Reflective Thinking · Lesson 2 of 3

What changed my mind, and what did I miss?

Notice what actually changes your mind. It is usually not the thing you use when trying to change someone else’s.

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Track the moments your mind changed and what did it. Most people find the list is short and is mostly personal experience rather than argument, which is worth knowing about yourself before you try to persuade anyone else.

Asking what you missed works best with a specific frame: what did someone else see that you did not, and what were they looking at that you were not? Vague self-criticism produces no information.

The point of both questions is calibration — matching how sure you feel to how often you turn out to be right. That is learnable, and it is close to the whole value of reflection.

See it happen

You used to be sure that working from a café was a waste of a morning. Now you do it twice a week.

The read that arrives on its own

I suppose I just got used to it. These things change on their own.

The same situation, with this idea

What actually changed it? Not the articles about it. One specific morning when a stuck piece of work came apart in forty minutes. It was a single vivid case — which is exactly the kind of evidence I dismiss when someone else offers it.

What changed

Noticing what changes your own mind is uncomfortable, because it is usually not the sort of evidence you present when trying to change someone else’s.

The takeaway

Notice what actually changes your mind. It is usually not the thing you use when trying to change someone else’s.

Easy to take the wrong way

Only cataloguing the big reversals. Most mind-changing is a slow drift you never registered, and the drift is where the interesting question is.

Try this

Write the last time you genuinely changed your mind, and what caused it.