The Power of Changing Your Mind

Summary

Emma explores the transformative power of changing your mind, neuroplasticity, and how to develop this crucial skill to adapt, grow, and live a more authentic life. She shares personal insights, scientific concepts, and practical frameworks to help listeners embrace flexibility and resilience.


Key  topics

The importance of neuroplasticity in personal growth
Changing beliefs about helping and success
The neurobiology of resistance to change
Reframing the narrative around flexibility and open-mindedness
The impact of identity on the ability to change
Building capacity to handle discomfort during change
Design thinking applied to life and career
Challenging inherited blueprints for a sustainable life


Take aways

Changing your mind is a skill, not a failure.
Neurobiology makes change uncomfortable but possible.
Resistance to change is rooted in evolution and identity.
Practicing change increases capacity and resilience.
Questioning inherited beliefs is essential for growth.


Notable quotes

"Your brain is a prediction machine."
"Your brain uses evidence to predict your identity."
"Changing your mind can feel like ripping the rug out."


Chapters

00:00 The Art of Changing Your Mind
02:16 Understanding the Role of Helpers
05:42 The Skill of Flexibility
10:17 Navigating Neurobiology and Resistance
13:31 Revising the Inherited Blueprint

resources

The Phoenix Blueprint by Emma Jones
Emma Jones  on Instagram

Neuroplasticity Explained - TED Talk  by Lara Boyd

Get in touch with Emma

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ejones_md/

Website https://www.emmajonesmd.com/

Subscribe the the Self Trust Newsletter

https://www.emmajonesmd.com/newsletters/self-trust-newsletter/subscribe

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:18

I've had to change my mind in some really big ways. And I think that the skill of changing your mind is one of the coolest things that a human being can have. I have a very popular Instagram video that talks about it as a sign of high intelligence. And this podcast is all about how to change your mind. What does it mean? The biggest thing I've ever had to change my mind about was what it meant to be a helper. For years, I thought helping meant doing everything for everyone. And that turned out to be completely wrong in ways that we will unpack over the course of this season. But when I started to have to think about changing my mind about that, that made me think about changing my mind about a whole lot of other things, which led to me learning about how our minds work, why we think the things that we think, and how do we change that? What is this concept of neuroplasticity? And what do ancient traditions have to say about it that modern science is starting to come up with? So all of that is why this show exists. I'm Dr. Emma Jones, and this is She Changed Her Mind. A little bit about me. I'm a pediatric palliative care physician, which means that I've spent my career sitting with families in some of the hardest moments that life can hold. That's where I learned the hard way that everything that I knew about helping and what it actually means to be helping might have been wrong. Along with that work, I'm also a certified coach, and I wrote a book called The Phoenix Blueprint about what it takes to rebuild after burnout. I learned that getting out of burnout is not about pushing harder or thinking more. It's about being different, learning how to rest, learning how to accept support, learning to explore yourself, study yourself, and be curious at all times. So this show is where those two worlds meet. The clinical understanding of how people survive hard things and have to change their minds about what it means to be a person, what it means to be happy, how what it means to believe in things, all of those things come into question when you meet something really hard, like your child being sick. So that clinical knowledge and experience, along with the coaching work that I do, working with high-achieving women, doctors, lawyers, corporate professionals, and beyond to design a life that doesn't require burning it down. So let's talk about the premise of the show. And here's what I want to name right at the start is that most of us have been trained to treat changing our minds as a failure. Just think about the language that we use. We say flip-flopping or backtracking or you're wishy-washy. Sometimes this is gendered. You know, we always say women can't make up their minds, or she changes her mind so much. You'll hear me say this a million times. Let's turn that thing that is considered a liability into a superpower. So instead of saying we caved or we couldn't commit, or maybe you didn't really believe it in the first place, we want to turn that into open-minded, flexible, willing to be in the flow. This is not going to be as easy as just deciding to be more open-minded. Because somewhere along the way of this human cultural development, holding a position became synonymous with integrity. And that updating a position became the same thing as losing it, right? You've changed, you've become a different person. I don't even know you anymore. For those of us who came up in high-achieving environments, and nowhere is this more true than in medical culture. That's the culture that I know the best. I am a physician for over 20 years. Um, but this applies far beyond medicine. But the training runs deep. We are rewarded for certainty. We're tested on having the right answer. We're not tested on our ability to revise our thinking when new information comes in. The entire education system and then an entire profession and professional culture on top of it told us that competence looks like knowing. And that saying you don't know, or you need to look into it, or you need to think about it more, is a sign of weakness. So we got good at defending our positions, and we got bad at releasing them. So I want to offer a different premise. This is an invitation that changing your mind isn't a failure of conviction. It's a skill. And like any skill that most of us were never taught, we're bad at it. Which means we avoid it, which means we end up stuck with beliefs and identities and ways of living that stopped serving us a long time ago. So this show, She Changed Her Mind, is about getting good at that skill on purpose. Now, I want to talk a minute about why it's hard on purpose. What's the actual difficulty? Because I don't think it really helps anyone to just pretend that it's just a matter of deciding to be open-minded. So reframing is one thing, starting to see this as a strength and not a weakness is definitely a first step. It has to be something that you want. But even if you want it, your neurobiology is still working against you. Your brain is at a core, a prediction machine. All of all of our brains are, human brains. This is how they work. It's constantly building a model of how the world works. And that's based on things that we've experienced, observations, things that we read about, things that we hear about, things that we see, all of that, the way we were raised. And then it uses that model to predict what happens next. Your brain is doing this constantly, and it's really good at it. It's a really good prediction machine. But if something doesn't match the prediction, that creates dissonance or prediction error. And that's uncomfortable. We sort of feel uncomfortable what I thought was going to happen or what my model of the world told me to expect is not what's happening. And now I don't know what to do. That's supposed to be. Discomfort is the signal that tells your brain that something needs to update. The way that many of us in the default resolve this dissonance is by saying this new observation must be wrong because my model cannot be wrong. And this is the part that matters a lot for this conversation and why this show is called She Changed Her Mind, is because your brain doesn't just use this system for facts about the world. About your identity, beliefs about what makes you valuable, your sense of who you are. And all of that was built the same way as a predictive model that's using evidence from the past to predict the future, which means that when you encounter evidence that challenges a core belief about who you are or how life is supposed to work, your nervous system is going to respond the same way it would to a physical threat. So this is why it can feel so uncomfortable to change. This is why changing your mind about something that matters doesn't just feel like updating a spreadsheet. It feels like the ground is shifting beneath you. And to some extent it is. And then when we layer identity on top of that, and that if you're a midlife person in your 40s or 50s, you've spent decades building your sense of worth on being right. Right? You were warded for it. You were a person who was right, you were the most capable, you were the most intelligent, you were in control of the situation. That is probably some sense of who you are. So in that case, changing your mind isn't just updating a belief. It can feel like ripping the rug out of the very thing that you've built your entire identity on. So I want to be clear about something here. That resistance that you feel is not a personality flaw or some sign that you're stubborn or too difficult or too proud to admit that you're wronged. That's neurobiology, right? Your nervous system is doing exactly what it evolved to do. Updating our belief used to be physically dangerous, right? In the model of our world that told us where the predators were that mattered. If we change that just because we wanted to try something new, we might get eaten. So resistance to updating is an old program. It's it's old evolutionarily, right? Like it's something that's deep in our programming as human beings because it is how we survived as a species. And it is protective. And it's not going anywhere just because you want to decide to be more flexible. So that means that our goal can't be to make the discomfort go away. We cannot overcome the neurobiology. We have to work with it. Part of what we're going to do here at She Changed Her Mind is learn about how our minds work. What is all this neurobiology? How does this programming happen? And then we can learn how to move towards the things that we want. But we can't make the discomfort go away. We have to get better at moving through it. And that's what the skill is. We never want to ask for the absence of difficulty. Challenge is always going to come our way. That's how we grow. That's how we are able to do bigger and more impactful things is by being able to handle greater challenges. That's capacity. We're going to talk about that in episode three. But with practice, it gets easier. We continue to practice until this becomes more familiar. The capacity grows around it. And suddenly the thing that feels unbearably challenging today becomes easy a few months from now. But we really have to practice changing our mind. And I don't just mean making different decisions. So why does this matter so much? Why am I building an entire show around one skill of being able to change your mind? That's because I think that this is the engine that's underneath everything that we need right now. The world is changing so fast. Things are moving faster than human brains can keep up with. But the people who are going to be able to flow, the people who can be agile and nimble, change their mind as new information comes in, are the ones who are going to be able to survive. The people that I've worked with who build a sustainable life and a sustainable career, the ones who really last, are not the people who never waver. They're not the people who make a five-year plan in their 20s and execute it without deviation. Almost without exception, every truly successful woman that I have worked with are the people who can look at their life at various points and say, this isn't really working. I was wrong about what I needed. And then they actually act on that. They act on the updated information. It's not indecision, it's design thinking. Any good design only works if you're willing to revise it when the data tells you to. And that's the difference. That's how we stay at a wishy-washy or flip-floppy. We're grounded in data. We're grounded in values. We know how we're deciding. This is what I always say in the clinic. I work in a high uncertainty environment. But I say, you know, we don't need to decide what we're going to decide, but we do need to decide how we're going to decide. And that's the thing. But knowing how to change your mind is an incredibly important skill. So I want to plant something here that we're going to come back to in the next episode because it does deserve its own full conversation. Most of us are living according to an old blueprint. A set of rules about what a good life and a career can look like that we inherited rather than chose. Most of us are living according to an old blueprint. That's a set of rules about what a good life means and what a good career looks like that we inherited. We didn't choose. Things like work harder, prove your work through, prove your worth through output, rest is something you earn. Even all the beliefs about what it means to be a wife and a mother and a community member may be according to somebody else's plan. And until now, you may have never even thought about the fact that there could be multiple versions of that. But that blueprint was handed to us. We didn't design it. And for a lot of us, it was never going to work. Not because we were executing it badly, but because it was built for something other than a sustainable life. So we're going to get more fully into that next time. But you can't even see that you're working from an inherited blueprint, let alone replace it, if you don't first believe that questioning is safe. So that's what we're doing this week. We have to believe, let's get it in our bones that revising our thinking, even about something as foundational as what a good life is supposed to look like, is not a failure. It's the whole point. So that's what this show's going to be. It's not going to be feel-good platitudes. This is practical. Every episode is going to give you something to actually work with: a concept or a framework or a way of thinking about your life that you can test, not just admire. So here's what you can expect from the season ahead. We're going to build a new blueprint together, one that is grounded in design thinking instead of inherited rules. We're going to talk about capacity as the real currency that you're managing. It's way more foundational than even time or energy. And we're going to walk through what it takes to actually rest, to recharge, to study yourself honestly, to set boundaries that actually work, to find real community, to use your voice, find your voice again, and to get your creativity back. Because we are all creative creatures. Many of us have just hidden that so far we don't know where to find it. But piece by piece, we're building a different way to live. Not one that works, but none of that works without this first skill. The ability to look at a belief you've held, sometimes for years, sometimes since before you can remember, and say, I might be wrong about this, and I'm willing to find out. I might be wrong about this, and I'm willing to find out. That's what this show asks of you. Not certainty, just willingness. I'm definitely going to ask you to change your mind about a few things. And some of them are going to be uncomfortable. Some of them might already be things that you sense are true. You just haven't let yourself say out loud. And some of them are going to feel so obvious that you're going to say, wow, I can't believe I never thought of that yet. In the next episode, we'll start with a big one the blueprint that you inherited and why it's been broken from the start. I'll see you there.