How to Unlearn – What Got Society 2.0 Here Won’t Cut It Moving Forward #37 #cong20

The Society of 3.0 will require us to unlearn, let go of some outdated models, internal operating systems and we’re beginning to see this at the economic (from Ego-System to Eco-System Economies), environmental (green and blue ecological economies), societal or leadership level as expressed in the article. The polarities and disconnects we have witnessed this year, are enabling us through their contrasting experiences, to begin the process of dreaming for a better future for tomorrow.

Total Words

Reading Time in Minutes

4

1. Unlearn the behaviours and mindsets that keep you from moving forward.
2. Break through old habits and thinking by opening up to new ideas and perspectives while achieving extraordinary results.
3. Non Attachment requires you not only to let go of your roles and your stories, but to also let go of the part of yourself that identifies with these dramas
4. Letting go is difficult

Bernard Chanliau, ICF Ireland Coach of the year (2015), owner of BC Team Coaching, is a sought after Executive Leadership coach and OD Change Management consultant working from the CEO level on down. He has helped hundreds of senior leaders in the last decade (directors and above) accelerate their leadership careers and achieve business objectives in a wide range of industries.
He helps companies innovate through conversational leadership using teams as a vehicle and his Organisational Coaching sweet-spot is the upscaling-expansion life-cycle stages of SMEs, where they need to upgrade their own internal operating systems and raise their level of leadership consciousness.
Member of the International Coach Federation, Professional Certified Coach (PCC) since 2010 with 3500+ Hours of coaching experience and currently working towards his MCC.

You can connect with Bernard on LinkedIn or see Team Leadership.

By Bernard Chanliau

Let us dream about a Society 3.0 where building a better future for tomorrow means starting from an open mind – remember those times when you were a kid playing games, fantasizing about a new world without any attachments, any conditionings influencing your creativity? How did you feel? What did you create? Where you aware of stepping outside of your comfort zone?

The Cambridge dictionary defines open-minded as “willing to consider ideas and opinions that are new or different to your own”. In an increasingly polarized world, played out with the recent US elections, Brexit or others, being able to step outside of our comfort zone and consider other perspectives and ideas is important.

So what does it mean to step out of one’s comfort zone? There is a feeling in this unprecedented year, that the things that appear to be deeply frozen and unchanged are our collective habits of thought and the actions that they produce and reproduce in our societies.

The first step outside of our comfort zone starts with unlearning and letting go of our old habits keeping us attached to a safe harbour.

Lately, I stumbled upon an interesting article from one of my mentors on the practice of non-attachment and the roles we take-up in life “Nonattachment requires you not only to let go of your roles and your stories, but to also let go of the part of yourself that identifies with these dramas”.

I remember an exercise we had to perform where the instructions required us to make a mandala in nature representing all the labels, stories, roles – our life cosmos – we’ve stuck to in this lifetime and burn each symbol in order to release the hook-up narratives.

This implied all the identity roles our ego is attached, such as father, student, executive coach, brother, teacher, and the like…I had to let go of my preconceived notions about who I was, and found it difficult due to the numerous pigeon-hole descriptions of one’s life.

Letting go is not an easy process and I experience this with our Transition Leadership coaching programmes, where executives need to embed new micro-leadership competencies (i.e. delegation, feedback, strategic skills) moving from an individual expert’s to higher levels of consciousness within their organisation.

As in Barry O’Reilly’s book (Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results)

• Unlearn the behaviours and mindsets that keep you and your organisational roles from moving forward.
• Relearn new leadership skills, strategies, and innovations that are transforming your eco-system
• Break through old habits and thinking by opening up to new ideas and perspectives while achieving extraordinary results.

Experts try to exercise control by perfecting their technical knowledge and exercising watertight thinking, clinging onto things— knowledge status, technical power, PhD titles —simply does not make sense considering their evolving nature.
These things add to your life, but they are not your life. You’re all that’s guaranteed, and even you grow and change, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

• What if, what we perceive as reality is not actually reality at all?
• What if, it is simply what our mind’s eye has led us to believe?

There is a story of two Zen monks, an elder and a junior, both committed to celibacy, who were travelling across country and reached a rushing river. On the riverbank was an attractive woman who was nervous of the water and asked for help in crossing. Without hesitating the older monk picked her up, carried her across, lowered her gracefully on the other side and then carried on with the journey.

A few hours later the brooding young monk could not contain himself anymore. He was upset by his elder’s actions and, under the guise of politeness, enquired: ‘Do you think it was appropriate, considering our oath of celibacy, to carry that woman across the river?’

“I put her down,’ the elder replied, ‘as soon as I reached the other side. But you, my young friend, are still carrying her.”
This is common, isn’t it? We all carry things in our minds that we have trouble unloading. We carry stories for too long. Our monkey minds can’t let them go.

The Society of 3.0 will require us to unlearn, let go of some outdated models, internal operating systems and we’re beginning to see this at the economic (from Ego-System to Eco-System Economies), environmental (green and blue ecological economies), societal or leadership level as expressed above. The polarities and disconnects we have witnessed this year, are enabling us through their contrasting experiences, to begin the process of dreaming for a better future for tomorrow.