Unlearning
In Charles Dickens’ classic tale, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a prisoner of his own creation. His passion for work and money forge links of despair and doom removing all joy from his life. Where did Scrooge get his work ethic, his avarice and desire for more? Perhaps it was the way Ebenezer was raised as a child and what he came to value as an adult. Ultimately, Ebenezer sees the error of his ways, repents and vows to change his life. The tale closes with Dickens’ hope that all men can change if they see the light, but can we?
Ebenezer explores the past in order to better understand what is happening in his present and to prepare him for the future which he envisions. To change, we must first unlearn the unqualified messages that we heard from people who had good intentions but were not qualified in a specific field of expertise. Remember when you were a kid how you were told that it was crass or inappropriate to talk about money? And who can forget mother’s message about talking to strangers. Well, isn’t our contracting business driven by talking to strangers about how much money they have to accomplish their housing goals?!
How many messages are rattling around in your brain of which you are unaware? How long have you been carrying them? The reality is that you cannot get rid of these messages because they have been recorded for life. The trick is to keep the good and helpful messages that we received as children from parents and adults and to control the volume on the counter-productive, destructive or unqualified messages. We must learn to live with them because we cannot erase them.
Often, we would like others to change, but why is it we resist change ourselves? The amount of change we are willing to make will be in direct proportion to the reward we collect.