The thing that got you here is now in the way

On unlearning, which is harder than learning.

Sometimes the exact quality that made you good at your job becomes the thing holding you back.

You’re doing what has always worked. That’s the disorienting part. Nothing about your behaviour changed, you’re applying the same instincts with the same effort and the same care, but it produces less than it used to.

A version you’ve probably watched

Somebody gets promoted because they handled everything themselves. They didn’t wait, didn’t escalate, just absorbed problems and made them disappear. That’s valuable and it’s why they got the role.

Then they’re leading a team, and the same instinct turns them into a bottleneck. Everything routes through them, because they’re still reaching for the move that worked for a decade.

From the inside it’s baffling, because by their own standards they’re doing nothing wrong. They’re doing exactly what has always been rewarded, with the same intensity. The context changed and the reflex hasn’t caught up, so under pressure the brain reaches for the pattern that used to fit, and pressure is exactly when the old pattern is most likely to surface.

The same shape appears everywhere once you look for it. The person whose thoroughness made them trusted, who becomes the reason nothing ships. The person whose speed made them valuable, who now can’t slow down enough to bring anyone with them. In each case the strength wasn’t wrong. It stopped being the thing the situation needed.

Why removal doesn’t work

Unlearning is much harder than learning, and I think it’s because of how the thing got installed.

You did it a thousand times. It worked a thousand times. That’s not a habit sitting on the surface where you can pick it off, it’s closer to identity by now. It’s tangled up with how you understand your own competence, which means letting go of it feels less like changing a method and more like admitting the last decade was a mistake, which it wasn’t.

And you can’t simply stop, because the moment pressure arrives you’ll reach for something. If nothing new is in the slot, the old one returns instantly and you won’t notice until afterwards. Removal leaves a vacuum and vacuums get filled by whatever’s most practised.

So the work is replacement rather than subtraction, and replacement takes far longer than anyone expects. There’s a stretch in the middle where the new approach is slower and worse than the old one, because you’re a beginner at it, and everything in you will argue for reverting on the grounds that reverting produces better results this week. It does produce better results this week. That’s the trap.

Why nobody tells you

The other difficulty is that this rarely arrives as feedback.

People will tell you when you’re missing a skill, because a gap is easy to describe and reasonably comfortable to raise. Almost nobody will tell you that a strength has become a liability, partly because it sounds like an insult wrapped in a compliment, and partly because the people around you are still benefiting from the old behaviour in the short term. Your team isn’t going to complain that you keep absorbing their hardest problems. That’s a good week for them.

So the signal has to be self-generated, and the shape of it is usually a mismatch between effort and result. You’re working as hard as you ever have and the outcomes have gone flat. The instinct in that situation is to apply more of what you know, because more has always worked, which is exactly the wrong response and also the most natural one.

There’s an organisational version of this too, worth noticing if you’re anywhere near decisions about how a team works. Companies get good at something, build their processes around it, and then keep running those processes long after the conditions that justified them disappeared. The rigorous approval chain that made sense when releases were quarterly. The documentation standard designed for a system nobody uses anymore. Same mechanism, larger scale, and considerably harder to interrupt, because now the old pattern has a budget and someone’s job title attached to it.

The question worth asking

When something that used to work stops working, ask whether you’re doing what the situation needs, or what you’re used to.

That’s usually where the stuck part is. Not in a skill you’re missing. In a skill you have that no longer fits, and that you’re still being rewarded for by the part of your brain that’s keeping score against old criteria.

And if that’s what’s happening, you’re not getting worse at your job. You’re outgrowing the thing that used to be enough, which feels almost identical to failing, and isn’t.