A Willingness To Change What You Think

Think back to the last time you had a conversation with someone who was close-minded. I bet that no matter what was said to them, they created a version of it that served their understanding and reinforced their viewpoint.  

Or how about someone that you convinced way too easily? Where you expected pushback but they didn’t give any, or you had an argument prepared but it wasn’t needed. Almost like someone was too easily persuaded by what you have to say.

Our belief system is basically our mental model for how the world works, what our preferences are, and what we believe to be true. It has been formulated over the course of our entire lives and is based on the things we learn and experience. When we receive new information, our mind naturally seeks to put new information into the mental models we already have in place. We defend our understanding until we have reason to believe otherwise, and different people allow their beliefs to change or shift at different thresholds.  This explains the natural variation that exists, and it comes down to two things: 

The first is how certain you are about something. If you confidently know something to be true, then there’s more resistance to that belief being changed. For example it’ll be hard for someone to convince you that the sky is green and plants are blue when you’ve know the opposite to be true your entire life.

The second is more mosaic, which relates back to how willing someone is to change what they think. This is a comprehensive metric. It involves ego, insecurity, personality type, and consciousness. All of these factors combine dynamically to output some way of being, which serves as the way a person expresses open-mindedness as a quality. Someone who knows less can be more resistant to changing their opinion than someone who knows way more. 

What I want to highlight is the role consciousness plays in it. You can choose to be more open-minded, receptive, and collaborative. In fact it’s generally positive to be the type of person who’s willing to change their mind, admit a mistake, or say they don’t know something. Yet it’s hard to do, and that’s because the ego actively tries to create independence and separation from others.

But you can overcome unconscious needs or insecurities with consciousness. When you feel like your authority is being challenged, switch into an intention to ‘get it right’ rather than ‘be right’. When you feel emotionally triggered by something or someone, explore the circumstances with curiosity rather than with judgment.  The more you can build the muscle of pointing your thoughts in the direction of ‘How might this be true’ versus ‘This can’t be true’, the more you allow yourself to see evidence for it as a possibility.

That’s what helps you put your guard down, be okay being wrong, and more willing to change what you think. And what I’ve found in my own experience, when I’m more receptive, collaborative, and open-minded, it has served me.