Unlearning: The Leadership Upgrade No One Talks About
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The pace of change in today’s world is relentless - technology is evolving, workplace expectations are shifting, and the skills required for effective leadership are no longer what they once were. Yet many leaders remain anchored in outdated mindsets and methods that no longer serve them or their teams. In this timely and thought-provoking webinar, participants will be introduced to a powerful and often overlooked leadership skill: unlearning. This practice encourages leaders to question long-held beliefs, release ineffective habits, and open themselves up to new perspectives that align with today’s fast-changing professional landscape.
Melissa Severance, PCC, will guide leaders in upgrading their internal "leadership operating system" by embracing humility, cultivating curiosity, and leading with greater adaptability. Through engaging discussion and practical tools, Melissa challenges participants to explore how unlearning is not about forgetting but about making space for growth, innovation, and continuous learning. By letting go of what no longer works, leaders can unlock new potential in themselves and their teams.
Your Benefits For Attending:- Recognize the importance of unlearning as a core leadership competency in times of rapid change and disruption.
- Identify outdated leadership beliefs, behaviors, and automatic habits that may hinder innovation and adaptability.
- Apply actionable strategies such as cultivating curiosity, seeking feedback, and encouraging experimentation to lead with agility and openness.
This webinar offers leaders the rare opportunity to reflect, reset, and refresh their approach in a rapidly evolving world. By embracing unlearning, participants will gain practical tools to enhance their leadership impact and model continuous growth for their teams.
Who Would Benefit from This Webinar:
This session is ideal for people leaders, senior executives, team managers, organizational development professionals, and anyone responsible for guiding others through change.
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Melissa Severance
Melissa Severance is the owner of Inspire Big Dreams, an executive consulting firm dedicated to empowering business leaders through transformative coaching, customized training, and strategic HR consulting services. She is also the founder and host of DisruptHR Naples, dynamic learning and networkin [...]
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This webinar received a total of 2 survey responses. Attendees have given an average rating of 4.7 stars out of a possible 5, reflecting the quality and value of the content presented.
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Reviews From Webinar Survey
Our webinars are crafted to deliver exceptional value and insight to business professionals. Below, you'll find genuine feedback from attendees.
Donna L.
February 18, 2026
4.4 / 5
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This presentation was relevant as we are in a period of change. The reflection questions were thought provoking, and I enjoyed the techniques shared for unlearning.
Karen T.
February 18, 2026
5.0 / 5
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Love attending Melissa's trainings! She's on point, cheerful and very positive about supporting and making changes, whatever they are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Unlearning in leadership is the deliberate practice of questioning, releasing, and replacing deeply held beliefs, habits, and mental models that once served a leader but no longer align with the demands of today's rapidly changing environment. Unlike forgetting, unlearning is an active, intentional process—recognizing that a previously successful approach is no longer effective and creating the psychological space to adopt new ways of thinking and leading. The need for leadership unlearning has intensified as technology, workforce expectations, and organizational structures have transformed faster than most leaders' internal operating systems have adapted. Leaders who continue to rely on command-and-control habits in environments that require collaboration and empowerment, or who cling to certainty-based decision-making in conditions of genuine ambiguity, often find their effectiveness declining even as their experience grows. Research consistently shows that the most effective leaders in dynamic environments are those who can identify and release outdated assumptions as readily as they adopt new skills. Melissa Severance, PCC, and founder of Inspire Big Dreams, introduces unlearning as a core leadership competency in Aurora Training Advantage's on-demand webinar—providing practical tools for leaders ready to upgrade their internal operating system for the challenges of today's world.
Identifying outdated leadership beliefs requires a combination of self-reflection, external feedback, and honest assessment of the gap between current leadership behaviors and the outcomes those behaviors produce. Common signals that a leadership belief or habit may be outdated include recurring friction with team members who expect greater autonomy, difficulty trusting team members to perform without close oversight, a pattern of being the last to adapt when organizational change is initiated, discomfort with ambiguity or decisions that lack historical precedent, and resistance to feedback that challenges established approaches. Seeking candid 360-degree feedback from direct reports, peers, and supervisors provides external data points that often surface blind spots invisible from the leader's own perspective. Examining where energy feels like resistance rather than flow—the projects and interactions that consistently feel more difficult than they should—can point toward areas where old habits are creating friction. Comparing current leadership behaviors against what today's high-performing teams actually need—psychological safety, autonomy, clear purpose, co-created accountability—helps identify specific gaps. Executive coaching and reflective learning practices accelerate the identification process by creating structured space for honest examination. Aurora Training Advantage's Unlearning webinar with Melissa Severance, PCC, provides frameworks and exercises that help leaders surface and examine the specific beliefs that may be limiting their impact.
The leadership operating system metaphor refers to the underlying set of beliefs, assumptions, values, and mental models that silently drive a leader's automatic decisions, reactions, and behavior—much as a computer's operating system runs invisibly beneath every application in use. Most leaders develop their operating system through early career experiences, formative successes and failures, organizational cultures they absorbed, and the explicit or implicit leadership models they observed. These beliefs become deeply ingrained and eventually run on autopilot—which is both efficient and potentially limiting. Upgrading the leadership operating system through unlearning means deliberately examining and updating these foundational beliefs: replacing the assumption that leaders must have all the answers with a curiosity-based model that values asking better questions; releasing the belief that control equals effectiveness in favor of empowerment and distributed decision-making; shifting from a certainty orientation to a comfort with navigating ambiguity productively. The upgrade is not about discarding everything that worked—many foundational leadership qualities remain relevant—but about consciously evaluating which elements still serve and which have become obstacles. Melissa Severance, PCC, guides leaders through this upgrade process in Aurora Training Advantage's on-demand Unlearning webinar, providing practical tools for examining and refreshing the beliefs that drive leadership behavior in a rapidly changing professional landscape.
Curiosity and adaptability are not fixed personality traits but learnable practices that leaders can deliberately develop—and they are among the most powerful enablers of successful unlearning. Cultivating curiosity begins with shifting the internal question from 'how do I defend my existing view?' to 'what might I be missing here?' in leadership conversations and decisions. Practically, this means asking more open-ended questions in team discussions before offering solutions, seeking out perspectives from people who disagree or think differently, and approaching unfamiliar challenges with the explicit mindset of a learner rather than an expert. Leaders can build a curiosity habit by dedicating regular time to exploring ideas outside their domain, engaging with perspectives from different industries or disciplines, and treating unexpected problems as discovery opportunities rather than threats. Adaptability is developed by deliberately engaging with ambiguous situations rather than avoiding them, by practicing incremental experimentation—trying new approaches on small scales before fully committing—and by building a relationship with feedback that treats it as useful data rather than criticism. Leaders who model curiosity and adaptability visibly—by acknowledging uncertainty openly, celebrating team experiments that don't succeed but generate learning, and publicly changing their minds when evidence warrants it—create organizational cultures where these qualities flourish. Aurora Training Advantage's Unlearning webinar with Melissa Severance provides actionable strategies for developing these capabilities in practice.
Experienced leaders often face the greatest challenges with unlearning precisely because of their experience—the beliefs and habits that need to be examined are often the ones most deeply reinforced by past success. When a leadership approach has worked consistently over years or decades, the brain encodes it as reliable and resistance to changing it is strong, not from stubbornness but from well-documented psychological mechanisms. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and the sunk cost fallacy all make it difficult to release approaches that represent significant personal investment. The identity dimension of leadership also complicates unlearning: for many experienced leaders, specific ways of operating—decisive authority, structured control, subject matter expertise—are not just professional habits but core elements of professional identity, making releasing them feel threatening. Overcoming these challenges starts with creating psychological safety for the leader themselves—approaching the unlearning process with self-compassion rather than self-criticism, recognizing that the need to unlearn is a sign of growth and adaptation, not failure. Working with an executive coach provides structured, non-judgmental support for examining resistant beliefs. Peer learning communities with other senior leaders normalizes the unlearning conversation. Starting with small experiments—applying a new leadership approach in low-stakes situations before full commitment—builds evidence that the new approach works, gradually replacing resistance with confidence. Aurora Training Advantage's Unlearning webinar with Melissa Severance, PCC, provides experienced leaders with practical tools for navigating this process.