Why Are We So Scared to Change Our Minds?

Or, "you've made your bed, now you must lie in it" was the phrase of my childhood

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Last month I changed my mind in a big way. I had been living in the countryside for eight months after make a big song and dance about leaving London. I’d given up my home, moved all my belongings (and my very unimpressed dog) and now I was having regrets. The whole experience hadn’t worked out as I’d hoped, (let’s be honest, I was hoping I’d move next door to widower Jude Law and his two delightful children) and I really just wanted to come back to London but I was scared that if I changed my mind people would judge me. That I would be seen as some sort of failure for admitting it wasn’t for me.

I am notoriously stubborn. I think this is a hangover from my childhood when I had chronic asthma and a lot of rhetoric around being a sick child involved telling you all the things you shouldn’t do. “You shouldn’t have pets, they’ll make you wheeze”. “Don’t go running around with your friends at breaktime, you’ll have an asthma attack". “Make sure you always have your inhaler, you mustn’t go anywhere without it” - ok, life would have been easier if I’d followed that last one but sometimes a kid has to assert their independence. I was proud of being able to prove people wrong, it became something I got a lot of self-esteem from and then, inevitably, it became harder and harder to admit when actually I should have listened.

I am not alone in this. If the political debates of the last decade have taught us anything, it is that human beings really don’t like to change their minds once they’ve decided on something. In fact it’s so common that psychologists have come up with a term for it, cognitive dissonance. We might know that we’ve made a mistake but that knowledge is so painful to our ego that we deny it, we find any argument or point of data to prove that we were in the right all along. And then we’re stuck in this place of wrongness and even though we know what we should do to make it right, we can’t.

When I was growing up one of the most used phrases in my household was, “you’ve made your bed so now you’ve got to lie in it.” If I made a decision, particularly a decision that went against what my parents thought I should be doing, then I was on my own with the consequences and there was no backing out. Now, I’m sure if things had been going really badly they would have stepped in to help but that feeling of being on my own with my decisions has lasted into adulthood. Along with the fear that if I change my mind I’m going to be met with an unending chorus of “I told you so” and all the shame that goes with that. So when I think I’ve made a mistake I tend to put my head down and either get on with it or try to find a way to make it good. I rarely ask myself, is this what I really want?

There are very few good associations with changing your mind. We call people flakey or unreliable. They’ve taken away that sense of certainty that we need as human beings and so we shame them for it. We also over-romanticise the idea of keeping going no matter what. We’re brought up on stories of the great adventurers who trudged across continents in the midst of winter, without so much as a coat to protect them and even when they’d lost all of their toes. This level of commitment is all well and good occasionally but we don’t need it in the majority of our life. All the continents have been discovered now, we can take a break.

So I’d like to give changing your mind a bit of a rebrand. In a piece of research done by the Dale Carnegie Training Institute, it was found that the most inspiring thing a leader could do for their team was to admit they’d made a mistake. 81% of employees rated this as their number one required skill in a leader but only 41% of them felt they could rely on their manager to do this. Imagine how it would change your working relationships (and your behaviour at work) if rather than having to cover up when you’d made a mistake or changed your mind on an idea, you could just own it instead?

I’m not suggesting we all embrace Boris Johnson levels of insouciance at our own fuck-ups but rather that we start seeing decisions as data gathering exercises instead of finales. We don’t make one big decision that then determines the course of everything, instead we make moves across the chessboard of life and restrategise as we go. Rather than seeing changing our mind as admitting you’d screwed up, we’d start to see it as simply analysing the data and finding a better path.

And sometimes, we change our mind because we’ve screwed up and that’s ok too. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the past few years is the empowering quality of admitting you were wrong and making amends. Mostly this will be to other people but sometimes it will be to yourself. I went after something and it didn’t work out, I’m sorry, let me do better by myself but listening to my own wisdom and the following it rather than staying in the bad position I got myself into.

I think changing your mind is a beautiful act of self-knowledge. Of course, life is all about balance and if you’re quitting on everything you might want to ask yourself what’s stopping you from seeing anything through to the end, but really changing your mind is about being honest about your own desires and then fully going after them. It’s an act of bravery to admit you got something wrong and you’re now going to do your best to right it. You’re going to choose yourself rather than staying somewhere that makes you miserable. That’s the side of the bed I want to lie on.

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