Why Changing Your Beliefs Isn’t Bad

Welcome back to Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration! Contrary to what I wish I had been doing for the last three weeks, I was in fact moving. The reason for moving, that we bought our first house together, was very exciting. The actual act of moving however, was not.

Being a person that looks for a life lesson in everything that happens, however, I did have the opportunity to learn the following:

• Labeling saves lives. And knees. And sanity.
• When it comes to packing: start early, and do it often.
• You don’t really need that five year old package of rice you found in the cupboard. Or that t-shirt you haven’t worn in years, or that bottle of nail polish you used once and never again. Moving is a great opportunity to purge.
• Moving when you’re middle-aged is a very different proposition than moving when you’re in your twenties. You just have more stuff. And less energy. And more breakable parts. Plan accordingly.
• Speaking of plans, have one.
• If you have the option, choose a time when there is not a worldwide pandemic happening.

Getting On With It

Bitterness aside, I tried to pay attention to local and national news as all this was going on. COVID-19, protests, Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, police brutality… Basically it felt like the world was starting to come to an end. Truly, it felt a little like the beginning of the End Times. For me, anyway.

One thing that was super uncomfortable for me over the last few weeks (aside from my aching, aging knees) was this “all lives matter” thing.

I used to be an All Lives Matter person. I felt as if someone saying that Black Lives Matter meant no other lives matter, or that other lives don’t matter as much.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve changed my mind. I’ll talk more about why, and how, in the podcast later this week. But today, I want to focus on the basic idea of changing your mind (about anything), why it’s important, and why we shouldn’t be afraid of it.

The Magic, Elastic, Plastic Brain

From the time we’re born to the time we die, we are having experiences. Those experiences help shape our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. I believed that “all lives matter”, that we shouldn’t “see colors”, or talk about race. I believed that as a white person, I couldn’t discuss racial injustice, because what did I know about it?

These were beliefs I developed over time. Starting from the time I was a kid and first introduced to the “be colorblind” idea, to when I got older and developed a fear of mentioning race in case I was perceived as racist, or presumptuous: these beliefs were a product of my experiences throughout my life.

These kinds of long-held beliefs can cause knee-jerk, gut reactions that are almost instinctual. They are not always helpful, however. And adhering to them even in the face of overwhelming opposing evidence and information may keep us stagnant and prevent us from growing as individuals.

Neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, is the brain’s ability to change and adapt as a result of experience. Over the last few weeks, I was presented with an overwhelming amount of new ideas, concepts, opinions, and information that conflicted with what I had always believed. Taking new information and using it to develop new opinions, thoughts, and beliefs is a way of leveraging your brain’s amazing capacity for growth, change, and resiliency.

By using our neuroplasticity to our advantage, we can change our beliefs.

Seek Out and Embrace New Information

As I talked about in the past, learning new skills is possible. In fact, learning new skills increases the plasticity of your magic brain. The same is true for learning things that may change your perspective or your point of view.

When you don’t know how to do something you want to try, maybe you read a book, or watch a YouTube, or look up a tutorial on Pinterest, or Google it. If we apply that same concept to learning about uncomfortable things, things that conflict with what we’ve always believed, we are opening the door to new ideas, new perspectives, and new points of view.

You can learn about something that changes the way you think in the same way you learn how to fold a fitted sheet, or how to build a doghouse, or how to double-crochet. You go out and find resources, talk to people that know more about it than you do, and be open to learning new things.

Identity Fluidity

I think sometimes, at least for me, the idea of changing my beliefs or opinions is very uncomfortable. There is the sense that reversing your opinion is an open admission that you were wrong. There’s an implication for the ego, that admitting you were wrong, or even suspecting that you’re wrong, is somehow a character flaw or something bad. There’s also a sense that changing what you believe changes who you are – and there is a fear that can come along with what could be considered a “loss of self”.

A while back I reviewed Atomic Habits, by James Clear. This book is about our habits and how to develop good habits and make them stick. There was also a section about identity, and how it relates to our behavior.

In it, Mr. Clear writes, “The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first. Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously). To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself.”

While this is in relation to building long-lasting habits, what I found interesting is that he takes it as fact that our identities are not set in stone. Rather than our beliefs being derived from who we are, he says that our identity is a product of what we believe about ourselves at any given time. If that is true, then changing our beliefs will change who we are. And that is a good thing, because it means we’re growing and changing and not going stale and stagnant.

Changing your perspective, opinion, thoughts, or beliefs based on new information is not traitorous. It’s not hypocritical. Changing your mind is not a betrayal of who you are. It’s an expression of one of the most fundamental and amazing parts of being a living being: the ability to take new information, learn from it, and become something (or someone) different.

On the Path to Becoming Better

If we’re going to become better humans, we have to be willing to examine our belief systems, to think critically about why we think the way we do, why we believe the things we believe. We have to be open to the idea that we might be wrong, or that we may no longer believe what we always advocated for. We have to be willing to change. And we have to do that in order to grow.

Over To You

What’s something that makes you uncomfortable when you think about changing a belief or opinion? What about it makes you uncomfortable?