You could easily accuse me of being a bit “over the top” about lifelong learning.  I practically live for new books, new ideas, stories and concepts that I’ve never been exposed to before.  Truly, I belong to the “cradle to grave” school of philosophy about the importance of continuously taking your education to a new level.  But lately, I have been challenged to think about the fact that a great deal of my time and attention needs to be actively focused on unlearning.

To me, unlearning means giving up on or “retiring” outdated ideas or assumptions.  I have discovered that before you can really assimilate new information and begin to apply it, it’s often important to unlearn things you previously believed or held as true.  Not only do we have to unlearn a lot of our assumptions about key business disciplines, but we even need to unlearn leading! As an example, do we need to focus on:

• Asking questions                vs.       providing answers,
• Being transparent             vs.       playing it close to the vest
• Providing experiences     vs.       giving people facts and information

In this, our brave new world of business and life, what do we need to unlearn?  Especially for boomers in the workplace, are we unlearning as fast as we need to? What do you think?

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