"Changing your mind is not failure. It is proof you were paying attention to new information and cared enough to choose again."
Have you ever stayed in a situation too long just because you didn’t want to look inconsistent?
There is a lot of pressure to stick with what you said you wanted – the career you chose at 19, the relationship you tried to make work, the identity you announced when you had less information. Somewhere along the way, changing your mind started to feel like admitting defeat. Yet the truth is the opposite. Changing your mind is often the clearest evidence that you were paying attention, learning, and caring enough to choose again.
When you receive new information – about a person’s behavior, how a job really feels in your body, or what your nervous system can handle – staying rigid is not loyalty. It is self-abandonment. Growth will ask you to pivot, to update your choices, and sometimes to walk away from what once made perfect sense. That does not mean the past version of you was wrong. It means that version of you could not see what you see now.
Think about how strange it would be if you still held every belief you had ten years ago. You would call that being stuck, not being stable. The same is true for your relationships, routines, and self-story. As you gather more lived experience, what fits you will naturally change. Giving yourself permission to adjust course is not flakiness. It is emotional intelligence. It is you honoring the latest, most honest data about what actually supports your wellbeing.
You are allowed to outgrow dreams that no longer feel like yours. You are allowed to end relationships when respect and safety are missing. You are allowed to say, “This made sense for me then. It does not anymore.” The people who benefit from your staying the same may call it quitting. In reality, it is you choosing accuracy over appearance.
