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Two years ago, a ski instructor told me I looked like an old-fashioned Parisian on skis. I didn’t entirely mind the Parisian part — but I knew that it wasn’t a compliment.

I learned to ski on the long, thin, straight skis of the 1970s, where every turn was earned through brute technique and sheer will. I worked a ski season as a student, bartering subsidised drinks for free lessons from instructors. I got good. I kept taking lessons long after most people plateau, pushing into group off-piste classes, tackling rocky couloirs that filled me with quiet terror. Each time I reached the bottom in one piece, I thanked providence and prayed that that was the end of the lesson.

I was proud of how I looked on skis, particularly compared to my British compatriots. I thought I was composed and stylish.

Then my instructor explained the problem. I was still skiing as people did twenty years ago — before parabolic, shaped skis fundamentally changed the physics of carving. My body had locked in an old pattern so completely that I couldn’t feel it anymore. It had become invisible to me. And that, it turns out, is the most dangerous kind of limitation: one you aren’t even aware of – a blind spot!

What followed was two full seasons of feeling like a beginner again. Awkward, unnatural and wrong. Every time I thought I’d cracked it, my instructor would quietly correct me. The hardest part wasn’t learning the new technique — it was tolerating looking incompetent while I did it. My ego, built over decades of being “the good skier,” took a sustained and uncomfortable bashing.

But here’s what I know now, in my mid-60s: it was worth every moment of discomfort.

When I finally let go of the old pattern and committed to the new one, everything changed. Off-piste terrain that used to fill me with fear now felt fluid and alive. I felt like a kid playing in powder snow again. And I’d achieved something conventional wisdom Says you can’t achieve past a certain age: I had genuinely rewired my physical and cognitive patterns. You certainly can teach old dogs new tricks!

What Carol Dweck would say about this

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades researching why some people grow through challenge while others stagnate. Her conclusion — the foundation of growth mindset theory — is deceptively simple: people who believe their abilities are fixed will avoid the risk of looking incompetent. People who believe their abilities can be developed will lean into that discomfort.

But here’s the part of Dweck’s work that most leadership conversations gloss over. It’s not enough to believe you can grow. The real test of a growth mindset is whether you’re willing to temporarily get worse at something you’re already good at in order to get significantly better. That’s not just openness to learning — that’s a profound act of ego management. And it’s far rarer than we like to admit.

The uncomfortable question isn’t whether you have a growth mindset. It’s whether you’ve tested it recently on something that actually matters to you.

My two seasons being willing to looking like an old Parisian on skis? That was growth mindset — not as a concept, but as lived experience.

The surgeons who wouldn’t let go of the scalpel

In 1980, Dr Kurt Semm performed the world’s first keyhole surgery. He was met with fierce resistance from the surgical establishment. Experienced surgeons saw no reason to abandon a method they had spent careers mastering and be praised for. One British urologist captured the prevailing mindset when he observed that his colleagues were actively applauding large incisions while patients were clamouring for the exact opposite!

The surgeons with the most experience — the ones who had invested the most in mastering open surgery — were the ones most resistant to change. Their expertise had become their gilded cage. Within a decade, keyhole surgery had transformed medicine. The surgeons who held on to the old way didn’t fail because they lacked intelligence. They failed because they couldn’t tolerate being a beginner again.

The neuroscience they were missing

When we master a skill — be it skiing, surgery, leadership style, the brain encodes it as a deeply efficient neural pathway. Repetition makes it faster, more automatic, more invisible. This is enormously useful. It’s also the source of our greatest blind spots.

Unlearning that pathway requires the brain to do something counter-intuitive: suppress an efficient, well-worn route while simultaneously building a new one. It’s neurologically harder than learning from scratch. It takes longer. And it feels, at every stage, like regression.

This is why neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to rewire itself throughout life, matters so much for leaders. Your brain is not fixed. It remains capable of substantial change well into later life. But that change requires attention, self-awareness, expert feedback, and the willingness to tolerate a sustained period of performing below your own standards.

My skiing transformation took two full seasons. Not two lessons. Two seasons.

Trevor

I worked for several months with a senior leader — I’ll call him Trevor — who beneath a composed exterior carried a quiet but corrosive belief: that he simply wasn’t smart enough. He watched graduates arrive with technical skills he didn’t possess and privately concluded this was evidence of his limitations — skills he’d been born without and could never acquire. This belief didn’t stay in one lane. It seeped into everything: his willingness to speak up in meetings, to challenge his peers, to back his own judgement. Trevor had become a shrinking violet — capable, experienced, and almost entirely invisible by choice.

What shifted wasn’t the acquisition of new technical skills — at least not at first. What shifted was his understanding of how learning actually works. Once he genuinely internalised — not just intellectually accepted, but believed — that the brain is designed to change, that capability is built through dedication and practice rather than inherited at birth, everything unlocked. He started doing the uncomfortable work.

His leadership presence transformed. He became someone his organisation actually heard. And almost as a footnote, though he mentioned it with considerable pride, he applied the same thinking to his golf game, which he’d long assumed had reached its natural ceiling. It hadn’t. It was just waiting for him to stop believing it had.

What this means for you

Most leadership development fails not because people can’t learn. It fails because nobody asks them to unlearn.

I work with senior leaders and their teams every day. The pattern I see most consistently isn’t a failure to learn — it’s a failure to unlearn. And beneath almost every failure to unlearn is the same thing: an identity that has become too invested in current competence to risk temporary incompetence.

You need a guide who can see what you can’t see in yourself. I needed an instructor who could observe my blind spot from the outside. So do your leaders. Honest, expert feedback isn’t a luxury, it’s the mechanism through which unlearning becomes possible.

You need to develop genuine self-awareness, not just about your strengths, but about your automatic patterns. The ones that feel like competence but may be calcified habits. This requires the kind of reflective practice that most executive schedules actively resist.

You need to make peace with looking worse before you look better. Leaders who cannot tolerate that window of visible incompetence will always retreat to familiar ground under pressure. Modelling this publicly — being seen to struggle, to course-correct, to not yet have the answer — is one of the most powerful signals a leader can send to their organisation.

And you need to give it time. Real behavioural rewiring — like the reprogramming that transformed my skiing — takes months, not sessions. Be deeply suspicious of any development programme that promises transformation in a two-day offsite. Changing any habit requires conscious attention and purposeful practice. To make it manageable I always encourage people just to aim for one percent changes. One percent may seem pointless, but when aggregated over a year, it can amount to a massive transformation.

The question I’ll leave you with

I’m in my mid-60s, rewiring movement patterns I spent forty years building. Trevor dropped his golf handicap after deciding his ceiling was permanent. Neither of us did anything extraordinary. We just accepted that years of practice had built invisible habits at the expense of excellence.

Your brain is ready. Your neural pathways are waiting to be rewritten. The only question is whether your ego will let it.

Have you got your own version of the old Parisian on skis? A pattern you’ve been calling experience that might actually be an outdated habit? I’d love to hear it — drop a comment or message me directly.

And if you’re working with a leadership team that’s ready to unlearn, let’s talk. 

Tom Flatau is CEO of Teamworking International and has been applying neuroscience to leadership development for over 25 years. His upcoming book on human-centric leadership explores how understanding our social brains can transform organisational performance. Connect with him at team-working.com.