Watching people change their minds in real time

One of the quieter privileges of the work I do is watching people change their minds in real time.

Not dramatically. Not with announcements or apologies. More often it happens mid conversation, when someone pauses, recalibrates, and realises that what they have always believed might not be the whole story.

It can look like a partner who begins a conversation very certain about what is safest, most sensible, most reasonable, and then slowly starts asking different questions. Or a friend who thought they were very open minded about birth, until they notice how much of their thinking was inherited, absorbed, or borrowed from someone else’s experience entirely. Sometimes it is even a mother in law, which honestly deserves its own category.

I have practised across different countries and systems, and one thing has become very clear to me. Much of what we believe about birth, parenting, and care is not universal at all. It is cultural. It is institutional. It is shaped by what is normal where you live, who you trust, and which stories are repeated often enough that they begin to feel like facts. Enter social media, where confidence is often mistaken for competence.

Once you have seen that level of variation, it becomes difficult to return to the idea that there is one obvious right way to do things.

What I find most interesting is that people rarely change their minds because they are presented with better arguments. More often they change because something stops fitting. A story no longer lands the way it used to. Advice that once felt reassuring suddenly feels thin. A lived experience bumps up against a belief and refuses to sit neatly underneath it.

I see this most clearly around birth. Someone may arrive believing that intervention automatically equals safety, or that trusting your body means opting out of thinking altogether. Then slowly, as we talk about physiology, systems, language, and choice, those ideas begin to loosen. They do not disappear, but they soften enough to make room for something more nuanced.

This is why I am wary of certainty, particularly loud certainty. It often shuts down the very process that allows people to arrive somewhere more aligned with themselves. Certainty can feel like clarity, but it is often just the absence of curiosity.

Changing your mind does not mean you were wrong before. More often it means you were working with limited information, a limited frame, or simply doing the best you could with what you had access to at the time.

I think we should talk about that more. About how normal it is to outgrow beliefs. About how uncomfortable it can feel to sit in the in between space where you are no longer sure, but not yet settled somewhere new.

Watching people change their minds in real time is a reminder that learning is not linear, and neither is care. It is relational. It happens in conversation, in trust, and often in moments that do not look particularly profound from the outside.

Those are the moments I am most interested in. They are usually where everything starts to shift.

A few questions to sit with

These are not questions to answer immediately. They are questions to notice.

What feels uncomfortable to question, and why?
Who benefits from me believing this?
If I did not need to be certain, what else might become possible?

You do not have to abandon your beliefs to examine them. Sometimes the most meaningful shift begins with letting them loosen, just enough to breathe.