On changing our minds, navigating careers, rethinking professional ambitions, and the psychology of intellectual humility—because learning something new should not automatically make us prisoners of what we believed before.
By Sahil Tayal | Independent reflections on psychology, organisational behaviour and human development
“But Sahil, you said something completely different in 2022.”
Yes. I probably did.
“And in 2024, you wrote an article arguing almost the opposite.”
That's entirely possible.
“And now, in 2026, you're presenting another perspective?”
Yes. And I understand why that might appear inconsistent.
There is something interesting about living in a world where our earlier opinions can be recorded, archived, searched and compared with what we believe today. An article written during the early years of a career can be examined alongside a perspective developed after a decade of professional experience. A LinkedIn post written during a job search may remain publicly accessible long after someone's circumstances, priorities and understanding have changed.
This creates legitimate opportunities for accountability. People should be able to examine what professionals, researchers, managers and public commentators have previously said. But it also raises a question that deserves more attention.
At what point did we begin expecting human beings to remain intellectually identical to their earlier selves?
I am a human being, not a finished philosophical system. My opinions are not constitutional amendments, and my writing is not a lifelong contract requiring me to defend every sentence indefinitely. It represents my understanding at a particular moment, informed by the knowledge, experiences and assumptions available to me then.
Sometimes successfully. Sometimes imperfectly. And occasionally with considerably more confidence than the evidence justified.
I hope that understanding continues to evolve.
Otherwise, what exactly would be the purpose of learning?
1. A career is not a permanent declaration of identity
LinkedIn is an interesting place to examine this question because professional identity is often presented through relatively stable categories: educational qualifications, job titles, industries, specialisations, competencies and career achievements.
These categories are useful. Employers need ways to evaluate experience, and professionals need ways to communicate what they know and can contribute. A résumé is necessarily selective, and a LinkedIn profile cannot contain the full complexity of a human life.
But sometimes we begin treating these categories as though they define what a person must remain.
Someone who studied finance may later become interested in psychology. An engineer may discover an aptitude for management. A human resources professional may develop a fascination with behavioural research, entrepreneurship or education. Someone who once aspired to a senior corporate position may eventually decide that independent work, family enterprise or a different professional path better suits their circumstances.
None of these changes automatically invalidates the earlier choices.
A person can make a reasonable decision with the information available at twenty-two and arrive at a different decision after acquiring more experience at thirty-two.
The newer decision is not necessarily superior, but it may reflect a different understanding of opportunities, constraints, preferences and responsibilities.
We often ask job candidates to explain their career transitions as though every move must fit a perfectly coherent plan conceived at the beginning of adulthood.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes the more accurate explanation is that the person learned something.
Perhaps an industry turned out to be different from what they expected. Perhaps a particular role revealed strengths they had not previously recognised. Perhaps their financial responsibilities changed, or an unexpected opportunity introduced them to a field they had never considered.
Professional development is not always linear, and a non-linear career is not automatically an unsuccessful one.
2. Why changing our minds can feel professionally risky
Psychology offers several useful frameworks for understanding why people sometimes defend their earlier positions even when new information challenges them.
Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance describes the discomfort that can arise when beliefs, attitudes or behaviours conflict. People may attempt to reduce that discomfort by changing their beliefs, reinterpreting information or finding reasons to preserve an existing position.
Ziva Kunda's influential research on motivated reasoning further explores how people's motivations can influence the way they evaluate information and arrive at conclusions.
These ideas are particularly relevant to professional life.
Imagine a manager who has spent years advocating a particular leadership philosophy. Their reputation, credibility and perhaps even their professional advancement have become associated with that approach. New evidence suggests that the philosophy is less effective under certain conditions than they previously believed.
The manager now faces two different challenges. One is intellectual: how should the evidence change their understanding? The other is psychological: what would acknowledging that change mean for the professional identity they have built?
The same dynamic can affect researchers, consultants, entrepreneurs and professionals at almost any career stage.
Once an opinion becomes publicly associated with our identity, changing it may feel less like updating information and more like losing something about ourselves.
But protecting the appearance of consistency is not necessarily the same as protecting the quality of our judgment.
An organisation that rewards employees for defending their previous decisions at all costs may inadvertently discourage learning. Conversely, an environment in which people can explain why their conclusions have changed may make it easier to recognise mistakes before they become more expensive.
The important distinction is between changing a position because the evidence has improved and changing it merely because doing so has become convenient.
3. Intellectual humility is a professional capability
A concept I find increasingly useful is intellectual humility.
A review published in Nature Reviews Psychology examines intellectual humility and its implications for judgment, relationships, education and other areas of human behaviour.
At its centre is the recognition that our knowledge has limitations and that our beliefs may be mistaken.
This does not require abandoning expertise or becoming uncertain about everything.
A surgeon should not treat a carefully established medical finding as equivalent to an unsupported opinion. An engineer should not disregard structural safety standards merely to appear open-minded. A manager should not change an organisational decision every time someone disagrees.
Evidence, competence and professional responsibility still matter.
Intellectual humility is better understood as the ability to remain open to correction while continuing to make informed judgments.
For someone early in their career, this may involve recognising that an experienced colleague understands constraints they have not yet encountered. For a senior leader, it may mean accepting that someone with less formal authority has identified a genuine problem. For a researcher, it may mean revising a hypothesis when new findings challenge the original explanation.
And for someone searching for employment, it may involve reconsidering assumptions about which roles, industries or career paths are suitable for them.
The capacity to say, “I had not considered that possibility,” can be professionally valuable.
So can the ability to say, “I have examined the evidence, and I still disagree.”
Humility is not the absence of conviction. It is the willingness to examine conviction.
4. What positive psychology can teach us about professional development
Positive psychology has expanded psychological inquiry into questions involving human strengths, motivation, well-being, meaning and development.
One influential idea is Carol Dweck's concept of a growth mindset, which concerns beliefs about whether abilities can develop rather than being entirely fixed.
The popular interpretation is that people should believe they can improve through effort and learning. The scientific evidence is more nuanced. A 2018 meta-analysis by Sisk and colleagues found that growth-mindset interventions generally produced small effects on academic achievement, with some evidence of benefits for particular groups and circumstances.
This matters because encouraging people to learn is not the same as promising that a positive attitude will overcome every obstacle.
Professional development depends on many factors beyond individual motivation: access to education, financial resources, organisational opportunities, labour-market conditions, mentoring and the quality of available training.
Still, there is a valuable principle here.
Our present level of competence does not necessarily define the limits of what we can learn.
A person who struggled with public speaking early in their career may become more effective through experience and practice. Someone unfamiliar with data analysis may acquire those skills through structured learning. A professional who once found leadership intimidating may develop better judgment after working with different teams and confronting difficult situations.
Not everyone will achieve the same outcomes, and improvement is rarely guaranteed.
But the possibility of development makes it reasonable to reconsider the identities we have assigned ourselves.
Perhaps “I'm not a technical person” is sometimes an accurate description of current competence rather than a permanent statement about potential.
Perhaps “I'm not management material” reflects limited experience rather than an immutable personal characteristic.
The challenge is to distinguish genuine constraints from assumptions that have never been properly examined.
5. Psychological flexibility and the ability to change direction
Another useful concept is psychological flexibility, particularly as discussed within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Broadly, psychological flexibility involves responding to experiences with awareness and openness while continuing to act in ways connected to personally meaningful values.
Research on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and psychological flexibility has examined how these processes relate to psychological functioning and responses to difficult experiences.
I find the concept relevant to professional identity, although applying it to career development is an interpretation rather than a direct conclusion established by the cited research.
Consider someone who has spent years working toward a particular promotion. Their professional ambitions, daily routines and sense of progress have become organised around reaching that position.
Then circumstances change.
Perhaps the role no longer offers the opportunities they expected. Perhaps family responsibilities require a different arrangement. Perhaps experience reveals that another kind of work would be more meaningful.
The person now has a choice between treating the original ambition as a permanent obligation and reconsidering whether it still serves their priorities.
Changing direction does not automatically represent failure.
But neither does it automatically represent wisdom.
The important question is whether the decision reflects a thoughtful understanding of the available options, consequences and values.
There is a difference between abandoning a goal because progress has become temporarily difficult and revising a goal because the underlying reasons for pursuing it have changed.
Psychological flexibility offers a useful way to think about that distinction without reducing every career decision to a simple story of persistence versus quitting.
6. Job seekers deserve more than motivational slogans
There is an important limitation to conversations about adaptability and personal growth.
Not everyone has the same freedom to change direction.
Someone preparing for a job interview may be doing so because employment would materially improve their family's financial circumstances. A professional considering a career transition may have loan repayments, dependants or other responsibilities. A student may choose a degree primarily because it offers a credible route toward economic stability.
These are reasonable priorities.
It is easy to encourage people to explore their passions, reinvent themselves or pursue unconventional careers without fully appreciating the practical constraints under which they make decisions.
A person can value curiosity while still needing a predictable salary. Someone can prioritise employment without lacking imagination. And a professional can remain in a role that is not their ideal vocation because the stability it provides is important to other people.
I would not want the language of growth and adaptability to become another way of judging individuals whose choices are constrained by circumstances.
Nor should we assume that everyone must constantly reinvent themselves to remain valuable.
Sometimes professional growth means changing industries. Sometimes it means developing greater competence in an existing role. Sometimes it means building financial stability before pursuing a different ambition. And sometimes it means recognising that a stable, meaningful working life is a perfectly legitimate objective.
The purpose of education and professional development should be to expand people's realistic choices, not prescribe one supposedly superior way of living.
7. Experience changes how we understand the theories we learned
My own professional and intellectual journey has moved through formal education, organisational environments, family enterprise, independent research, writing and creative experimentation.
Each environment has revealed different aspects of human behaviour.
An MBA programme introduces frameworks for understanding leadership, motivation, organisational structure and decision-making. Professional experience reveals how those frameworks interact with institutional expectations, incentives and constraints. Family enterprise introduces another set of dynamics involving informal relationships, customer behaviour, trust and everyday commercial decisions.
Working in retail, for example, can make concepts such as price sensitivity, customer loyalty and purchasing behaviour more immediate. What appears as a variable in an economic model becomes something observable in conversations with customers.
But observation is not the same as scientific proof.
A single shop cannot establish a universal theory of consumer behaviour. One workplace does not represent every organisation. Personal experience can generate useful hypotheses while remaining vulnerable to selection effects, incomplete information and mistaken interpretation.
This is where I find the relationship between theory and experience especially interesting.
Theory helps organise observations. Experience exposes limitations and generates new questions. Research provides methods for examining whether our explanations hold beyond the circumstances in which we first encountered them.
I would be disappointed if years of additional experience left every one of my opinions unchanged.
That would suggest either that I had reached an extraordinarily complete understanding very early in life or that I had become unusually resistant to learning.
The second explanation seems considerably more plausible.
8. Organisations need people who can revise decisions responsibly
The ability to change one's mind is not only a personal development issue. It also has implications for how organisations make decisions.
Imagine a team that has invested months in a project. The original assumptions seemed reasonable, resources were committed and senior stakeholders approved the direction. New information now suggests that continuing unchanged may produce poor results.
The team faces a familiar dilemma.
Should it continue because substantial resources have already been invested? Should it revise the approach and risk appearing inconsistent? Or should it reconsider the decision using the best information currently available?
Research on the sunk-cost effect by Arkes and Blumer illustrates how previous investments can influence decisions about whether to continue an activity.
The implication is not that every struggling project should be abandoned. Some investments require patience, and early difficulties do not necessarily invalidate a strategy.
Rather, the decision to continue should be based on expected future consequences, not merely on a desire to justify past expenditure.
A similar principle applies to organisational beliefs.
An earlier decision may have been reasonable given the information available at the time. If circumstances change, responsible management may require reconsidering it.
This is also connected to Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Psychological safety concerns whether people perceive the interpersonal environment as sufficiently safe to take risks such as asking questions, acknowledging mistakes and raising concerns.
Psychological safety does not mean avoiding disagreement or eliminating performance standards. Its relevance lies in creating conditions where people can surface information that might otherwise remain unspoken.
A team that cannot question its own assumptions may appear unified while becoming progressively less responsive to reality.
The objective should not be to reward inconsistency.
It should be to make evidence-based revision possible.
9. But accountability still matters
Everything I have argued requires an important qualification.
Not every change of opinion represents growth.
People sometimes change positions because of convenience, reputational incentives, social pressure or a desire to avoid uncomfortable questions. Someone may make contradictory claims to different audiences without attempting to reconcile them. A newer argument may also be less accurate than an older one.
Changing one's mind is not inherently virtuous.
The quality of the change matters.
If I have made an inaccurate factual claim, I should be willing to correct it. If I have treated someone unfairly, announcing that I have evolved does not substitute for acknowledging the behaviour or its consequences. If I have publicly argued for a position that I no longer consider defensible, explaining what changed may be part of responsible communication.
The same standard applies in professional settings.
A manager cannot justify every reversal by describing it as adaptability. An organisation cannot avoid accountability for earlier decisions merely by announcing a new strategy. A professional cannot claim intellectual humility while refusing to examine legitimate criticism.
The useful questions are straightforward: What was the earlier position? What new evidence or experience prompted reconsideration? Which assumptions have changed? What consequences follow from the new decision?
Those questions allow us to distinguish thoughtful development from inconsistency that has simply been given a more attractive name.
10. The person you were five years ago does not have to become your enemy
There is something else I think we often overlook when discussing professional growth.
We sometimes become so eager to demonstrate progress that we begin treating our earlier selves with contempt.
An old career ambition becomes embarrassing. A previous professional decision appears foolish. A belief that once seemed reasonable is judged as though we possessed all our current knowledge when we first formed it.
But retrospective judgment can be unfair when it ignores the circumstances and information available at the time.
The person who accepted their first job may have prioritised financial independence. The person who later changed industries may have discovered new interests. The person who returned to a family business may have recognised opportunities or responsibilities that were not previously relevant.
These decisions do not necessarily form a straight line, but they can still belong to a coherent human life.
We can recognise mistakes without assuming that everything preceding our present understanding was worthless.
We can acknowledge that an earlier ambition no longer suits us without dismissing the person who once pursued it.
And we can appreciate how experience changes us without pretending that every change represents progress.
Professional identity can develop through continuity as well as revision.
11. So, Sahil, which version should we believe?
A fair question.
I would not ask anyone to accept my current position merely because I hold it today. Nor would I ask them to dismiss an earlier argument simply because it is older.
Evaluate the argument on its merits. Examine the evidence. Consider the reasoning. Compare it with what I have previously said, if the comparison is relevant.
Ask what changed.
Challenge assumptions that no longer seem compatible.
And if the newer position reflects convenience rather than better understanding, that is worth questioning too.
I do not expect the freedom to change my mind to exempt me from explaining myself.
What I hope we can recognise is that intellectual honesty sometimes requires revision rather than consistency.
There is no particular achievement in defending an error indefinitely simply because it was once expressed publicly. Nor is there virtue in changing every opinion merely to appear adaptable.
The challenge is to develop a relationship with our beliefs in which conviction and openness can coexist.
For someone searching for a job, this may mean recognising that a career path can change without invalidating the education or effort already invested. For a working professional, it may mean learning a new skill without treating previous expertise as obsolete. For a leader, it may mean revising a decision when the evidence warrants it. And for a researcher or writer, it may mean acknowledging that a previously published explanation was incomplete.
Some of my future writing may disagree with what you have just read.
If it does, I hope there will be a good reason. I hope the newer argument reflects better evidence, more careful reasoning or a deeper appreciation of circumstances I previously overlooked.
And I hope I will be willing to explain the difference.
Because I am not trying to build a professional record in which I was always right.
I am trying to build a life in which I remain willing to learn.
Perhaps professional maturity is not demonstrated by never changing our minds, but by knowing when to reconsider, how to evaluate new evidence and how to remain accountable for the consequences of our decisions.
We do not have to become prisoners of our earlier ambitions, job titles or opinions.
We can remain committed to meaningful work while recognising that our understanding of what that work should look like may change.
I am not claiming finality.
I am participating in an ongoing conversation with the world.
And I would like to remain teachable for as long as I am here.
References and further reading
Intellectual humility and cognitive psychology
Porter, T., et al. (2022). Predictors and Consequences of Intellectual Humility. Nature Reviews Psychology.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin.
Positive psychology and human development
Sisk, V. F., et al. (2018). To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement?. Psychological Science.
Psychological Flexibility and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — Research Review.
Organisational behaviour and decision-making
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.
Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The Psychology of Sunk Cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Related independent writing
About the author
Sahil Tayal is an independent writer and organisational behaviour researcher with an MBA in Human Resource Development from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Mumbai. His interests include psychology, human capital, education, organisational decision-making, entrepreneurship and the relationship between knowledge and action.
His writing draws on academic research, professional experience, family enterprise and independent intellectual exploration. The purpose is to examine questions rather than present permanent or universally applicable conclusions.
Independent authorship and disclaimer
This article is written entirely in my individual capacity and reflects my personal opinions, interpretations and evolving understanding. It does not represent the official views, policies or positions of any current or former employer, university, educational institution, professional association, research organisation or other entity with which I am or have been affiliated. No such organisation has commissioned, reviewed, approved or endorsed this article.
References to research, institutions, organisations or professional experiences are included for educational and contextual purposes. They do not imply institutional participation or endorsement.
The article is an independent interdisciplinary reflection, not an empirical research study, professional psychological assessment, employment guarantee or institutional recommendation. Research findings are distinguished from my own interpretations wherever relevant, and the conclusions remain open to revision.
I welcome constructive feedback, factual corrections, thoughtful disagreement and concerns regarding the content. Readers may contact me directly at tayalsahil24@gmail.com.
This essay reflects my present understanding. I reserve the responsibility—not merely the right—to revise it when better evidence or reasoning becomes available.
Preserved from the LinkedIn data export of 24 October 2026. Links and references reflect the original article; they are not independently re-verified here.