It’s OK to change your mind

Yesterday I wrote a post about the importance of having a set of nice professional portrait shots to hand. This was off the back of me needing to take a desperate bathroom selfie in order to meet a deadline to submit one. I realised, despite how silly it seemed, it genuinely was a useful piece of advice.

The thought stayed with me, and had me revisit some other amusing stories over the years which have ended up in the ‘lessons learned’ category. You know, all the stuff you can only truly understand from experience but still think if you’d been told first it may have been useful.

So for today I thought I’d touch on another that has become more important for me to remember as I’ve gotten older:

It’s OK to change your mind.

Whether it’s biological, psychological, or some other ‘ogical’, it seems we think the decisions we make last forever. It’s as if someone once said there’s a permanence to everything we do. In reality, that’s so far from the truth.

When I was at univeristy, I studied Graphic Design. As a degree, that has a 90% chance of you becoming a mac-op in a design studio. And that’s not a bad job by any stretch of the imagination, but about six months out from graduating I started to realise it wasn’t what I wanted.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had this with my tertiary education either. The Graphic Design degree was actually the second course I started. Before that I was enrolled into an Arts degree in a different city which I’d decided to discontinue to focus on Graphics.

When I changed my mind for the first time, I felt like I’d wasted a year. I was cross with myself for having made a decision that didn’t turn out to be the right thing. Not to mention sinking a few grand into a student loan while I was at it.

When I changed my mind for the second time (albeit I did finish my degree) I really started to question what my problem was. All up I had spent four years studying disciplines that I ultimately didn’t want to use. And I hit a bit of a rut.

Looking back, that was so the wrong way to think about it. If anything, the ability to identify what I was doing wasn’t something I was into in the long run, and make an early pivot, was far preferable. Especially when you consider the alternative was to think I’d committed four years to something and therefore needed to stick it out for the rest of my life.

But the scary thing is, a lot of us do think that way. A lot of us feel that certain decisions lock us to a certain path. And it’s simply not true.

Even on a smaller scale, we need to know it’s ok to change our minds.

As humans, by default of getting older and having new experiences, our perspectives change; it’s only natural that our opinions would too.

I was talking to a friend about this with regard to changing surnames when getting married. Right now I don’t think I’ll change mine but also said that if a few years down the track it feels right, I might do it then.

My friend was surprised by this, largely because so few people switch course on this kind. And for that exact reason, it couldn’t have been a better example of my point.

We think that decisions are permanent, but we need to be more flexible and adapt the way we think as our thinking changes.

Someone looking to critique this could say it’s classic millennial; always looking to satisfy an immediate want. And perhaps down one end of the spectrum it is. However, when you really look at what changing your mind represents, it’s quite simply being more true to what is going to give you greater happiness and satisfaction from your work, life, social decisions, and so on.

Which, when you consider that we aren’t around forever, seems to make a lot more sense than sticking something out just because we thought we ‘should’.