“People change for two reasons, either their minds have been opened or their hearts have been broken.” ~ Unknown
Muhammad Ali once said, “A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” I wholeheartedly agree, yet paradoxically, I’ve never changed my mind. This seeming contradiction reveals a profound truth about how we evolve and grow. We don’t independently and deliberately change our minds, just as we don’t voluntarily control other psychosomatic processes. Rather, our minds evolve through a complex interplay of our feelings, environment, and experiences, often in ways that are hidden from our conscious awareness.
Consider your heart function and blood flow. You don’t consciously control them, yet you influence those processes profoundly through your feelings and behavior—environment, exercise, diet, stress. Similarly, mental change isn’t achieved through mere thought, but through engagement with your inner state and the world around you. However, before any meaningful change can occur, there’s a critical first step that’s often overlooked.
Your thinking mind is adept at creating elaborate justifications for limiting that engagement and staying exactly where you are—physically and mentally—even when you’re deeply unsatisfied. It whispers insidious thoughts like, “I don't want to be in this unfulfilling job, but I have to stay for financial security,” or “I know this relationship isn’t healthy, but I have to stay in it because it’s the right thing to do.”
These self-deceptions are the mind’s way of keeping you stuck in familiar patterns, even when those patterns no longer serve you. They create a false sense of necessity around your current circumstances, making change seem impossible or even irresponsible. Recognizing and confronting these self-deceptions is the crucial first step to enabling change. It requires brutal honesty with yourself and a willingness to challenge your deepest assumptions.
Ask yourself: “Is it really true that I ‘have to’ live the life I’m living? Or is that belief a comfortable lie that absolves me of the responsibility to engage with the uncertainty of the world?” Once you’ve begun to dismantle these self-deceptions, you open the door to real change. But remember, this change doesn’t come from thinking alone (mental causation). You can’t simply will yourself into new patterns of behavior. Instead, lasting change emerges from self-awareness, along with new environments, experiences, and actions.
So if you find yourself in a state of endless rumination, resist the urge to retreat into self-help theories. Instead, focus on becoming want conscious and then taking concrete actions that challenge your current patterns. Try new things, meet different people, change your routines. Give your mind new experiences to work with. You might be surprised at how your thoughts and feelings begin to shift, not because you willed them to, but because you’ve given your mind new input to process.
Remember, you don’t change your mind—your mind changes as a result of your inner awareness, experiences, and actions. By understanding this and first confronting your self-deceptions, you can approach life not as a mental challenge, but as an adventure of self-exploration. Your mind will evolve not because you forced it to, but because you gave it the opportunity to grow and adapt through honest self-reflection and new interactions with the world around you.
This perspective underpins my upcoming book, “Unwinding Want,” which examines how we can use our minds to liberate ourselves from our constraining thought patterns. This short, paradoxical book explores how our wants drive our beliefs, behaviors, and even our sense of self. By closely examining the structure of our wants, we can begin to unravel the complex web of thoughts that keep us trapped in cycles of dissatisfaction. The paradox lies in the realization that by deeply understanding and acknowledging our wants, we can simultaneously free ourselves from their grip.
Stay passionate!