Changing Your Mind Is A Good Thing

Ok perhaps the headline in this article title isn’t all that provocative or controversial, especially if you’ve read Adam Grant’s “Think Again ” which skillfully outlines the argument in favor of changing and evolving our viewpoints.

But there’s still a lot of cultural ethos around certainty and conviction. Politicians frequently accuse each other of “flip-flopping” which underscores a societal virtue of immovability and consistency of belief.

I’ve taken Q1 this year to decompress from an intense stretch of life and work, and it’s given me an opportunity to reflect on ways I’ve grown or changed.?

What stood out to me is that in nearly every area I’ve made material improvements, my worldview in that area made a dramatic shift?first.

Here’s a few examples of the buckets where my perspective has significantly shifted in the last decade (I’m 40 btw).

• Leadership and managing teams
• Personal relationships: marriage, parenting, friendship
• Faith and spirituality
• Food and nutrition
• Mental health & holistic wellness
• Awareness of social issues and marginalized groups
• Youth sports coaching
• Career/money/investing
• Dogs (my kids can attest to my previous resistance!)

Aside from those areas, and losing my hair, I’m basically the exact same person I was at 30??.

When I saw this Tweet from? Codie A. Sanchez ?I took a little pride in just how cringeworthy I find my old self. Way to go me, I think.?

I feel like my personal growth accelerated in my 30’s to an exponential degree vs my 20’s. My views shifted very little in my 20’s and I had fewer questions and more answers than I do now.?

This is oversimplified, but my mental processing was something like this…

This is a tough model to experience real growth. So?what changed?

Carl Jung talks about the two halves of life , and Richard Rohr in Falling Upward builds on it to suggest that the catalyst is often great suffering. Difficulties and challenges that felt beyond my ability to handle opened my mind to new ways of thinking and seeing the world.

I’d say my framework for growth has evolved to something more like the below…

Suffering

I don’t need to trauma dump here, but like everyone by 40, I’ve been through some stuff. It softens you or it hardens you.

Let's just say having 5 kids in 5 states?has?a way of bringing a person to the fetal position more than thrice. (That's as high as I could count in adverbs...not sure the word for five-ce ??)

Suffering is often the portal we pass through to disabuse ourselves of expertise. As the uber talented Theo Katzman recently sang, “(pain) is the distance from A to B. "

Humility

The challenges I've experienced punctured a hole in any notion I might have had that I have life’s secret sauce.?

I am less dogmatic about my current views on most issues, given the significant changes that occurred in my 30’s. I’m?self aware?that some beliefs I hold now will embarrass me when I’m 50, just not sure which ones yet!

And I’m much more comfortable saying “I don’t know” when something comes up that…well…I don’t know.

Curiosity

Humility drives a snowball effect of curiosity about people, which generates much different questions. Rather than listening for what’s wrong about someone’s viewpoint so I can smugly and safely dispute it in my head and cling to my existing views, I listen more for understanding.

It’s like my brain is now wired to ask “what else am I missing?” because I’ve missed so much previously.

Real Listening

For most mind shifts I’ve made, stories were a more powerful driver of change than just information. That’s not to suggest that our worldview should be based on anecdotes, but hearing a story from a person with a different perspective has often opened a door to challenge my assumptions and research further. Stories are the antidote to polarization!

There have been times where I'm scared to ask the tough question, but I've typically found that if it's approached with sincerity and lack of judgment, most people are willing to share their experience.

I'm better able to sit in discomfort and ambiguity, and don't feel the same urge to offer platitudes to make myself feel better when hearing about someone's pain.

Vulnerability

All of this has led me to a place where I feel I connect more quickly and deeply with people, as I can be open about struggles I’ve had without fearing that it will make me look weak. It simply makes me human.

For?example?with both my work team and my children I’ve been pretty open about my wrestles with anxiety and depression, which gave me a “vulnerability hangover ” the first time I talked about it openly. It felt like a monumental admission at the time, but the 1:1 conversations that flowed afterwards helped me realize it was probably a bit more like admitting that I have hunger.

In 2023 anxiety is unfortunately synonymous with being awake for many of?us?right? (Or being asleep for that matter…thank you anxiety dreams like the one where I'm on stage without lyrics performing a song I've only heard once)

I used to shy away from most things vulnerable, and I still use humor in many ways to deflect and distract myself and others from what's going on inside, but now I embrace a chance to really get to know someone in those real conversations that drill beneath sports, work deadlines, or weather.

Learning and Growth?

While the pattern of growth for me often follows the steps above, it's an imperfect science and a framework I just made up yesterday in Google Slides (loosely based on Think Again). You get what you pay for here on LinkedIn.

Another way I've experienced significant growth is through a variety of therapy modalities to improve my mental health. My wife pushed and encouraged me for years prior to seek help, but I stubbornly thought...

A) I'm not neurodivergent I'm just stressed and busy.

B) I don't have time for therapy. The solution to my constant feeling of time crunch is certainly not to add something else to my plate.

C) I can power through and DIY it. I just gotta do the things. Hit the to do list harder.

There was probably a mixture of pride and shame in there too.

The cognitive distortions I had (like the 3 examples above) are so much clearer to me now, and I wish my current self could talk my younger self through what I was afraid of so I'd seek help sooner.

I can’t adequately articulate the growth and transformation I’ve seen in the ~4 years I’ve been actively pursuing therapy.?I better understand my triggers, my wiring, the thought patterns I've grooved over decades that don't serve me, and I can identify healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms amongst so many other insights.

Doing core values work has also been a game changer for me. It helps me reframe progress instead of getting frustrated by not hitting every lofty goal or expectation I set for myself. It's also been key to help me understand my true anchors and what I intrinsically value, so when my paradigm shatters in an area of life I thought I had a handle on, I can refer back to my values which are more consistent.

In the health and wellness bubble I live in, having a therapist is as common as active wear in public. But if it’s still stigmatized in your circle, just call it a performance coach and give it a try! You might be surprised, like I was, how much soul expansion can come and the ripple effect it can have on work, relationships, health, etc.

Final Summary

I’ll wrap this up by saying that if you are experiencing cognitive dissonance in multiple areas of your life, you’re not taking crazy pills. You’re just growing! Sometimes it’s painful and it just sucks. It’s so much easier to be comfortable and to cling to familiar mental patterns. It is much, much harder to question.

If you buy the happiness curve research, the pressures and stresses of mid-career are pretty universally taxing, and it's normal to feel a bit drawn and quartered by conflicting priorities.

But if you give yourself a little grace, open yourself up to learn, to reconsider, to listen, to explore new ideas, and to truly see people and share deeper parts of yourself, the learning that can begin to flow is quite remarkable.

Here’s to reading this in 2033 and cringing a bit.????