If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.
—Maya Angelou
At the beginning of the 2010 season, tennis superstar Serena Williams was at the pinnacle of her sport. She was the number-1 ranked woman tennis player in the world. However, while dining at a Munich restaurant, Serena accidently stepped on some broken glass. The next day, and 18 stitches later, she played in an exhibition match but was forced to the sidelines for the rest of the season. She finished the year ranked number 4 on the women’s professional tennis circuit.
After sitting out the first half of 2011 as she recovered from the foot injury (along with a pulmonary embolism and hematoma), Serena went back to work. While her singles record for the year was 22 wins and just 3 losses, which included a fourth-round defeat at Wimbledon and a straight-set thrashing in the final round of the US Open, she had to skip both the Australian and French Opens. She ended the year ranked number 12.
Surely, these results were nothing more than temporary setbacks, yet Serena’s slide continued. In 2012, she lost to 56th-ranked Ekaterina Makarova in the fourth round of the Australian Open. But it was at the French Open, the second Grand Slam event of the season, where everything fell apart completely. Serena lost to 111th-ranked Virginie Razzano in the first round, the first time in her entire career that she was defeated in the opening round of a Grand Slam match. The New York Times described the defeat as “an upset that ranked among the most stunning and unexpected in the recent history of the French Open . . .”1
Doubts filled Serena’s head, and they impacted her performance. She was doing everything she had been doing in the past—she trained longer, worked harder, and her preparation was perfect—but what had brought her success in the past was no longer working, and she was no longer winning.
Why weren’t her tried-and-trusted methods working?
Why wasn’t she winning?
Was her time at the top up?
There comes a time in the life of every individual when doing the things that brought you success in the past no longer delivers the same results. You wake up, walk into your office, and sit at your desk just as you always have. But suddenly you’re stuck, stagnating, unsatisfied, or struggling with what was once your secret to success. You might find yourself asking:
Why am I not living up to my expectations?
Why can’t I solve this problem?
Why do I constantly avoid taking on this particular challenge?
The world evolves, conditions change, and new norms emerge. Instead of adapting, people find themselves stuck in their patterns of thinking and behaving. Most don’t realize the new situational reality until it bites.
This is the paradox of success. While thinking and doing certain methods may have brought you success in the past, it’s almost certain they won’t continue to bring you success in the future. The key is to recognize the signals and break through before it’s too late. Your once-successful strategies can cause your downfall. The challenge is to make the adjustments and adapt, not get caught in the past.
But how?
My inspiration to write Unlearn came from what I frequently find to be a significant inhibitor when helping high-performance individuals get better—not the ability to learn new things but the inability to unlearn mindsets, behaviors, and methods that were once effective but now limit their success.
Highly effective leaders are constantly searching for inspiration and for new ideas. But before any real breakthroughs can happen, we need to step away from the old models, mindsets, and behaviors that are limiting our potential and current performance. We must unlearn what brought us success in the past to find continued success in the future.
In the pages that follow, I share how the Cycle of Unlearning is a new way of thinking and a new way of leading organizations in every industry. It’s not difficult to learn more. What is difficult is to know what to unlearn, what to stop, and what to throw away. That is the focus of this book.
I believe we can all grow, have impact, and achieve extraordinary results—I’ve seen it time and time again. Outstanding individuals achieve success not by chance and not by luck, but by continuously and routinely applying a system of unlearning—sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally. My aspiration is to give this superpower to you.
I define unlearning as the process of letting go of, moving away from, and reframing once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit our success. It’s not forgetting or discarding knowledge or experience; it’s the conscious act of letting go of outdated information and actively gathering and taking in new information to inform effective decision making and action.
Unlearning is an essential yet often overlooked step to being able to learn. While most people agree that we struggle to adopt new techniques to improve, fewer recognize that our existing knowledge and know-how can inhibit us further. Not all learning is unquestionably beneficial. We can learn the wrong lessons, bad habits, and flawed or once-useful ideas that are now obsolete. Unlearning our thinking and behavior can be harder than learning it in the first place.
In this book, we’ll dig deep into the practice of unlearning—what it is, why you should adopt it, and how you can leverage its tremendous power for yourself, your teams, and your organization. If you already feel you’ve unlearned before, great—I’ll teach you how to do it intentionally. If not, I’ll teach you to practice it deliberately.
I’ll show you how to think big but start small, and why choosing courage over comfort can take you to places you never imagined possible. You’ll see how tackling uncertainty can lead you to exponential growth and impact, and I will provide you with a proven system for unlearning what brought you success in the past (but no longer does), and then relearn what you need to achieve endless breakthroughs in your future.
Let’s get started.