Un-Knowing

A universal truth is you cannot change governing beliefs without changing yourselves.

• Beliefs defend themselves (even when they are invalid, untrue, and unevolved.)

• Beliefs by their nature become deeply embedded narratives, routines, actions, and ideologies.

• Beliefs have nothing to do with reality. You made up or culturally absorbed your beliefs to create your reality — (and reality is changeable.)

• Looping storylines, narratives, bombasity, or mantras are simply ego attachment. Feel into that.

Building muscle in suspending beliefs is change work.

You brave unpacking what keeps you limited. You look under your ecosystem of beliefs’ hood. You interrogate blind spots within and around your beliefs’ shapes, forms, history, and sources. You learn to hold a principle overtly that beliefs are limiting in their very nature. You become good at holding open the space and finding comfort in the discomfort of not knowing when you come to accept the limitations of your beliefs.

Confronting certainty and doing (healthy) questioning as a way of operating is not a system norm until you design it to become one.

Brains require repetition to change. Building new norms need reps. Reps are designed into alternative, actionable practices of being, thinking, doing, and behaving differently.

The practice is a practice of un-knowing.

Meaning, you stand in the embrace of knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know. You accept and surrender to not knowing so you can flex the present moment. You come to realise you are the actual instruments to shift the reality.

It takes invincibility, a combination of faith, willingness, and vulnerability. Invincibility unlocks potential and possibility. Invincibility (altogether different than heroism) is leading.

Un-knowing asks that you be in the here and now.

The here and now is an interpersonal communication tool used to flex muscle in keying into the present state, to become aware of your defense mechanisms that alternatively prevent here and now mindsets and hearts. It is a tool to learn directness, concreteness, and specificity so you unlearn indirectness, passivity, and lack of clarity.

• The practice of un-knowing enables you to build new places, spaces, and ways of being, modes of operating, cultures of communicating, and formations for leading.

• Un-knowing is stripping down to the here and now and interactively experimentating as a core operating mode.

• Emptying the moment of the gunk, history, storylines, and competing beliefs so you are able to maneuver strategically, innovatively, and consciously as the instruments for and of change.

Unknowing is a change and transformation strategy fundamental. You cannot alter the trajectory of your team's operating, your product's development, or your organisation's growth without deeply flexing the practice and modeling of un-knowing.

• Get Into the Questions to Get Out of the Certainty.
  Your certainty is usually just a mask for your fear. It is an antidote for your ego’s dislike of ambiguity. Questions are pathways to your “allowing difference” muscles. Difference has infinite faces. Questions are enablers for you to suspend your strongly held beliefs in the moment your inner reptile heats up. She/he always heats up in the face of the fear becoming a certainty posture.

• Interrupt Your Own Heat by Making an “I” statement to Ground You in Your Current Feeling State.

  "I feel overwhelmed." "I feel intimidated." "I feel afraid." "I feel hurt." "I feel angry." "I feel uncomfortable."

  To be clear, your feeling state is you getting in touch with yourself. It is you tapping in to your own body/mind. You reducing your internal heat by meeting the heat. You can feel free to make the statement only to yourself by writing it down in front of you, or you can say it out loud. Ground yourself and get centered by finding your feeling state, disclose it if the context and culture are comfortable spaces (or you are feeling spicey to risk objectively.)

• Identifying your feeling state is always and forever an objective way for you to learn to override your own subjective programming.

  That programming can look like (1) your belief that your feeling state is irrelevant to the present moment, disassociated from your internal power (not ego) and (2) learning to engage with your feeling state as a highly useful steering and revised intuitive function.

• Ask a clarifying question out loud to open up the potential for growth and connectivity with whom you are in dialog with.

  I want to understand X, can you tell me more about… I heard you say X, can you elaborate what you mean by … Are you wanting X, and if so, how do you see Y playing out? Your clarifying question (from an actual caring rather than a manipulative energy state) serves to elevate you above your reactive feeling state. The reactive feeling state without the practice of un-knowing likely connects you unconsciously back to old history, automatic response that pulls you out of the here and now moment.

• Repeat what you heard in response to your clarifying question to train your brain.

  You are training on (1) listening, (2) giving people your full attention in conversation, whereby (3) suspending the noise within you of your own limiting beliefs and judgment operating architectures. Examples of parroting are I heard you say “X”. Am I accurate? Can we agree that …. Or “Here is what I think you are saying, and I understand that as X. Am I close or still misunderstanding you?”

• Agree to the new shared understanding, an alternative story.

  Eject yourselves out of the projected stories because they sit unconsciously in your heads without being worked by instead working a new story together.

• Be willing to feel unconstrained, wrong, crazy, and absurd.

  Unconstrained, wrong, crazy, and absurd are natural feelings and signatures of experimentation, testing, and innovation. Unconstrained, wrong, crazy, and absurd are aspirations in a non-certain field. Aspire to finding comfort in them to get more practiced in suspending beliefs.

• Understand validation is an uncertain outcome of risk-taking — as people, of ideas, within markets.

  Validation is not assured when shifting to an un-knowing, uncertain world, change-based world. Cookies and kudos get passed for the effort of showing up and being present, trusting in lack of certainty to emerge potential rather than fixating on outputs.

Suspending

Beliefs are projected stories. We all have our own, and they are simply stories we tell ourselves. To stop projecting all over the place, you practice suspension.

Peace

Peace lies in surrendering to your own suspending of a belief, story, or narrative. The gripping is stressful. The reactivity floods your system with stress hormones. The fear, flight, and fight mode keeps you in your small rather than unbounded and abundant self.

Bear in mind that submission and surrender are not synonomous with one another.

Freedom

Freedom lies in allowing space for opening up to re-write new stories together as an ongoing phenomenom. As an alternative context and culture-building technique. Certainty does the opposite.

When you learn to operate by welcoming as a way of being the questioning, listening, giving of full attention to, getting out of your own comfort zone, feeling the disequilibrium of not knowing, shining light into your blind spots — you begin to find an alternative power. Your doing becomes more grounded, informed, open, adaptive.

That power is nothing close to manipulation or control. Manipulation arises out of deep fear and attachment to certainty. Attachment even to bad, unhealthy, and unproductivity. The gripping happens as an antiquated survival technique so the world won’t take you out of what you know and make you feel afraid, stupid, imperfect, unkept, threatened, or unsafe in the open space.

Power however arises from learning to dance with the repeated unknown.

Dancing within the walls of uncertainty, relieved of rigidity, playing in the landscape of loosely held beliefs so pivoting and twirling come more fluidly.

Lack of certainty, exploration, and un-knowing is where the fertile ground lies to be leveraged, utilised, and designed into change and unexpected outcomes.

Individually.

Collectively.

Systemically.