Unlearning as an Essential, Yet Difficult to Use, Tool for Acquiring New Skills in a New Industry

In real life, I am not fond of salespeople. When I receive an unsolicited sales call, I tend not to pick up. If it is from someone I do not know in real life, I would block the phone number. When I receive sales emails and text messages, I largely ignore them. I would like to have control over how, when, and about what topics I speak to others, on my own terms. Being rushed, or worst yet, manipulated, to make a decision will likely lead to increased skepticism and a greater possibility of a "no." My feelings about sales have been so strong that I assume that others largely have the same attitude.

The aversion to salespeople does not work well when I am directly involved in sales as a profession today. In this line of work, I have found myself hesitating to make those unsolicited calls, knowing that if I were on the receiving end, I would certainly not enjoy the correspondence, and upon receiving the correspondence, would only have a more negative impression of the sender. It does not help that in my private life, I rarely make any outbound phone calls for any purpose, and my last stint at sales, over a decade ago, ended quickly with the same kind of communications-related trauma.

Deep down, I know that both my assumption that others share my distaste for unsolicited sales and my history of sales-related trauma, as of now, are just figments of imagination, less grounded in reality than my personal preferences. My desire to learn the ropes of having to communicate with complete strangers day in and day out, with the ultimate goal of getting them to purchase often vaguely defined services that they have zero personal experience with, priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, require a leap of faith in both my personal capabilities to learn just as much as the potential clients' potential to trust.

Overcoming the bounds of negative imagination requires just as much unlearning as learning. Yes, learning how to figure out the needs of potential customers, and then persuading them of how certain services and products can help fulfill those needs are essential skills for the salespeople of today. But in learning this process, many newbies forget that it is just as important to jettison whatever assumption that they had about persuasion, interpersonal relationships, and building rapport that they acquired in their previous jobs and private lives.

Unlearning is by no means easy. Adults are fixated on some constants within their lives, introduced by themselves and others to maintain structure and stability. Personalities develop through set patterns for communication, a set of core values and beliefs, as well as daily routines that help each individual navigate the needs and wants of both professional and private lives. Changing a big element of daily life, such as the nature of employment, necessitates some other life changes, but the need for constants in life prevents thorough changes that would lead to significant transformations.

Indeed, the ability to change physical settings, such as the workplace or the residence, often struggles to be accompanied by mental changes. Employment, for one, is much more than operational procedures that one undertakes on a day-to-day basis to make ends meet. It is often a form of identity, buttressed by a sense of pride in both past successes as well as an accompanying sense of professional ethics. Even when switching jobs, people find themselves retaining pride in the past, deterring them from quickly dropping past practices and picking up new ones required for the new job.

Unlearning, then, becomes not so much an issue of how to get acclimated to a new environment, but a fundamental battle with oneself. Sometimes a job takes one down an ideological path, compelling one to accommodate beliefs and ethics associated with a corporate vision or culture. The larger the gap between what one has come to hold as core beliefs over the years, and those espoused by a new workplace, the more difficult it would be to undertake thorough unlearning for the sake of doing well in a job. Employees feel trapped between what they have to do and who they want to be.

There is no doubt that unlearning is necessary to do well in any new professional or personal environment. After all, no two workplaces or living spaces are alike, no matter how much superficial likeness there seems to be. Dig deep enough, and those gaps in beliefs, values, and practices emerge. To do well in a new place, picking up new things and tossing out the old are necessary. But how much of the old does one need to toss out, and more importantly, capable of truly tossing out, without losing one's established identity? It is an essential question, especially when the environment, like sales, involves interacting with new people all the time.