The Importance of Learn- unlearn- relearn

The importance of learning:

“The illiterate of 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot – LEARN, UNLEARN, AND RELEARN.”– Alvin Toffler

Learning means:

•       Learning is a continuous process. Learning -Widens your mental horizons, Changes the perceptions and expands your overall intellectual base. To learn is to acquire knowledge or skills through study or experience. The different learning processes of animals and humans- Intuitiveness of animals helps them while we need to learn many things the minute we are born except breathing.

How many of us actually consider themselves, lifelong learners? 

Unlearning means:

 Shed off old habits.  To unlearn is to lose or discard knowledge that is false, outdated, or no longer serves a person or situation according to the Oxford Dictionary. It doesn’t help that our brains infer an endless number of thoughts daily using what is called the ladder of inference . Humans have an endless number of preconceived thoughts and ideas that our brains unconsciously jump to without us even realizing.

The problem isn’t learning: it’s unlearning:

 To embrace the new logic of value creation, we have to unlearn the old one.

Ex: Newly wed girl in her in-law’s place

Unlearning is not about forgetting. It’s about the ability to choose an alternative mental model or paradigm. Ex: Cycling and bike riding

When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one. It’s not easy to unlearn the mental habits that no longer serve us.

Ex: Adopting to new driving rules when our Indians go abroad and drive there

Think about this, how often do you find that a new operating system or a new version of your favorite software or app makes you uncomfortable? Ex: Kindergarteners. As humans, we are creatures of habit. Our inertia makes us do the things that make us feel good, secure and comfortable, and yet, growth is what we inherently seek. To put it simply — we resist change while we seek growth. And to overcome that is a challenge in itself.

What do you need to unlearn and relearn?

The process of unlearning has three parts.

First, you have to recognize that the old mental model is no longer relevant or effective

Second, you need to find or create a new model that can better achieve your goals

Third, you need to ingrain the new mental habits. 

Relearn- What is it and why?

To relearn is to learn again. Relearning is where the workforce of the future is going.

To keep up the pace with our world that is changing and growing more complex year over year is no a small task. Relearning is what comes next after unlearning. It should not stop there. Learning, unlearning, and relearning is more of a continuous cycle versus a three-step process. Relearning is hopefully where diversity of thought breeds innovation, possibility, and opportunity.

5 ways to Make Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning a Part of Your Life

•       1. Adopt a Growth Mindset- The Learn — Unlearn — Relearn method is the very foundation of the Growth Mindset popularized by Carol Dweck. According to Carol Dweck, the word ‘YET” can change disparaging sentences into positive ones, promoting growth.

    Eg: I don’t know how to do it yet. / I can’t speak at length fluently yet.

•       2. Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine- Make sure you ritualize this so it’s an indispensable part of your daily routine, do it at least 30 minutes a day.

•       3. Keep a Learning Journal- Use a Reflective-Learning framework in your learning journal.

•       4. Create a Process- Create a process for every learning task that you partake in. It is a subtle way of helping you break a habit.

•       5. Be a Part of a Community- Be a part of a community committed to learning and growth — in a field of your choice.

To add some more-

•       Have a firm and flexible mindset that you are still learning and evolving.

•       Begin at the beginning

•       Stay open

•       Look for mirrors.

•       Try to associate with intellectual friends.

•       Examine your beliefs- If you think you can, you can.

•       Mentoring – Two- way communication

                  - Share your knowledge, expertise and experience.

                  - Benefited from the practical experiences and learning of your mentees.

•       Be passionate

•       Commit to your conscience

•       Courage to accept mistakes and relearn

•       Be open-minded-  It is possible to train your brain to be more open-minded with practice. Being open-minded has several benefits including the ability to gain insights on current or new ideas, have new experiences, achieving personal growth, becoming more mentally strong, feeling more optimistic, and learning new ideas.

 

To conclude….

The learning strategy of the future is a simple one — Accept, Adapt, and Adopt. This succinctly sums up the need to embrace change, to have the agility to adapt, and to learn the ability to adopt new things. Challenge your mental maps- “What got you here won’t get you there” This book title by Marshall Goldsmith speaks to the deep need to continually upgrade the assumptions, underpinning the mental maps in our heads. Assumptions kill possibilities. Never Let Your Ego Come in Way of Your Learning. “If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, pretty soon you’ll be the only guy in the room.”

•       Those who think they’re the smartest in the room risk walking through life with blinkers, unaware their own blind spots and closed off to ideas that would improve their own.

•         As Jim Collins, author of Good to Great wrote, “The most important lessons lay not in what I needed to learn, but in what I first needed to unlearn.”

•        Practice ‘De Vuja’ and consult your ‘future self’.

•       Think of a challenge or opportunity you’re currently facing and imagine you are looking at it for the very first time. How do you see it differently?

•       Embrace the discomfort of change- Let’s face it, change, even change for the better, is rarely comfortable.  Sticking to familiar ways can spare psychological discomfort but it puts you at risk of losing your place in a world marching, charging, rapidly forward. 

•       Unlearning some of those familiar ways of old so you can relearn better ones. Unlearning and relearning is not means to an end. It’s an end in itself. As such, the key to unlearning doesn’t lie in the teacher. It lies in the student.

•        In you. In your openness to being challenged - to letting go what you think know so you can relearn what you need to know.

Practice, practice, and practice

The good news is that practicing unlearning will make it easier and quicker to make the shifts as your brain adapts. (It’s a process called neuroplasticity.) You can see this process at work in an experiment by Destin Sandler and his “backwards bicycle.” 

As you begin unlearning, be patient with yourself — it’s not a linear process.

Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

In this time of transformative change, we need to be conscious of our mental models and ambidextrous in our thinking. The place to start is by unlearning how we think about learning.

•       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&t=14s&ab_channel=SmarterEveryDay  Link for the video of backwards cycle Towards the end of the video you can see the unlearning process at work.

References:

Unknown document collected from Google

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•       https://www.slideserve.com/kirk/presented-by-sadia-ali

 

 

-Sudhara