The One Thing Great Leaders Do Before They Grow: They Let Go

In this episode of The Leadership Vision Podcast, Nathan Freeburg is joined by Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring to explore a foundational idea for leadership growth: before leaders can grow, they often need to let go of something.

The conversation centers on the role of unlearning—the process of releasing habits, patterns, and ways of thinking that once worked but may no longer serve us. Together, they unpack why unlearning is often more difficult than learning, how it impacts individuals and teams, and why creating space is essential for meaningful growth.

Through practical examples and leadership insights, this episode highlights the importance of awareness—paying attention to moments of tension or resistance that may signal the need for change. Dr. Linda and Brian also emphasize that letting go isn’t about losing who you are, but about making room for new ways of thinking, leading, and relating.

If you’ve ever felt stuck doing what’s always worked—or sensed that your leadership needs to evolve—this conversation offers a thoughtful framework for moving forward.

Key Themes

•  Why unlearning is essential for leadership growth 
•  The challenge of breaking established habits 
•  How letting go creates space for new learning 
•  The connection between awareness and change 
•  Learning and unlearning as a natural rhythm 

Reflection Question

What is something you may need to let go of in order to create space for a new path forward?

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Transcript

Why Growth Starts With Letting Go

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg, your host, and one of the more challenging realities of leadership is that growth doesn't always come from adding something new. It often starts with letting something go. Now, most leaders get to where they are because they've been successful. Their habits, their instincts, and their ways of solving problems have worked. But over time, those same habits can become limitations. Now, what helped you succeed in one season may not be what's needed in the next. As the title of the famous book says, What got you here won't get you there. And that's where the idea of unlearning comes in. The ability to recognize when a mindset or behavior is no longer serving you or your team. And that's not easy, because unlearning doesn't just challenge what we do, it challenges how we see ourselves as leaders and people. But when leaders can let go of what no longer works, they create space for new ways of thinking, leading, and growing. So today on the podcast, I'm gonna ask Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring why unlearning is just as important as learning something new for leaders. So Brian Linda, I was thinking about this idea of unlearning, and the things that I've unlearned in my life are so vast that I couldn't land on just one. But an idea that popped up was, you know, at Christmas time, our house is our whole street is this whole Christmas fiasco, and with different road closures, I have to unlearn how to get to my house and learn new ways to do it. And it's so interesting how, you know, these these habits, you just get on autopilot and you have to like actively think differently and think ahead to like make this change. Do you have any examples from your own life where you've had to actively unlearn something that was so ingrained that it it just felt automatic?

SPEAKER_02 1:59

I have so many. The one thing that came to mind as you were talking, I recently bought a new backpack to travel with. Now, Nathan, I know you love backpacks, and I have traveled with one specific backpack for shorter trips and a little larger bag for other trips. I wanted to find one that could do both. And I'm telling you, it took me almost a year to learn how to unlearn some of my bad packing habits to learn how to use a backpack that was both more spacious and you know has my favorite color involved. But it took a lot of unlearning and leaving things behind before I learned how to pack and store and whatever.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

You are particular about your stations and how you contain your stations. The pockets.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

There are pockets on backpacks for a reason.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

You take one pocket away, and like my whole life had to be unraveled.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

So then with our question here today, I want to ask you, in your experience, why is unlearning old habits sometimes just as important as learning new skills for leaders?

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Because the unlearning and the breaking a habit is way more difficult than just starting with a blank slate and learning something new. I remember a leader that I worked with, and he came new into an organization, and he was kind of frustrated with he's like, I thought these people were really smart, and I thought they learned fast and they just don't. I said, You're talking about industry experts, and some of the changes that you're introducing will cause them to unlearn first. And he's like, Yeah, but they should just they should just figure it out. I'm like, give them a second to unlearn so that they even have space cognitively and intellectually to step into new learning.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

I think when people learn, they often don't think of their capacity to retain what they need to retain for the learning that's being asked of them. It's almost as if you have a kitchen cabinet and you feel like you can just keep learning, keep putting stuff in that cabinet. At some point you need to undo all this learning. And the challenge with learning is this this is why we're talking about the topic today. Learning creates new patterns of how it is that we go through our daily life, those new patterns become habits. And the more habits we create, the more we rely on those habits to help us navigate. So oftentimes when we realize that, you know, through our physiology or through our relationship or through our emotions, that the way that we navigate these patterns with our established habits, by the time that happens, we realize that we need to learn something new, but often we have to let go or untangle the patterns and habits that got us here so that we can learn and create space for something new.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

A friend of mine is a doctor, and when she was in medical school, she just said, I am learning so much that if I learn one more thing, I might forget something important, like my colors. What is blue? What is pearl? I don't know. Like I have to, you know, get rid of that. And I think there's times where it's just we feel we feel overwhelmed, and there was this instinct that I had, like, okay, it has to be unlearning, it has to be unlearning. And it wasn't until Adam Grant's Think Again that came out and all of his research around the importance of rethinking and the importance of unlearning that I'm like, finally, the research and language that that backs up the intuition and things that we've noticed with leaders.

Paying Attention To Signals And Stories

SPEAKER_02 5:47

If we're focusing on unlearning, I believe that the unlearning is important because we often try to simply modify the direction or the behaviors that we are using right now when the situation is asking for us to unlearn first to create a new opportunity for learning later. In my own personal experience, I've realized the importance of unlearning is coming through my paying attention. So when my body is disturbed in some way, it's my body asking me to pay attention because there could be patterns to how I'm eating or patterns to how I'm sleeping or patterns to the way I'm working out that are creating some adverse reaction in my body. Paying attention is my recognizing that I may have to unlearn something to regain that sense of health. Like when you apply it to teens, paying attention to maybe the struggle that you have, paying attention or the difficulty you have interacting with another person or understanding the reason why. It may be because you need to unlearn a way of thinking or unlearn a way of relating to create an opportunity to learn something new.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

And I don't think it's changing your personality or getting rid of something that's that's you know not working for you. Instead, is it's it's stepping into some unknown territory where okay, the thinking that I have is not gonna get me from here to there. I feel a sense of doubt, I feel a sense of unknown, I don't know what necessarily to do. And so it's re-establishing some new patterns, some new habits, and doing it through the outflow of who you are, not necessarily because you want to change and let go of who is you, like how you are uniquely you.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

I think there's so many layers to the unlearning that people tend to simply not think about. There are so many ways that unlearning can help us learn something new. If we ask ourselves, you know, do we have to unlearn the way we show up? Do we need to maybe unlearn the way we dream? Or are we being invited to unlearn the way that we relate to other people and the labels that we use? We may have to unlearn the stories or like the narrative through lines of the stories we tell ourselves. That's an unlearning. I was coaching someone last week who had gone through a tremendous unlearning of a belief system to create room for a new belief system. There's an unlearning that we have in how it is that we ask for help. Sometimes our learning is actually keeping us in the state that we are and not opening us to something that could be new.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

Could you just say that unlearning is learning in a different direction? Like I'm trying to I'm trying to think, you know, when you you know, the best way to to break a bad habit is to replace it with something else. So is unlearning really just replacing it or just learning something else?

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Yes, and I would add the it's learning to let go. Right. Learning in order to let go, to have your hands open to learn forward, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:19

So the let go to be able to hold on to the new that awareness that this thing's not working. I need to do something different, and I need to now point myself in that direction to do it.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And it's not necessarily because it's not working. Sometimes it is the anticipation that it's not going to work in six months. So let's learn some new patterns now. Right. Develop some new habits now so that we can be in that different place when the moment is.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

We're not asking people to unlearn to discard. It's a utility question. Unlearning a certain pattern because the you the utility of that pattern will not serve us that well going forward. There could be something new that we need to learn. I really believe that any invitation in life to learn something new is also an invitation to unlearn something familiar. And the answer may be you don't need to unlearn anything. But the point is having the awareness that unlearning is part of the learning process, and that's key to how it is that we grow as human beings.

Teams That Resist Change And Need Rest

SPEAKER_01 10:28

And that I think underscores this whole conversation is there has to be a willingness and an openness and a desire to grow as a human being in whatever thing that you're doing, be it your role as a leader, playing the piano, parenting, running, breathing differently. How often do you find or encounter teams of people who are just not willing? They're like, this is just working good enough. And how do you get them past that?

SPEAKER_02 10:59

Or it may not be working at all. Or at all, right. Sometimes we have had teams where the learning is very slow because the learning is very challenging. And to understand that daily life is tiring, it can be really wearisome. And sometimes people need to maybe spend time resting to be restored to have the energy to learn something new. I feel that part of this invitation to unlearn is to allow people and to give them the permission to unlearn as a preparation for what's coming next for them. We want people to be familiar with the ebbs and flows of life. Every downhill in life, there's also an uphill. And that's somewhat of the relationship between learning and unlearning. It takes time and the two take turns. I like that. What what is it what in life? I just like that uphill and downhill.

A Reflection Question And Closing

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Life is life is this constant ebb and flow of learning things, of unlearning things. What worked now didn't work later. My oldest is about to become a teenager. And everything I thought I knew about parenting. Not everything, but you know, there's just like we're having the conversation about phones right now and all this stuff. And it's like, all right, this is I don't know if there's an uphill or downhill, depending on how you look at it. But there's an ebb and flow. We were just in a meeting the other day thinking about our team, a leadership vision, and all the ways that we've done business over the 20 plus years. And I don't know if we're in ebb and flow of that right now, or up and down. But the point is that, you know, as I said in the the introduction, what got you here won't necessarily get you there, but maybe part of it will, or pieces of it will. And so what do you carry with you to that next season, that next port, if you will, whatever. And what do you what do you learn? To wrap this up, what question could you possibly leave us with to help leaders kind of reflect on a moment of unlearning? I don't know, just to help us wrestle with this whole idea a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Before I ask the question, I want to start with a comment. And the comment is growing people change, growing people learn new things, and in that learning and in that growth, there is often a moment where something had to be let go to create space for something new to land. So my question is: what is something that you have had to let go of in order to create more space to try a new path forward? It could be physical, it could be emotional, it could be intellectual, it could be spiritual. The invitation is what is something that you have learned at some point in your life that now you need to set down and not discard and not unlearn and unwind, but set down so that you can learn something new.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Linda, that was awesome. And thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. If you found value from this episode, we would love it if you would subscribe, Leadership Vision Consulting.com slash subscribe. There's also a link in the show notes. Review us wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Nathan Freeberg. I'm Linda Schubring.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

And I'm Brian Schubring.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

And on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

I almost said sleeping.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Thanks for sleeping.