Changing your mind should be simple. New information comes along, you reconsider, and you reach a different conclusion. In reality, it can be surprisingly difficult.
Imagine you’ve been recommending the same restaurant for years.
You tell everyone it’s brilliant.
Then you go back and the food isn’t particularly good.
You could simply decide that perhaps it isn’t as wonderful as you thought.
But part of you starts making excuses.
Maybe the chef was having a bad night. Perhaps they were short-staffed. You ordered the wrong thing.
Of course, sometimes those explanations might be true.
But there’s another possibility.
We don’t particularly like discovering that something we’ve believed for years might be wrong.
And when the belief is more important than our opinion of a restaurant, changing our minds can become considerably harder.
Why do we become attached to our opinions?
Our opinions don’t exist completely independently from the rest of us.
They can become connected to our experiences, relationships and sense of who we are.
You may think of yourself as someone who is careful with money, environmentally conscious, ambitious, independent or good at judging people.
Once an idea becomes part of that story, information that contradicts it can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.
Changing your mind can then feel like admitting something about yourself rather than simply updating an opinion.
Perhaps that is why we sometimes defend positions long after we’ve stopped being entirely certain about them.
Do we look for information that agrees with us?
It’s very easy to do.
Suppose you’re considering buying a particular car.
You’ve almost decided.
You start reading reviews.
A glowing review catches your attention.
“Exactly,” you think.
Then you find one from somebody who says they regretted buying it.
You immediately start wondering whether that reviewer knew what they were talking about.
We naturally notice information that supports what we already think.
The internet makes this particularly easy because, with enough searching, we can usually find somebody who agrees with almost anything.
Searching for information and searching for confirmation can look remarkably similar.
Why is admitting we were wrong so uncomfortable?
Partly because being wrong can feel embarrassing.
If we’ve argued strongly for something, persuaded other people or made decisions based upon it, changing our mind may mean acknowledging that our earlier judgement wasn’t correct.
The longer we’ve defended the position, the harder that can become.
But there’s an odd contradiction here.
We generally admire people who can say:
“I thought that before, but I’ve learned something since.”
Yet when it’s our own opinion, changing it can feel like weakness.
Perhaps it is better understood as the opposite.
Being willing to revise an opinion means allowing new information to matter.
Why do we sometimes defend decisions we’ve already made?
Imagine you’ve spent a considerable amount of money on something that isn’t working.
Perhaps it’s a course, a business idea or a home improvement project.
Stopping means accepting that the money has already gone.
Continuing gives you the possibility of proving that the original decision was right after all.
So you put in more time.
Then more money.
And now stopping becomes even harder.
Past investment can have a powerful influence on present decisions, even when what we’ve already spent cannot be recovered.
Sometimes the useful question isn’t:
“Was my original decision right?”
It’s:
“Knowing what I know now, would I make the same decision today?”
Those are very different questions.
Does changing your mind mean you can’t trust yourself?
No.
We make decisions using the information available to us at the time.
Later, we may have more information.
Circumstances may also change.
You might genuinely love a job when you’re 25 and find that the same career no longer suits you at 40.
That doesn’t necessarily mean your earlier choice was a mistake.
You changed.
The situation changed.
What you wanted changed.
Sometimes changing our minds isn’t evidence that we didn’t know ourselves.
It’s evidence that we know ourselves differently now.
Can other people make it harder for us to change?
Very much so.
Imagine telling everyone you’re moving abroad.
You’ve researched the country, announced the move and talked excitedly about your new life.
Then doubts begin to appear.
Changing your mind privately is one thing.
Explaining the change to everyone else is another.
We can become trapped by versions of ourselves we’ve already presented to other people.
“I’ve always said…”
“Everyone knows I…”
“People will think…”
But continuing with something simply because we’ve announced it doesn’t necessarily make it the right decision.
Other people’s expectations aren’t contracts.
When should we question our own beliefs?
Not constantly.
If we challenged every opinion every morning, very little else would get done.
But there are moments when it’s useful to become curious about our certainty.
Particularly when we find ourselves becoming unusually defensive.
Why does this matter so much to me?
What evidence would actually change my mind?
Am I considering the information, or am I trying to win the argument?
Would I judge the same evidence differently if it supported the opposite conclusion?
Those questions don’t automatically mean we’re wrong.
They simply create a little room for the possibility.
Changing your mind doesn’t erase who you were
We sometimes look back at previous versions of ourselves with embarrassment.
How could I possibly have believed that?
Why did I stay in that situation?
Why did I think I wanted that?
But our earlier decisions were made by an earlier version of us, with different experiences and different information.
Self-discovery isn’t only about learning who we are.
Sometimes it’s about noticing that we are no longer exactly who we were.
There is nothing particularly inconsistent about saying:
“I used to think that. Now I think differently.”
In fact, perhaps one of the clearest signs that we’re still learning is that occasionally, we’re prepared to change our minds.