You Have The Right To Change Your Mind, You Have The Right To Grow

Changing your mind at any given moment is not moving away from our essences. It is realizing that people we trust are not to be trusted, it is assuming that a path that we thought was correct was not so correct, and above all, knowing how to advance with greater perspective and maturity. Therefore, let’s not forget that we all have that valuable right, to change in order to grow.

As curious as it may seem, in our day to day there is no shortage of those who see with skeptical eyes that at any given moment, we act or think differently. Something like this tends to surprise our family members, upset our partners or disturb friends. But how is it that now you like “green” if before you were passionate about the color “blue”?

Indeed, it is. Now we prefer the color green or red or cobalt, because suddenly we have realized that in life there are more colors than we have been taught. Now, we have also discovered that there are shades that favor us much more, that there are flavors that awaken our senses  and that there are more motivating and enriching smells, corners and settings.

Changing your mind at any given moment is not sacrilege, nor does it make us fickle or changeable. Moreover, those people capable of opening their minds, of being receptive to other stimuli and who are also open to change when they believe it or consider it, are highly competent profiles in their own personal growth.

People with an open mind are not afraid to change their minds

People who change their minds lightly and for no reason make us mistrust. This fact is something obvious, because it is not easy to live with someone who today tells us one thing and then does another, with whom today defends a series of values ​​at all costs and tomorrow rejects them and opts for completely opposite ones. Now, it is not this type of behavioral dynamics that we are talking about.

We refer above all to that capacity that we should all practice: that of change focused on facilitating human development. Thus, being able to change our opinion on a subject, on a behavior or on the conception that we have of a specific person, is often like that starting line with which to facilitate our best progress, our only opportunity to assume other perspectives and more useful approaches.

In the  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,  social psychologists Ian Handley and Dolores Albar published an interesting study a few years ago on our resistance to changing attitudes. According to this work, there is a central fact that is still incredibly revealing: people with good self-esteem and who feel good about themselves have a more open mind and are much more receptive to change. What’s more, they are not afraid to change their minds at any given moment and to make it clear why they are doing it.

Heuristics that act as our inner voice

This data is also related to what other psychologists, Melissa Finucane and Paul Slovic, labeled under the term “affective heuristics.” In other words, those profiles with a more flexible and open-to-experience approach to life tend to make their decisions based on mental shortcuts that draw directly from their emotions, or rather “from their instincts”.

Their filming in terms of self-knowledge is so competent that they have a “detector” (or an inner voice) capable of letting them know when certain things cease to agree, or when certain ideals, companies or concepts must be discarded because they cause dissonance, dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

For their part, people who are most reluctant to change their opinion or attitude use more sophisticated but less emotional heuristics. Only then do they manage to put up walls to invalidate in a thousand possible ways everything that dares to challenge their preconceptions.

You have the right to change your mind

You have the right to change your mind, to stop feeling admiration for someone without making you feel bad. You have it, you have the right to now like that discipline, that hobby or that area of ​​knowledge that you used to criticize simply, because you had not had the courage to approach it to discover everything it could offer you.

Sometimes, to change your mind is to grow, it is to allow us to open new doors by closing others before us to move forward with greater competence and security. And none of that is bad or makes us worse people, quite the opposite.

Now, in each of these steps there is a fact that we cannot ignore.

Whoever changes his mind about something or someone is because he has previously done a self-reflection exercise. It is because he has allowed himself to make use of those aforementioned affective heuristics to remember where his essences are, what his instinct says as well as his emotional needs.

No one should therefore make light changes or change their mind just on a whim. It must be done with certainty, with the certainty and security that there are things that should no longer be defended because there are more valid and enriching options.

Let’s think about it and stop being so afraid of changes, small or big.