Why is Unlearning So Difficult?

How Learning to Ride a Bike Helped Me to See a New Pattern

I begged my dad to teach me how to ride my new bike when I was in the single digits of aging. For weeks, I watched the kids in the neighborhood pedal their way to delight after school on the sunniest of days. Every time I expressed an interest in learning this new skill, my dad wouldn’t budge. On one of his more charitable days, he embraced his girl dad identity and gave in to my whiny request. I immediately embarked upon a learning journey that led to scarred knees and a humbled ego.

I thought that learning how to ride my bike would be easy because the kids on my block made it appear that way. My dad, on the other hand, knew it would be difficult, and I assume that’s why he wasn’t eager to take on the responsibility. He made me practice riding every day, and although I wanted to quit many times, he refused to let me stop rehearsing until I learned how to properly balance my body and my ego.

I learned how to ride my bike in a short span of time because my dad never stopped believing in my ability to learn. A few years later, I learned how to skate because he taught me how to do that too.

Although I haven’t ridden a bike or skated in decades, something tells me that revisiting it will be just learning to ride a bike…you never forget.

I fell in love with hula hooping around the same time that I learned to ride a bike, and I haven’t forgotten how to do that either.

The scars and bruises we earn from playing as a child often become the valuable lessons we cherish as adults.

I appreciate my ability to “remember how” easily but if held onto too intensely, it can hinder our ability to learn new ways of doing old things.

Have you ever tried to unlearn what you know? I have and it’s difficult. What do we do with all the instructions we’ve been given on how to do things when given an opportunity to learn an alternative how? Do we just toss them aside and act like our learning never happened? Do we temporarily or permanently ghost our knowledge like the toxic lover we should never have dated or married?

As a facilitator and trainer, I’ve observed adults, younger and older than I, struggle to set aside what they’ve learned even for a moment. Learning environments are often stifled and seized by experts (disguised as students) who insist on clenching tightly to what they know and releasing it into the atmosphere every chance they get.

The petty part of me desperately seeks someone to blame for our mental clutches. One could argue that mode of thinking is yet another thought to unlearn. Perhaps our affinity for clingy context isn’t our fault nor is it our parents fault. I don’t recall my teachers or college professors advising me to leave my backpack full of what I know by the door. What role have educators played in making the problem a bigger problem? Someone is to blame, but I’m not sure whom.

I’m no neuroscientist, nor do I play one on television, but it seems as though our desire to make sense of new information by comparing and contrasting it to our arsenal of knowledge and experiences is normal. It also makes sense that our brains often invite and gravitate to familiarity when we try to learn something new.

I believe there are occasions when what we know helps us to better understand the new. On the other hand, some new things we desire to learn are unrelated to anything familiar so those backpacks full of our prior knowledge and experiences can sometimes do us more harm than good.

Here’s my most burning question, ‘In what situations should we set our knowing aside in order to learn new concepts, processes, and ways of thinking, doing, and being?’

Although there are times when holding on to what we’ve been taught is useful, what about those times when it isn’t? What happens when there’s an opportunity to learn a new way to do what we feel we already know? What about the times when we don’t want to forget what we know but just need to set it aside long enough to learn something different? In this instance, it’s not a matter of unlearning what we’ve learned; instead it’s unlearning our proclivity for showcasing what we know to those who only want to teach us something else.

Unlearning is merely a temporary pause rather than a complete rejection of the knowledge and experience we possess. At the appropriate time, we can easily retrieve our intellectual backpacks and head back to our homes, workplaces and communities.

The process and benefit of unlearning was a tough lesson that I had to learn on my own. I was co-parented by a Mathematician who navigated life through a numeric lens of right versus wrong. He’s also the birth product of a Pastor who strongly believed that religion is the universal poster child for right and wrong. Couple Math and religion, and you end up with absolute opinions on just about everything.

I inherited my dad’s pattern of learning, meaning making, and opining and came to realize much later in life that the things I enjoy studying for fun, like philosophy and poetry, are thought provoking interpretations and ponderings of life rather than definitive markings. I love being right when there’s only one right or wrong, but I also enjoy leaving my backpack of knowledge at home so that I can see clearly and deeply into something else.

Don’t get me wrong. I value what I’ve learned how to do in life, but I also want to unlearn some of the habits I’ve formed as an adult like assuming that other people think the way that I think. I want to unlearn my propensity for procrastination. I want to unlearn bringing up old stuff, over and over again, that no one else cares about or remembers. I want to unlearn my pattern of editing the word choices of others. All of these things are more difficult to unlearn than learning to ride a bike, skate, or hula hoop, and I never want to unlearn the fun and childlike ways that I celebrate life.

We need a virtual repository for in person and online classrooms — a place where we can temporarily toss the language and experiences that amplify our identity, voice and power in self-aggrandizing ways in order to make space for others to teach us what they know and what’s true and useful about it.

Silencing the noise of disrupters and avoiding the quagmire is easy now that I see it for what it is…just another way to ride a bike.

Thank you for reading these words and giving me a space to plant them. References to identity, voice and power and what’s true and useful are components of Human Systems Dynamics, a theory-based approach to seeing, understanding, influencing and transforming patterns.

I’m curious if there’s anything that you want or need to unlearn or is this just another assumption that others think the way that I think? 🐝