Unlearning with Honor: The Art of Decommissioning Your Beliefs by Dave LaRue

As we look toward our next Comma Club workshop, I'm thinking a great deal about what it really takes to "always be learning and growing," which is one of my highest and most consistent goals, and one that is shared with all of you.

When I first dug into the research around learning agility, the word itself, "unlearning," grabbed me even before I'd fully decided what it meant and what its value was to me and what it might be to you. Really, it was the first two letters: "un–."

I had gone through my whole life without considering learning and growth as anything but additive processes. I was very much stimulated by the idea that things I knew, and certainly things I thought, stopped being useful, and stopped being useful to the point that they needed to be retired.

And that right there was one of my insights: Just as we go through a conscious process of transition, maybe with a party or a trip or another occasion to mark the change, unlearning often requires steps to shut an old way of thinking down. To do it right, it's much more like decommissioning a ship than it is donating a sweatshirt.

How to Decommission a Warship
There's a great and interesting article from the US Naval Institute about what it takes to decommission a warship. I'll share the link here. Suffice it to say that when you decommission a ship, you're shutting down something that works, you're shutting down a workplace and a living space for many people, and you're acknowledging at every step that something that used to be a valuable and necessary part of a fleet is ready to be removed from service. The fleet will still run without it. In fact, it will run better.

You don’t just burn it down. There’s a process. When it comes to decommissioning a belief, that process starts with reflection.

Merchant of Reflection
All change starts with the truth. And the kind of truth that's needed for personal development only comes through powerful, deep reflection. The lessons and concepts I share at each workshop and the tools I bake into the worksheets and the planner are there to make your reflection as focused, successful, and efficient as possible. It's a constant refinement process on my part.
What I want to bring to the front of your mind now are some thoughts to take your reflection deeper than you need to go on a daily basis. Deep enough to get your fingers underneath some of your most automatic responses and unexamined attitudes.

Two (Loving) Provocations
There are 2 big things I will drop on you now that will, once you come to your own personal understanding of them, transform your daily experience of being alive, and will open up new vistas for your results and impact with other people and the world:

1. You might believe a fact, but your beliefs aren't facts. They are mental constructions that help you connect to and work with the world outside your mind. They may be helpful, but they aren't the only beliefs that will work for you.
2. Your beliefs were all formed in the past. Many were formed for a world that doesn't necessarily exist anymore. Relationships that don't exist, situations that don't exist, and a "you" that doesn't exist.

As we make progress working on our limiting behaviors and beliefs, we all get to a point where we realize that something big has to change. If you've hit a plateau, it's time to look at these two ideas with focus and patience until you see something in them.

Our first beliefs about all sorts of things: money, relationships, human nature, who we are, how we should feel about ourselves, start when we are kids. There’s nothing to stop you from simply reinforcing those beliefs for 50 or 60 years, even if you’d really benefit from a more adult perspective.

Growth in the Era of Quickening
For years, I have coached on removing next-level stoppers, but the world has been changing increasingly fast, and more and more the development people are seeking is as much about finding ways to adapt to the world, find their fit, and learn to read the environment for opportunities.

Whether you're looking more to grow linearly, i.e., how can you maximize the opportunities you're already in-flight with, or trying to adapt to changes, if you've already set goals, worked the process, and aren't seeing the results you need, it's time to chew on these two thoughts and get down to their implications for you. I'd like to help you get a jumpstart on these now in advance of our next workshop.

Exploring the 2 (Loving) Provocations

Just What, Exactly Do You Mean?
First off, I'll be clear: I'm not talking about your faith, marriage, or core values you base your entire reality on. While we can reach crisis points where those things need to be investigated, I'm not talking about those today. For now, your truest northstars aren't what we're discussing.

The beliefs that we all benefit from auditing from time to time are the ones that drive our attitudes. I'm the kind of person who… I'm not the kind of person who… I hate people who… It's so lame when… This or that is so uncool… It's important to realize how many people have, once reaching success and midlife, found untapped energy, motivation, and "yes to life" by doing a 180 on something like that.

Often, other people help us see these possibilities. We accept something because we accept someone. We have a child, grandchild, or colleague from another generation who shows us that something we dismissed or forbade ourselves from isn't what we thought it was, and suddenly we see a whole new corner of life. Whether it's as simple as opening up your sensibility or as complex as seeing a perspective you disagree with as valid, suddenly, you are "the kind of person who…" and it ignites passion and energy you never thought possible.

Or in business, we make connections, learn about something, develop a skill, and now a world we thought was out of our purview is something we want to take part in.

Belief and Fact
Here's the first piece: You might believe a fact, but your beliefs aren't facts. They're mental constructions—tools that help you work with the world, not the world itself.

It’s simple and easy to confuse these. We think our beliefs are Reality , so changing them feels impossible or just dishonest. “This is just how things are." Luckily, no. It's how you've organized things to make sense of them.

Think about a fact: Revenue was down 15% last quarter. That's a measurable, verifiable fact. Now beliefs come in. One person sees that fact and believes: "We're failing. This business is dying. I'm not cut out for this." Another believes: "This is a signal. Time to pivot. We're learning what doesn't work." The same fact is met with completely different beliefs about what it means, where it leads, and what should happen next.

A fact doesn't tell you what to believe. You construct the belief from the fact plus your interpretation, which comes from your history, your fears, your goals, and so on. Sometimes

You can be completely committed to facing reality, to accepting hard truths, to being honest about what's actually happening, and still have tremendous flexibility in what you believe about those facts.

Ants Don’t Need Beliefs
Ants directly perceive the presence of chemicals in their environment. It’s how they communicate. They have totally different organs than us. They don’t need to believe anything.

But we don't have a sense organ that directly perceives fact. We have brains that take impulses in, create memories, connect them to other memories, compare them to patterns, and construct stories. This happens so automatically that we think we're perceiving reality directly.

We're not. We're always interpreting, always building a model, always choosing—usually unconsciously—which details matter and what they mean.

Retooling
This is actually good news. It means you have more freedom than you think, as long as you’re willing to dig in and get underneath all that work done unconsciously and automatically and do it manually.

The beliefs that drive your attitudes—"I'm the kind of person who..." "People like that always..." "Success means..." "It's pathetic to..."—these aren't facts you discovered. They're tools you built. And tools can be rebuilt.

A spoon makes a terrible knife. A knife doesn't work as a fork. The question isn't whether your belief is "true" in some absolute sense. The question is: Is this belief the right tool for what you're trying to do now?

Sometimes you discover a belief has been working against you for years, and you thought you were stuck with it because you thought it was just "reality,” or who you are. It's not. It's a tool you can put down and pick up a different one.

A Secret Source of Energy
How often have you heard of people finding new energy, new insight, new motivation, or a new “yes to life” from allowing a perspective they dismissed, or a possibility they forbade themselves?
“I’m not the kind of person who likes concerts” changes to “I love live music when I get to sit down,” and suddenly a whole new corner of life has opened up.

“Only people who should be divorced have separate vacations” becomes “our couples trips are actually romantic now that we also get to do solo trips the other isn’t interested in.”

“I need to be there every day, or I don’t deserve my percentage” becomes “I’ve been trusting my team more, and they’re taking things in directions I’d never imagined.” And life heads in new and better directions

Beliefs Past Expiration
As to the second provocation: Beliefs are formed in the past, often the distant past, for specific conditions that no longer exist. They expire. And they can really go bad.

Relationships that don't exist.
Someone might learn to be careful around anger because a parent was volatile, and they’re still tiptoeing when they’re 40. Sometimes people learned to be self-sufficient at an early age because they couldn't count on help. Now, as adults, they don’t know how to ask for help, and they are limiting their ability to delegate—and alienating people who genuinely want to give support.

We learn how to act to please or cope with parents, teachers, and school relationships. It can be a massive millstone to drop when you look up and realize the beliefs and attitudes you formed for those people don’t matter anymore. You’re free to completely reassess.

Situations that don't exist.
There are plenty of examples, but one is very common in our circle: so many of us developed attitudes about money based on the sense of scarcity we grew up with. Whether we grew up around dire poverty and material lack, or we heard our parents argue or worry about earning, saving, or spending, we developed certain beliefs. Even if we later understand on some level that our parents weren’t experts on money, we often resist shaking it off. Sometimes because we believe it helps us stay driven. Sometimes we hold on because we just don’t inspect our core beliefs.

A "you" that doesn't exist.

This is the big one. You formed beliefs about your capabilities, your worthiness, your limits when you were younger, less experienced, less capable. "I'm not good with people." “I’m bad with numbers.” "I always mess up under pressure." “I need more time than other people.”

These might have been accurate observations once. But you've changed. You've learned. You've developed capacities you didn't have. Even if there’s some factual basis to these, you’ve learned to thrive despite them.

So much of what makes us miserable and what alienates us from others is shame over beliefs that are long since expired, whether we are conscious of the shame and accept it, or we compensate to try to cover for it. Updating these false or inaccurate beliefs has the biggest day-to-day impact of any of them. Peace of mind that seems impossible is on the other side.

Worthy of a Decommissioning
You’re here, so you’re successful. These beliefs worked. They helped you navigate the world you were in. They were commissioned for a reason, and they've been faithfully serving the mission ever since.

The problem isn't that they were wrong then—it's that the world changed, the mission changed, and they kept on running on the same old orders.

So when you hit a plateau, when you keep running into the same wall, it's worth asking:

• What relationship am I still navigating that ended years ago?
• What situation am I still preparing for that isn't coming?
• What version of me am I still protecting that doesn't need protection anymore?
• Which belief am I running that was written for a world I'm not living in anymore?

Take these apart. Understand the work they do, think about what you’d like in their place for the mission you’re on now.

Then, let them go. But not unceremoniously. They deserve some ceremony. They deserve some honor. They have served. They kept you safe, they got you through, they helped you succeed. They have served you well, but they shouldn’t stay in your fleet forever.

Wish them fair winds and following seas, and find a whole new realm of possibilities by retooling your beliefs.

-Dave