Somewhere along the way, you said yes. Yes to a career, a city, a belief, a person, a version of yourself. And then you kept saying it long after it stopped being true, because changing your answer felt like admitting the first one was a lie.
It wasn't. This week's permission: you're allowed to change your mind.
Here's a scenario I see in some form again and again, a composite rather than any one person. Someone spends their twenties building toward a goal and telling everyone about it. The title, the firm, the plan. They hit the milestones. Around year ten, they notice the dread on Sunday nights isn't about workload anymore. They don't want it. But they've said it out loud so many times, to family, to friends, to themselves, that the wanting has hardened into an identity. So they do what high performers are trained to do: push harder, because quitting a stated goal reads as failure.
What they're missing is that the original decision and the current one are made by two different people with two different sets of information. The 25-year-old chose with what she knew. The 35-year-old knows more about the work, about her body, about what actually feels like a life. Updating isn't inconsistency. It's what learning looks like.
We treat consistency as a virtue in itself. In my office, and honestly at my own kitchen table, I see how often it's fear wearing a virtue's clothes. We stay in a belief, a job, a friendship, or a way of seeing ourselves because the cost of revising is social. What will people think? What does this say about all the years I held the old view? I've changed my mind about big things, and I wrote a memoir about one of them. The hardest part was never the new decision. It was the story I'd have to retell about the old one.
That's what we get into on this episode: how growth and new information can reshape what you believe without making you inauthentic, and how that plays out where changing your mind feels most loaded, like parenting, relationships, faith, and career. Faith is a good example. Revising how you relate to something sacred doesn't mean the earlier relationship was empty. It can mean it was a stage.
A few things to hold onto.
Changing your mind is not the same as being flaky. Flakiness reacts to discomfort in the moment. Revising a belief happens after months or years of evidence that the old answer no longer fits. One avoids a feeling. The other responds to the facts of your life.
You don't owe anyone a defense of your past self. You can say "that made sense then, and it doesn't now" and leave it there. You can honor who you were without staying loyal to every decision they made.
Lag is normal. Often the body knows first: the tension, the avoidance, the long exhale when you imagine saying no. The mind catches up later with the justification. You don't need a perfect argument before you let yourself notice what you already know.
Your Permission Slip
Take a piece of paper and finish this sentence three times: "I'm allowed to change my mind about ___." Don't edit. Then sign it. Small, physical rituals land with the nervous system in a way that good intentions don't.
Three Questions to Sit With
What is one thing you're still doing mainly because you said you would, not because you still want to?
Who are you afraid will read your change as proof you were wrong before, and is that fear about them, or about you?
If you trusted that the person you are now is better informed than the person who decided, what would you do this week?
Want the full conversation? Listen to Permission The Podcast, S2 Ep 71, "The Changing Mind," on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube.
New episodes of Permission the Podcast drop every Tuesday — listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.
If any of this resonates and you're ready to talk it through, you can book a consultation with Dr. T here.
This post is for reflection and education. It is not psychological treatment or a substitute for working with a licensed professional.