About Us

Born out of collective learning spaces within the Wasan Network, our early experiments showed a deep hunger for change — not just in systems, but in ourselves. We saw patterns of dominance, disconnection, and fear holding people back, and realized there were few supportive places to release them.

Through co-created circles, pilot workshops, and personal journeys, the Steps to Unlearning framework emerged: a cyclical, story-driven process that helps people reflect, release, and reimagine. It has become a gentle movement. One that invites us to return to ourselves and to each other, with honesty and care.

The Steps to Unlearning is a project of the Culture Shift Studio, designed to help people and organizations let go of inherited conditioning and rebuild from a place of emotional intelligence, community care, and systems awareness. Through Circles, storytelling, and shared inquiry, we offer a new path for a changing world.

The Steps to Unlearning began with a simple question:

What do we need to let go of to live, lead, and relate with greater integrity?

Mission

The Steps to Unlearning exists to help people and organizations release inherited patterns of dominance, disconnection, and fear, and replace them with practices of care, belonging, and purpose. We provide a gentle, story-driven, and reflective pathway to support individuals and groups in letting go of what no longer serves them, and stepping into more human, honest, and life-giving ways of being together.

Vision

We envision a world where unlearning becomes a shared practice: where people recognize how cultural patterns shape their choices and relationships, and consciously choose new patterns rooted in empathy, accountability, and collective liberation. Through resources, circles, and stories, Steps to Unlearning aims to spark a movement of cultural repair, inviting everyone to remember their wholeness and build systems that honor our shared humanity.

What We're Leaving Behind

From the earliest moments of our lives, we’re shaped by cultural scripts about how to survive, succeed, and belong.

We’re taught to:

• Strive, achieve, and perfect — even at the cost of our well-being.

• Swallow discomfort to avoid conflict.

• Fear rest, failure, and vulnerability as signs of weakness.

These patterns didn’t come from nowhere. They were smart adaptations — learned responses to systems that demanded performance over presence, protection over connection.

But over time, what helped us survive has begun to keep us stuck: burned out, isolated, and cycling through ways of being that no longer serve us or our communities.

What We're Moving Toward

We don’t “fix” these patterns—we unlearn them.

Unlearning is a practice of remembering who we are beneath the scripts. It begins with awareness, and it deepens in community.

Through unlearning, we begin to:

• Reclaim our full humanity, instead of surviving on fragments.

• Shift from urgency and control toward cultures rooted in care, equity, and consent.

• Create space for truth-telling, repair, and renewal—where being human isn’t a flaw, but a foundation.

The Steps to Unlearning offers the language, tools, and collective spaces to help us make this shift—together, and for good.

Our Approach

The Steps to Unlearning is rooted in the belief that change begins within, but is sustained together. Our approach weaves together the wisdom from many that have come before us, all held through an anti-oppression and systems-change lens.

We draw inspiration from:

• 12-step recovery traditions, for their deep and commitment to accountability

• Buddhist psychology, with its focus on impermanence, compassion, and non-attachment

• Systems thinking, which reminds us that personal transformation is inseparable from the environments we live in

Our process uses storytelling, small-group practice, and reflective prompts to help participants name and release cultural conditioning. Unlike many trainings, our approach is:

• Cyclical, not linear

• Gentle, not punitive

• Story-driven, not performance-driven

We believe unlearning is remembering who you truly are, beyond fear and domination, and reconnecting to your integrity, purpose, and shared humanity.

The Six Phases & 12 Steps of Unlearning

Understanding how we’ve been shaped by dominant culture and beginning to turn inward.

Moving from isolation to shared understanding through truth-telling and release.

4. Living Into New Possibilities

5. Rebuilding Relationships & Resilience

Practicing new behaviors, repairing relationships, and reclaiming connections.

2. Making the Invisible Visible

Taking an honest inventory and speaking truth to what we’ve internalized.

3. Breaking the Silence

Creating better relationships and reflection as part of a sustainable change practice.

6. Rooting in Purpose, Leading by Example

Aligning with our deeper purpose and letting our lives reflect what we’ve unlearned.

1. Awakening: Name the cultural conditioning you’ve absorbed

2. Orientation: Open to a greater source of wisdom or purpose

3. Discernment: Choose to let go of inherited scripts

4. Inquiry: Take an honest inventory of beliefs and behaviors

5. Truth-Telling: Speak what’s been hidden, to self and others

6. Releasing: Loosen the grip of fear and control

1: Seeing the Waters We Swim In

7. Embodying: Practice new ways of being rooted in trust and care

8. Repair: Own your impact and make amends

9. Relating: Cultivate mutuality and emotional honesty

10. Integration: Reflect, adapt, and grow

11. Alignment: Stay connected to your deeper purpose

12. Service: Live your practice out loud: Live your practice out loud

Who We Are

Amy J. Wilson

Founder and Circles Co-Lead

Amy is an organizational strategist, author, and founder of Culture Shift Studio. She brings two decades of experience in leadership development, emotional intelligence, and workplace well-being across government, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. A former Presidential Innovation Fellow and Aspen Tech Policy Fellow, Amy is the author of Empathy for Change and a sought-after speaker on the future of work and inclusive leadership.

Through the Culture Shift Studio, she partners with mission-driven organizations to build cultures of trust, resilience, and high performance. Amy is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Maryland.

Dani Wilson

Circles Co-Lead & Facilitator

Dani is a social worker and liberation practitioner committed to transformative learning and systemic change. She facilitates workshops with We Are Finding Freedom, collaborates with Reckon With, is a certified practitioner with the Racial Equity Consciousness Institute, and hosts Warm Data Labs with the International Bateson Institute.

Dani’s work brings people together to challenge ingrained perspectives, understand systemic patterns, and advance racial, economic, and gender justice. She also serves as Executive Director of the Cancer and Environment Network, Executive Council member of the Cancer Free Economy, and co-chair of the Environmental Health Workgroup within the Pennsylvania Cancer Coalition.

Bhav spends most of his time supporting individuals and groups as they navigate their messy, complex realities, seeking direction and making decisions. Often working with networked, global groups where power and resources are unevenly distributed, Bhav helps people who are trying to make a difference -- in their own lives, in others’ lives, and on the planet.

Drawing from complexity thinking, coaching, spirituality, and a wide range of other sources, he shows up as a facilitator, trainer, coach, host, or conversational gardener. Bhav resists tidy titles and categories, and embraces the freedom of not being easily defined.

Bhavesh (Bhav) Patel

Collaborator and Advisor

Mary Nations

Circles Collaborator and Facilitator

Mary supports individuals and groups to surface viable pathways for engagement, action, and innovation amidst complexity. As an Associate with the Human Systems Dynamics Institute, Mary leans into uncertainty and emergent patterns, especially within diverse, interdependent systems. She guides networked groups and organizational systems to make sense of shifting realities, fostering adaptability and resilience.

Drawing on Human Systems Dynamics, complexity thinking, and an ever‑expanding toolkit, her work feels less like prescribing answers and more like enabling generative conversations. You might call her a facilitator, coach, strategist—or simply a systems dancer. She loves that her work remains beautifully undefinable.

Josaine Smith

Collaborator and ADVISOR

Josiane spends her days co-creating spaces where people lean into complexity, grapple with uncertainty, and spark emergent change. As Director of Learning Networks at Koreo, she collaborates with global, civic, and philanthropic systems working toward just and inclusive futures . With over a decade in social innovation and systems change, she guides networked groups—often uneven in power and resources—to notice patterns, connect across silos, and shape generative action.

Drawing from systems thinking, facilitation, and co-design, you might call her a facilitator, host, coach, or network gardener. Josiane embraces the beauty of resisting neat labels and loves that her work remains open-ended.

Core Values

Emotional Honesty

Telling the truth about what is, without shame

Mutual care

Centering collective wellbeing

Integrity

Aligning our actions with our values

Slowness & presence

Moving at the speed of trust

Anti-oppression

Challenging systems of harm