What do we feel when we realize that we were wrong all along? About a person, a thing, a situation, an ideology, a method, or even a simple piece of fact. Is it hurt? Shame? Anger? A mix of all together?
What changes inside you right at the moment when the wall of ego breaks down that was protecting you from this scary new knowledge that you were wrong and have done things based on that wrong knowledge?
I have found that it can also be a sense of relief. Of peace. Sure it feels hurtful, stings a bit, and in some cases a lot. It does feel shameful, especially if I have taken significant actions based on those assumptions. But the agony of uncertainty is no longer there, and that is a huge relief.
In fact, it is the suspicion that I might be wrong that gives me sleepless nights. That chink in the wall. I learnt that our brain protects us against letting that chink widen. it wants to spare us the pain we feel when proven wrong. And it is right in its own way; being proven wrong is painful, almost physically. That is where what is called confirmation bias comes in. Our brain pulls us towards opinions that confirm what we already know. Our brain loves familiarity, habit, recurring patterns. It rebels against anything new we may want to introduce. And things that require a complete rewiring of existing information pathways in the brain encounters the biggest resistance.
My brain has been my biggest enemy that way. It kept me locked inside abusive patterns of behaviour from friends and family, blurred my senses to red flags that should have been visible 10 miles away. It also sometimes kept me immune to constructive criticism at work, hindering my growth.
It is probably this insistence on keeping things familiar that bars most of us from growing in life. We cannot admit, for the life of it, that we were wrong about something. That our actions and beliefs led to some bad things, that sometimes the problems we are facing today might have been the result of actions performed under mistaken beliefs.
We fear retribution from our own ego. The standards we – and often the society – hold ourselves to. The uncertainty maddens us, eats at our day-to-day functioning, makes us feel inadequate and weak. To resolve that, we obsessively seek out scapegoats outside us; people or things to take the fall on behalf of our ego. We blame a lot of things for our misfortunes, and often those things exist. But the trick is, even if those conditions exist they will not disappear until we also admit to one crucial piece – that we ourselves were wrong.
Things outside us often do not control us as much as we think they do (not talking about larger socio-political upheavals here obviously). But our response to them often seals the deal.
By way of a very mundane example, let’s take the case of this work sample I wrote for a prospective client. It was met with some harsh criticisms about the style. I flipped out (not proud of that). In my mind, my piece was fine, more so because the corrections the example they had provided as a style guide had grammatical and constructional mistakes. I kept thinking that the client is unintelligent, egoistic, they are criticising just for the sake of it.
But here’s the thing. I was unhappy. If I was so sure about my superiority I wouldn’t be fiddling still. I have dealt with unreasonable and disrespectful clients before and felt no qualms about my actions. So what was it?
I realized what it was when the client sent back another paragraph written in the style they want. They were right about the criticism; they just didn’t express it in a way I would understand before. Their tone also made better sense now; it had more to do with a relative unfamiliarity with digital communications which is common in people of that age group than anything I did.
I felt a bit stupid, true. But I also felt relieved. Because now I knew how to salvage the situation without resorting to assumptions about another person.
Being proven wrong feels bad, but the truth is its not that bad. In fact, it is way better than the uncertainty you go through before you were proven wrong. I learnt that the hard way, and am still learning. The uncertainty still hits sometimes, and so does the shame. But the relief is palpable too.
Let us hold on to that peace. Let us heal and learn and grow, whatever resistance our survival-obsessed brain may put in the way.
In Other Words 