Part of the process of change and of becoming limitless involves letting go of the idea that your past failures came about because there was something wrong with you. A similarly important change is realizing that you do not have to live your life as an “expert,” that you can go into situations and proudly share uncertainty. Jesse Melgares told me about these two aspects of the change he went through as he became unlocked. Jesse is an assistant principal in east LA, but in earlier years he taught mathematics and was, as he said, “extremely self-conscious,” thinking he did not know enough and nothing could change. When Jesse became an assistant principal, he needed to coach math teachers, but he was fearful that others would find out he was a fraud:
To be honest I would get a lot of paralyzing stress when someone asked me a math-related question. . . . It was terrible. It was like a boot on my chest. It’s what I woke up with in the morning, wondering, “Am I gonna be asked something that I don’t know the answer to? And will I be discovered as some sort of fraud?”
The feeling of paralyzing stress Jesse described, the fear of being asked something he could not answer, is a feeling shared by millions of people in different situations and jobs, and it is a feeling that I hope this book can change. For Jesse the change began when he took one of my online courses and realized: “Everything that I had been taught as a student of math when I was in the K–12 system and as a math educator was wrong.”
For Jesse, the first step in becoming unlocked was realizing that any trouble he had had learning in the past was not due to some deficit in him, but to the faulty system in place. This is a shift I have seen others make, and it is vital for those who have had bad learning experiences.
Jesse not only started feeling better about mathematics; he started a new “journey” discovering that mathematics was his passion. He shifted from feeling defeatist about math to seeing it as an exciting challenge. Jesse is now the director of mathematics for twenty-five schools—quite a change for a person who used to feel paralyzing stress when he thought about math. New knowledge about the brain allowed him to shift his perspective, his mindset, and his belief in himself. Jesse still meets questions he cannot answer, but instead of being afraid, he thinks: “Well, I don’t know what the answers are but, you know, we’ll figure it out. This is a challenge.” This shift in perspective is typical for people who have become unlocked. When people change their mindset and become aware of the positive benefits of struggle, they take a new and much more positive approach to challenge and uncertainty. They let go of the need to be the expert and replace it with curiosity and the desire to collaborate.
