Unlearning to learn

It may seem absurd and counterintuitive, but when we get a better understanding of how we function neurologically, unlearning or letting go of what we have memorised in terms of habits and behaviours is the process that helps us to learn more. We've all internalised things that need to be questioned if we want to go beyond our knowledge and our present understanding.

It’s easy to get stuck in the lines and squares of our preferred mind-sets when we become adults. This is comfortable and it simplifies our lives, but it takes away a lot of other perspectives and kills our creativity and fun.

In the current world we live in we need all the creativity we can get. Because it's an unstable controversial, fragile world where every certainty of the past is disappearing fast and the many opportunities that are being presented will be caught by the visionaries, the dreamers and the creatives first.

We must go back to being a little more like children: able to ask questions, eager to be surprised and capable of imagining, curious, not presuming that we already know everything. Our experience is important, but it often prevents us from grasping the new, we must admit that we don’t know everything if we want to open ourselves to the possibility of seeing and understanding different perspectives.

Curiosity towards something we don’t know yet is refreshing, it blows away the boredom of usual habits and the lack of fun in having to meet the same expectations in roles that we know so well.

Why then don’t we start to choose to unlearn what we have become and learn to be something more, something we could be?

(Pic courtesy Mads Bodker for Flickr)