You are allowed to change your mind.

There are sentences we say at some point with a surprising amount of certainty.

“I would never do that.” Or: “That is simply how I see it.” Maybe even: “I am just not that kind of person.”

Then a few years pass. We experience something, meet someone, make a mistake, learn something new – and suddenly the old sentence no longer fits quite as well.

That should actually be completely normal.

And yet changing our mind can feel surprisingly difficult.

Because we do not want to look inconsistent

When we have held a view for a long time, it starts to feel like a small part of who we are.

Other people know our position. Perhaps we have argued about it. Perhaps we have confidently explained why we were right.

And then we are supposed to say:

“I see it differently today.”

That can feel as if we are admitting failure or losing face.

But a new opinion is not automatically proof that the old one was foolish.

Thinking differently today does not automatically mean you were wrong yesterday. Maybe you simply know more now.

der uNi

We decide with the knowledge we have at the time

I sometimes forget that myself.

A decision always grows out of a particular moment.

From the knowledge, experience, possibilities and perhaps fears we have at that exact time.

Five years later, all of those things may look completely different.

Why should our thinking have to remain exactly the same?

After all, we would not expect a twenty-year-old city map to know every new road.

Changing your mind does not mean giving in on everything

Of course this is not about claiming something different every morning simply because somebody disagrees loudly enough.

There are values, beliefs and boundaries that can stay with us for a long time.

But there is a difference between being steady and being rigid.

Being steady can also mean honestly checking whether what I am holding onto still fits who I am and what I know today.

Sometimes defending an old opinion is actually easier than changing it.

Because changing it may require a small sentence that can take quite a lot of courage:

“I have learned something since then.”

New information is allowed to change something

It would be strange if it did not.

We read. We travel. We meet people whose experiences are completely different from ours. We try things we once avoided.

Some ideas survive that.

Others do not.

And there is something good in that.

If we were never allowed to change our mind, learning would eventually become nothing more than collecting reasons for what we already believe.

Plans are allowed to change too

This is not only about big opinions about the world.

We also hold onto old sentences in our personal lives:

“But this is what I always wanted.”

Maybe that is no longer true today.

A career plan can change. A project can stop fitting. A goal we chased for years can lose its importance.

That does not make the time before it worthless.

Perhaps it brought us exactly to the point where we were able to see something new.

We do not have to defend our past forever

Perhaps that is the thought I want to keep.

I do not have to defend every old statement forever just so my life looks perfectly consistent from the outside.

People are allowed to develop.

They can try something and later say: that was not for me after all.

They can reject something and become curious about it years later.

And sometimes they may even discover that somebody else had a point they once refused to hear.

That is not necessarily weakness.

Sometimes it is simply movement.

What is something you have changed your mind about in the last few years?

Marco, der uNi