Permission to Change Your Mind

Decisiveness can be a useful character trait in a lot of situations. We’re each faced with hundreds of decisions on a daily basis, so being able to quickly sift through options and take action saves us a lot of time and energy. However, decisiveness can also hold us back from self care, gentleness, and listening to our needs when we forget that decisions don’t have to be set in stone.

Maybe you’re totally fine with changing your mind or canceling plans. Maybe it’s easy for you to navigate life making adjustments based on the ebb and flow you’re presented with. On the other hand, maybe making the “right” decision, avoiding “disappointing people,” and feeling like a failure when you can’t meet your own expectations are all an ongoing, often overwhelming struggle. If you’re in the latter category, this one goes out to you.

We get a lot of cultural messaging that encourages decisiveness and treats indecision like a failing. We get hard or down on ourselves in situations when we struggle to make up our minds (which generally doesn’t help matters). We stress ourselves out about “being flaky” for not following through on plans. We worry about what other people will think if we don’t do this or that or the other thing. And, all too often, we push ourselves to power through “because we said we would” and forget to listen to the little voice inside that’s telling us that’s not what we actually want or need. This happens in small decisions (going out when we’d rather stay in) and big ones (leaving a job or relationship that’s no longer the right fit).

Cut Yourself Some Slack

Changing our minds can be hard because it can feel like admitting we were wrong – and most of us don’t especially like being wrong. We don’t want to feel like the past version of ourselves didn’t know what they were doing, or that we made a mistake. So, we get caught up in the pride trap and feel like we have to stick with our decisions in order to maintain face. And that totally makes sense! (Even if it isn’t very helpful.)

Most of us very understandably prefer to move through the world with the confidence that we DO know what we’re doing. It’s vital to feel like we can trust ourselves to make the “right” decisions. 

And we can! We can absolutely know what we’re doing at any given moment, and trust ourselves, and ALSO give ourselves some fucking grace when it comes to changing our minds. We just have to free ourselves from the jaws of pride and give ourselves the permission we deserve.

The Humility of Changing Your Mind

During a rather drawn out but kind and compassionate break up, an ex pointed out to me that he respected me for having the humility to change my mind. I didn’t really understand what that meant at first, but I’ve had enough time to reflect on it to see the truth in that idea. 

We talk a lot about humility in recovery – how important it is to practice humility and stay “right sized.” To remember that we’re not better than or less than anyone else, and that we also aren’t in charge of basically anything other than how we react to the world around us. It’s an important and useful concept, and it’s one that usually takes a lot of practice to sink in. But I hadn’t really ever thought about how it applies to changing one’s mind.

Humility means “freedom from pride or arrogance.” And I really like that definition. When I can free myself from the burdens of my own pride (or ego), I can move through the world with a lot more ease, and a lot more grace for myself and others. 

Giving myself the permission to change my mind does entail humility; it’s an act of liberation from feeling like I have to be right all the time, that I have to be perfect, that I have to have it all figured out in every moment.

It’s all about balance, y’all. And I think the journey of life and adulting and self-love is all about finding our way to good enough. Honoring my commitments is important. Doing shit I don’t want to do is a necessary part of taking good care of myself and healing and practicing healthy boundaries. And… self-compassion and self-love are also built through giving myself a break when I need one. 

Aiming for perfection just leaves us perpetually falling short. When we set the bar at a reasonable height, we’re a lot more likely to feel okay in our own skin on a daily basis. And a reasonable expectation for ourselves is that what we think we want to or can show up for on any given day may very well change tomorrow.

Making Plans is Trying to Predict the Future

I just had yet another conversation where my best friend helped me give myself permission to cancel plans. With more frequency than I’d prefer, I find myself in a position where I don’t have the emotional/mental/physical bandwidth to do all the things I want to do. And that means I have to cancel plans. And that often feels like a failing – like I’m not only letting other people down, but I’m also letting myself down. Because I said I would do the thing! I (usually) even wanted to do the thing when I agreed to it! So changing my mind, canceling the plan, feels like a personal failure. 

But a big part of emotional maturity and self-compassion is cultivating the capacity to stop beating myself up for those kinds of “failures.” I can’t always accurately predict my emotional bandwidth. That’s partly due to my ADHD and various other neuro-spicy aspects of being me, but mostly it’s because I’m not a fortune teller! 

News flash: trying to gauge how we’re going to feel in a few days or weeks or months is fortune-telling, soothsaying, divination. It’s the same as trying to predict the weather – we just think we’re supposed to be able to make predictions with greater accuracy because we like to pretend that we have some control or greater insight into our own capacities.

Sure, there are routines we can practice, healthy habits we can engage in, calendar apps we can use that show us how much of our time we’re “spending” in particular places. But none of that actually gives us crystal clear accuracy for predicting the fucking future!

Given the information we have today, we make decisions about tomorrow or next week or next month. And we hope that our future forecasting works out the way we want it to. But it’s good to remember that all of that planning is just putting our chips on red and hoping the roulette wheel of life cooperates. 

When it doesn’t, though, all there is to do is learn to be nice to ourselves (and others) about it.

The World Changes and So Do We

Nothing stays static, not really. The flow of time and seasons continues, and shit inevitably changes. This happens on the daily, micro level, but it happens on the long term, macro level, too.

I’ve largely been talking about changing our minds in smaller ways – not being able to show up to an event, realizing we need to cut back on various activities, or rescheduling things with friends. But changing our minds also happens on the larger scale: in relationships, in careers, in who we discover we are as we age. 

What we want when we’re in our twenties is generally pretty different from what we want in our thirties and forties and beyond. And it can be hard to navigate those changes if we don’t acknowledge them as changes. We outgrow jobs, sometimes we outgrow relationships. And all too often, we stay stuck because of all the stories we tell ourselves about how things are “supposed” to be.

When we start a relationship or take a job, it’s (hopefully) because it’s a good fit for who and where we are in our lives at the time. Strong relationships grow and expand and change together. Good jobs similarly provide us with opportunities for growth and development. But in both cases, we can’t really know if it’s a good fit, if it’s what we actually want until we try it on for a while.

We can’t know if someone is right for us without getting to know them and discovering who we both are in a relationship. We can’t know if a job is a good fit without taking it and learning the ropes. The only way to learn if something is right for us is to try it, but we have to give ourselves the grace to change our minds when it’s not. And, in break ups, to try not to take it personally if the other person discovers it isn’t a good fit for them. 

That’s the start of a whole other post. But for the moment, I just want to leave you with the gentle reminder that you’re allowed to change your mind. That your wants and needs matter. That change is inevitable and okay, and taking good care of yourself means listening to what your heart and body are telling you. If you need it, consider this your permission slip.