There’s a quote attributed to Alvin Toffler — the futurist, not a general or a CEO — that landed on me years ago and never left: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
I read that in my thirties and thought it sounded clever. I read it again in my forties, after a decade of command-level leadership, and it hit different. Because by then I’d accumulated a graveyard of habits I thought were strengths — habits that had quietly calcified into liabilities while I wasn’t paying attention.
We talk a lot about leadership development. Adding skills. Stacking certifications. Learning the new framework, the new communication model, the new conflict resolution technique. And none of that is wrong. But it misses something fundamental.
The thing holding most leaders back isn’t what they haven’t learned yet.
It’s what they refuse to unlearn.
I spent years operating in high-stakes, time-compressed environments where decisiveness was currency. Where the person who acted fastest earned the most credibility. Where hesitation could cost lives, careers, reputations. That environment trained me well. It also trained me wrong — or, more accurately, it trained me for a context that didn’t apply to every room I walked into afterward.
Complexity doesn’t reward speed. It punishes it.
General Stanley McChrystal wrote in Team of Teams that the greatest challenge modern leaders face isn’t a lack of information or capability — it’s an inability to adapt their operating rhythm to environments that don’t behave like the ones they trained in. He rebuilt an entire military task force around that insight. Not because his people lacked skill, but because their habits were designed for a world that no longer existed.
That’s the trap. The habits that got you here aren’t neutral passengers on the next leg of the journey. They’re active saboteurs if you don’t confront them.
So here are three shifts. Not additions. Subtractions. Things to strip away before the next layer of growth has anywhere to land.
Unlearn the Quick Fix. Learn to Pause.
I used to walk into tense rooms like a paramedic walks into a trauma scene. Assess. Decide. Act. Move. That sequence served me well in operational environments where delay meant danger. It served me terribly in every other context.
There was a meeting — maybe six years ago — where a simmering conflict between two division supervisors surfaced during a quarterly review. The tension had been building for weeks. Everyone in the room felt it. And the moment it broke open, I did what I’d trained myself to do: I fixed it. Right there. Split the difference. Offered a compromise. Moved the agenda forward. Clean. Efficient. Done.
Except it wasn’t done. The compromise addressed the symptom and ignored the root. Within a month, the same conflict resurfaced with twice the intensity and half the trust. Because I hadn’t solved anything. I’d just demonstrated that my comfort mattered more than their truth.
Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” I’d efficiently resolved a problem that didn’t need resolution — it needed exploration. It needed space. It needed me to shut up.
Speed feels like strength. In certain contexts, it is. But in complex human dynamics — team friction, cultural erosion, strategic ambiguity — speed is just a dressed-up version of avoidance. You move fast so you don’t have to sit in the discomfort. You deliver the answer so you don’t have to tolerate the question.
The unlearn: Let go of the belief that the fastest response is the best response.
The learn: When tension surfaces, name what you notice. Then stop talking.
Not for a beat. For a full minute. Sixty seconds of silence in a room full of professionals who are conditioned to fill dead air with action. It will feel wrong. It will feel like failure. It is neither.
In that silence, ask yourself two questions. First: Whose voice is missing? Because in tense moments, the people with the sharpest insights are often the ones least likely to volunteer them. They’re reading the room. They’re calculating risk. They’re waiting to see if honesty is actually welcome or just advertised.
Second: What fear is shaping this room right now? Not the stated concern — the unstated one. The fear of looking incompetent. The fear of challenging a senior leader. The fear of admitting that the plan everyone approved three months ago isn’t working.
Dwight Eisenhower — a man who understood urgency better than almost anyone in history — once said, “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” He led the largest amphibious invasion in human history and still understood that the most consequential decisions required patience, not velocity.
Signal to your team that unresolved issues deserve attention before they deserve action. That sitting with a problem for an extra day, an extra hour, an extra minute is not weakness. It’s the opposite. It’s discipline applied to the ego’s desperate need to produce an answer.
The quick fix is a sugar hit. The pause is protein. One gives you a spike. The other builds something that lasts.
Unlearn Superficial Reassurance. Learn to Name the Difficulty.
Leaders love to calm rooms. I loved to calm rooms. There’s a dopamine rush in watching anxious faces relax because you projected confidence and certainty. It feels like leadership. It looks like leadership.
Sometimes it’s the opposite.
I remember a period of significant organizational change — the kind that affects roles, reporting structures, daily operations. People were unsettled. Rumors filled the hallways. Morale wobbled. And in every meeting, every briefing, every hallway sidebar, I said some version of the same thing: “We’re going to be fine. Trust the process. This will work out.”
I meant it. I believed it. And it was the wrong thing to say.
Not because it was dishonest. Because it was incomplete. It acknowledged the destination without honoring the terrain between here and there. It asked people to skip past their legitimate anxiety and arrive at my conclusion without doing the emotional work of getting there themselves.
Brené Brown — and yes, I’m quoting a vulnerability researcher in a leadership blog, which would’ve made the younger version of me uncomfortable — wrote that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” But I’d push it further: people don’t trust your optimism until you’ve demonstrated that you understand their pain.
Reassurance without acknowledgment isn’t leadership. It’s dismissal with a smile.
The unlearn: Stop calming the room so fast. Resist the instinct to smooth things over before the rough edges have been examined.
The learn: State clearly what feels heavy. Name the frustration. Put language on the thing everyone is thinking but nobody is saying.
“This transition is harder than we expected. Some of you are carrying concerns you haven’t voiced. Some of you are frustrated, and that frustration is valid. I want to hear it — not so I can fix it right now, but so we’re dealing with what’s real instead of performing stability we don’t feel.”
That’s not weakness. That’s Winston Churchill standing before Parliament in 1940 and saying, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” He didn’t calm the room. He named the difficulty. And in doing so, he gave an entire nation permission to face reality together instead of pretending it away individually.
Turn private worries into shared material. Ask each person — directly, not generally — what they’re carrying. “What’s keeping you up at night about this?” Not in a therapy session. In a staff meeting. In a one-on-one. Over coffee. In the hallway, if you’ve read the first chapter of this book.
When a leader names the difficulty, two things happen. First, the people in the room exhale. Because someone finally said it. The thing they’ve been whispering about in parking lots and group texts is now on the table, legitimized, treated as real. Second, the collective intelligence of the room activates. People can’t solve what hasn’t been named. They can only worry about it. Naming converts anxiety into material. Material can be worked with. Anxiety just circulates.
The superficial reassurance feels generous. It isn’t. It’s a transaction: I give you comfort, you give me the appearance of a stable team. Naming the difficulty is the generous act. It says, I trust you enough to be honest. I respect you enough to stop pretending.
Unlearn Carrying It Alone. Learn to Share the Weight.
This one almost broke me.
There’s a mythology in leadership — especially in public safety, military, and high-stakes corporate environments — that the leader absorbs the pressure so the team doesn’t have to. You’re the buffer. The shock absorber. The person who takes the hit from above and translates it into calm direction below.
And there’s truth in that. Some pressure should be filtered. Not every organizational tremor needs to reach the front lines. But the mythology metastasizes into something toxic when it becomes identity. When “I carry this so they don’t have to” becomes “I carry this because that’s what makes me valuable.”
I wore that identity like armor for years. Every difficult conversation with upper management, every political landmine, every resource battle, every personnel crisis — I held it. Processed it alone. Decided alone. Presented the clean output to my team as though the messy input had never existed.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” I wasn’t leading. I was hoarding. And the insanity was that I called it strength.
The cost showed up gradually. Decision fatigue that masqueraded as irritability. A shrinking circle of trust because I’d convinced myself no one else could handle the full picture. A growing distance between me and the team I was supposedly protecting — because you can’t feel close to someone who won’t let you carry anything.
Jim Mattis, in Call Sign Chaos, wrote about the importance of what he called “shared consciousness” — the idea that distributed awareness across a team creates better outcomes than centralized knowledge held by a single decision-maker. He commanded Marines in combat. If he could share the weight of war, I could share the weight of an organizational restructure.
The unlearn: Stop absorbing pressure to prove your value. Stop believing that the leader who carries the most earns the most respect. They don’t. They earn burnout, blind spots, and a team that never develops the capacity to lead alongside them.
The learn: Ask others what signals they’re seeing. “What are you noticing that I might be missing?” “What feels most at risk right now — not from my vantage point, but from yours?” “Where do you think we’re most vulnerable, and what would you do about it?”
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re invitations. And they accomplish something the solo-carry model never can: they make uncertainty a collective responsibility instead of an individual one.
When you share the weight, you don’t become weaker. You become more accurate. Because you’re no longer operating on a single data stream filtered through your own biases, blind spots, and fatigue. You’re operating on the collective intelligence of people who are closer to the ground truth than you are.
Colin Powell had a rule: leadership is lonely, but it should never be isolated. There’s a difference. Lonely means you make the final call and accept the consequences. Isolated means you made the call without the inputs that would have made it better.
I’ve watched leaders — good ones, talented ones — collapse under the weight of problems they didn’t need to carry alone. Not because they lacked resilience. Because they lacked the humility to admit that sharing the burden wasn’t a concession. It was a strategy.
Your team doesn’t need a martyr. They need a leader who trusts them enough to say, “I don’t have the full picture. Help me see what I’m missing.” That sentence, spoken with sincerity, will do more for your team’s trust, engagement, and performance than any motivational speech you’ll ever deliver.
The Subtraction Principle
Most leadership development is additive. Learn this. Add that. Stack another tool on top of the pile.
But the leaders I’ve watched grow the most — the ones who navigated complexity without losing their humanity or their effectiveness — grew by subtraction. They identified the habits that no longer served them, and they had the discipline to let those habits go. Even the ones that felt like identity. Especially those.
Lao Tzu said it twenty-five hundred years ago: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.”
You don’t need another framework. You need fewer reflexes. Fewer automatic responses that served a previous version of you in a previous context. Fewer habits running on autopilot while the environment around you has already changed.
Pause before you fix. Name what’s hard before you reassure. Share before you absorb.
Three subtractions. That’s the work.