Change Your Mind More

When was the last time you changed your mind about something important? I’m not talking about crowning a new favorite restaurant or deciding that you are “officially done with shorts”. I’m talking about making a purposeful, meaningful change to what you believe about something that made a big impact on your life.

If nothing springs to mind after a few minutes of thought, you are like most people in that you rarely, if ever, change your mind about matters of consequence. You are also probably making one of two large mistakes:

#1. Assuming you’re infallible and that you know everything there is to know about everything. Mistakes are for suckers. Every decision you’ve made has been the right one. Except for very few people (the majority of whom are politicians), this mindset is rare because it’s plainly insane.

#2. Failing to seek out new information and different viewpoints or not considering novel material with an open mind. This is much more common and it’s because once you make up your mind about a topic, contradictory evidence essentially becomes meaningless.

Here’s how it works:
You form an opinion based on something flimsy. Maybe it’s something your parents believed when you were a kid or something your favorite celebrity seems to feel strongly about. Often it’s just because it “feels right” to your gut. Once you’ve made up your mind, your brain goes into hyper-drive looking strictly for confirming evidence and purposefully ignores anything that conflicts with the favored narrative.

This seems like a crazy way to behave but we all do it almost all the time. The culprit is our egos. Changing our minds, especially about something important, means admitting that we weren’t 100% correct in the first place. And there is nothing our egos hate more than admitting we were wrong. The actual beliefs themselves aren’t really that important to us but the threat to our self-esteem locks us down from the neck up.

Have you ever been 100% certain that if person X would just stop being so stubborn and change their mind about Y, everyone would be better off, including person X him/herself?!?

You know what? You’re absolutely right!!! It would have been better for everyone if they changed their mind.

But guess what? Right this minute, someone is saying the exact same thing about YOU changing YOUR mind and I hate to break it you…but they are right, too! There is something big that you’ve got ass-backwards. Maybe it was true (ass-forwards?) at some point but not anymore. And you never updated your thinking so now, unfortunately, you’re full of it.

Think about it logically: The only way it could possibly be true that you don’t need to change your mind about anything is if you were 100% correct up to this point in your life AND both you and the world have completely ceased changing since the moment you gained the power of conscious thought.

If you agree that some mental sprucing up is in order, pick one of the following three categories and commit to changing your mind about something that matters:

Change your mind about part of your identity

As I learned from my summer squash epiphany, if you examine the various parts of your identity, you will almost certainly find several ways you’ve defined yourself that are harmful to your ongoing growth as a human being. These types of beliefs are vicious, self-fulfilling prophecies. There may not have been any substance to begin with but by internalizing the beliefs and behaving accordingly, you start to develop the negative traits. Often the original belief grows out of a minor incident during childhood.

The first girl you ask out on a date turns you down and BAM! Girls aren’t interested in you.

Your first attempt at scrambled eggs crashes and burns and POW! You are a shitty cook for life.

Your third grade art teacher giggles at your clay pencil container and WHOO-PAH! Better major in accounting, you uncreative bastard!

So how do you attack this? The process is simple but not necessarily easy.

First, identify the opposite of the limiting belief.

Then, ask yourself “How would someone who had this particular strength or trait behave?”

Last, establish that behavior as a new habit or set of habits. Start acting your way into a new way of thinking.

Change your mind about someone or a group of people you’ve written off

“He’s an asshole.”

“She can’t be trusted.”

“They don’t care about anyone but themselves.”

Everyone makes these definitive judgments about other people. During a heated argument, it can be crystal clear that the other person is in the wrong, acting out of purely selfish motives, or completely unwilling to listen to reason.

But maybe there is a situation for which as time passes, you’ve seen that your role in the fight was a little larger than you initially thought. Or maybe now it’s a little easier to put yourself in their shoes and consider the possibility that if you grew up the same way, you would have said or done the same thing.

If you believe that you can change part of your identity that has been weighing you down for years, isn’t it also reasonable to think that there are people you’ve given up on who are now different than they were when you kicked them to the curb?

Challenge yourself to honestly consider whether you may have rushed to judgment and if you decide you did, be a grown-up and reach out.

Change your mind about how the world works

If there is one thing I’ve learned about politics in American society, it’s that everyone generally agrees about the proper role of government and trusts that the other side ultimately has their best interests at heart.

Oops, sorry about that! I accidentally copied and pasted a sentence from my half-finished science fiction novella set in an alternate universe where everything is the polar opposite from real life (working title: What Goes Up, Just Kind Of Hangs Out Up There).

One of the main reasons we disagree so vigorously about politics is because we have different core beliefs about how the world works. Human nature. What motivates people. The Government should be smaller. The Government should do more to solve problems. These are big, complex topics and if you and I disagree about the principles behind them, we are going to react to identical situations in completely different ways.

Here is a fantastic exercise even if it doesn’t change your mind one iota:

Pick a topic you feel strongly about and find a friend who feels just as strongly but has the opposite belief. Choose someone who you have a strong relationship with but who you also wouldn’t mind seeing crumble under the weight of your rhetorical might. Now challenge him/her to a Twilight Zone Debate in one month. You each have 30 days to assemble as convincing an argument as possible for the other person’s side of the argument.

Don’t just visit a few lame websites, seek out a wide variety of input. Listen to podcasts. Watch a documentary. Read a chapter or a book written by a leading scholar on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

At month end, go out to dinner or to a bar and face-off. Each person tries their hardest to poke holes in the other’s logic and sell them on their newly adopted viewpoint. Bonus points if you engage bystanders and convince them that you are a true believer.

The bottom line is that genuine behavior change as an adult is super fucking hard. To be sustainable, it has to grow from a change in your mindset. Be bold and prove to yourself that you can change your mind about something that matters. Then do it again. And again.