When’s the last time you changed your mind — and heart — about something really important?
Were you eager to tell your friends that you had been wrong before and you’d seen the light? Or were you hesitant to let people know? Were you sheepish about telling people that you had abandoned what you had believed was true? Did you struggle to explain how you could have believed one thing and then abandoned that faith or belief or person for something entirely different?
If you’re anything like me, you experience some internal discomfort — a sense of cognitive dissonance — about having to make major internal changes. There’s something in us that wants to be consistent with what we’ve said and done in the past.
And that ego-driven desire to be consistent with our past errors frequently keeps us stuck with our mistakes. It turns out that any serious positive growth in our lives is blocked until we can cast aside our old errors and admit our past choices were wrong. That is incredibly difficult for some people.
In praise of the weirdos who most people don’t really seem to like
I’ll never really know my mother and I’m envious of those who do
Freedom matters more than safety, even if you can’t see that
Briefly: Comic perfectly captured what I wrote about this weekend
We can’t really change people, even if they offer us the control
‘Do you want to sell sugar water … or do you want to change the world?’
If you allow anything to be priority over love and beauty, you’re a fool
We can’t defeat the existing system; we must build a better one instead
Radical Muslim effort to stop speech points to risks of multiculturalism