What if changing is an art?
We live in a balance between the need for a stable identity and the aspiration to change. A dilemma, an eternal disagreement that makes us take new paths and then often go back, because we are so tied to the idea that we have made ourselves and our personality that we block the change, even the slightest and we become scary, sometimes terrified, as if changing was a matter of losing our own identity.
Style of dressing, eating, musical taste, leisure, use of leisure time are often behaviors, and attitudes, subject to confirmation rather than denial. And if it is difficult to change our minds about the most basic issues, insurmountable walls will be erected when we face more complex convictions such as moral, political or social ones.
We are naturally conservative
Scientists describe us as "cognitive conservatives" who stand for happy and reassured animals in standing on our positions. The experts in social relations, sales and marketing are well aware of the enormous effort behind every change in the subjects to which they turn, be they consumers, voters, workers or citizens, which must always be studied and organized with genius and patience. The "nodes" are guilty of this, that is, those personal crossings of data, experiences, emotions and beliefs that have been created and crossed in our minds to the point of making it a canvas that is in balance and that we do not want to put at risk of breakage or damage.
Let's take an example. When we want to take a new holiday, out of the usual stay, sea, mountain, lake, we still draw on our pre-established conviction. A holiday made with the new perspective of a trip abroad, with the whole family, is the result of many "knots", but also negative in turn compensated by other considerations.
But what would happen if a colleague of ours office told us that going abroad with his family in a camper, family disputes broke out continuously, the journeys were tiring, and during stops in the camper area feared for safety, in short, that an experience abroad in a camper ever again, or only 25 km from home?! In all probability, we would put ourselves on the watchman's lookout for our knot (a web of mental convictions) and we would reinterpret the fact told in the office, isolating it from a "mere exception" ("our colleague is a dork, he doesn't know how to organize himself, he has a stressful wife and spoiled children"). We could also forget what our colleague told us or do even more: avoid exchanging experiences on camper trips with that colleague or with others who might have ideas contrary to ours.
The price of changing
What triggers a panic about changing your mind? It is the amount of energy, attention, time and emotion needed to put together our knots that together will have to bring to a new design a new balance that is often also uncertain there will be. Certainly leaving one's own ideas is painful because it influences our own identity and the group to which it tells us that we belong and confirms us to ourselves as religious, political, cultural and social belonging.
Rules for change
The drives for change have to do with our strenuous resistance not to unravel those reassuring "knots" that weave our very tight network of beliefs and so we must implement every possible strategy. Every strategy must promise us a profit, a reward that will make up for the difficulty of restoring the new mental and emotional order with difficulty. Sometimes it is enough to react to a storm of information that strikes us relentlessly, a shock, a state of fascination, an emotional resonance to start the change even if the process of change takes its time and is never sudden, even if the new idea seems right and overwhelming. The willingness to change depends on many factors such as age, the commitment to adapt to the environment, the habit of rationalizing one's choices, analyzing the issues deeply and evaluating the negative and positive aspects, the habit of evaluating the reasons of those who think differently from us by taking news, information and data even of those who belong "enemy". And it is not only a matter of reason, our emotions should also go to a school of flexibility to support our changes.
Art, music, fashion, social relations, in their aspects most incomprehensible to us, deserve some exploration to prepare good training to support our efforts when we are then engaged in a change.
Apart from these systems for dealing with the difficulty of overcoming our beliefs with good intentions, rationality, common sense or emotional shaking, the fact remains that flexibility is difficult and often involves superhuman efforts, even behind the prospect of advantages and compensations.
To extreme evils, to extreme remedies! If the change fails because we are subservient to the system in which we act, live and think, we just have to get out of the system triggering real changes that allow us to explore ways but traveled before.
Courage we are not alone in our fixity in fighting change we are in good company.
Scientists also often perch on networks of knots that are much more difficult to unravel, call them "paradigms", structured sets of ideas, and often those who question them with revolutionary ideas don't have a good life and will have to struggle long before they undermine the previous structured sets of ideas and replace them with their own, as Einstein and Darwin did at the beginning.
If you panic about a destabilizing change in view you can always draw on good preparation of healthy herbs.