There’s a particular kind of stubbornness I’ve carried most of my adult life — not the loud, fist-on-the-table kind, but the quiet, dignified kind that disguises itself as conviction. I used to hold positions the way some people hold umbrellas: gripped tight, pointed forward, certain they were prepared for whatever came.
Then I changed my mind about something significant — a pastoral approach I’d defended for years — and the world did not end. What ended, slowly and with some grief, was a version of myself I hadn’t realized I was protecting.
We don’t talk enough about how much ego is tangled up in our opinions. Not ego in the crude sense, but the quieter kind: the identity we’ve constructed around being the person who thinks this, believes that, leads this way. To change your mind is to admit that the person you were last year — or last decade — was working with incomplete information. That’s uncomfortable. It feels less like growth and more like concession.
I think that’s why so many leaders — in churches, in organizations, in families — dig in long after the evidence has shifted. It’s not that they can’t see the new information. It’s that updating their position requires them to grieve the old one. And grief takes time that urgency rarely permits.
What I’ve noticed, though, is that the leaders I most respect are not the ones who never waver. They’re the ones who change their minds thoughtfully — who can say, with some grace, “I held that view sincerely, and I hold this one more sincerely now.” There’s a distinction between a person who flips with every wind and a person who grows. The difference, I think, is the willingness to explain the journey. Not defensively, not with excessive apology, but honestly.
A mentor of mine — a quietly remarkable woman who led a nonprofit for many years — once told me that she kept a journal of things she’d been wrong about. Not as penance, but as a record of her own education. I thought about that for weeks.
I’ve started to think that changing your mind is actually a form of faithfulness — faithfulness to truth over reputation, to growth over consistency, to the person you’re becoming rather than the one you’ve already introduced yourself as.
It’s still uncomfortable. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I’ve stopped mistaking that discomfort for a warning sign. Sometimes it’s just the feeling of a door opening.