September 4, 2025

From Knowing to Becoming:
What Academia Can Teach Business About Growth

What if the key to thriving in business isn’t about what we know, but about how we become? ​ From today’s teacher, ​JENNIFER McCUSKER, Ph.D.​

Mindfulness Unlocks More Than Calm. It Unlocks Capacity.

In education, particularly within mindfulness-based learning models, the goal isn’t simply content acquisition, it’s conscious transformation. Rather than stuffing students with facts, the emphasis is on cultivating presence, inquiry, and inner awareness. Mindfulness helps students observe their thoughts, regulate their emotions, and build internal flexibility to adapt, reflect, and grow.

Business leaders often undervalue this kind of internal work. They rush to solve external problems without pausing to examine how their own reactivity, ego, or assumptions might be shaping the outcomes. Yet, what mindfulness offers, self-awareness, non-judgment, pause, isn’t just self-care. It’s strategic advantage.

Organizations that embed mindful practices create space for deeper listening, more thoughtful decision-making, and increased resilience. These aren't soft skills. They are survival skills in a world driven by rapid change, complexity, and ambiguity.

Shift from Performance to Presence, and Learning Becomes Evolution.

Academia at its best doesn’t just teach knowledge. It shapes identities. Teachers often say their proudest moments aren’t when a student gets an “A,” it’s when they ask a new kind of question, see the world differently, or finally see themselves differently.

This is the spirit of becoming, and it’s largely missing from most corporate development models.

In business, growth is still framed as linear: master a skill, hit a KPI, climb the ladder. But this performative model leaves little room for the deeper work of identity evolution. We don’t need more polished professionals; we need people who are self-aware enough to break open and adapt when the rules change.

This is where the Unbecoming Framework™ (inspired by mindfulness-based learning) can offer business a new paradigm. Instead of mastering more, it invites people to shed, stretch, and shift, to question what they know, absorb new perspectives, test their limits, and evolve iteratively. It redefines learning not as a path to perfection, but as a practice of transformation.

When We Teach People to Unlearn, They Become More Than Their Roles.

Academia teaches that learning is messy, nonlinear, and full of paradox. That’s exactly the mindset today’s workforce needs. In a post-linear world, employees don’t need more “10-step” models. They need the capacity to sit with uncertainty, to unlearn outdated assumptions, and to become someone new in response to the moment.

Unlearning is hard, especially in organizations that reward expertise and punish vulnerability. But it’s also essential. When people are given tools to reflect mindfully on what no longer serves them, and the psychological safety to try on new ways of thinking, doing, and being, they don’t just become better employees. They become better humans.

Final Thought

The future of business won't be built by those who know the most. It will be led by those most willing to evolve. Mindfulness-based learning reminds us: becoming is the real work. And unbecoming is where it begins.

If you enjoyed the read…

Forward this to a thought partner!

Share this edition of Mini Lessons to equip someone else with the teacher tool we talked about today — and gain a conversation partner along the way!