THE EGO BOOSTING POWER OF ADMITTING WHEN YOUR’RE WRONG
Once you learn how to turn being wrong into a positive experience, you are making yourself free to grow and change as a person.
Being wrong is a fact of life.
It’s impossible to know everything. Even if you’re blessed with an eidetic or photographic memory and can recall everything you’ve ever seen or heard in your entire life, you’re not going to have had access to every fact that exists. Eventually, either somebody will know something you don’t or prove something you know is incorrect.
And no one likes being wrong. It sucks, and it feels humiliating. But it doesn’t have to. And if you can change your mindset to turn that feeling around, I promise your life is going to get exponentially better.
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Why can’t you admit when you are wrong?
Why is it natural to get so defensive when someone proves you are wrong about something?
Well, in short, it’s all about ego.
For the longer answer, we need to explore the idea of Cognitive Dissonance. As explained by social psychologist Carol Tavris:
Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true.
Your ego tells you that you are smart. You know certain things, and having that knowledge makes you valuable to those around you. But if someone or something shows that our knowledge is incorrect, we are forced to face the fact that we are not as knowledgeable as we see ourselves. And if this is the case, you must be less valuable than we thought.
Therefore, refusing to admit when you are wrong about something is a way to defend both our sense of self and our place in society. And that’s not just conjecture. Because a 2012 study showed that refusing to apologise actually boosts our self-esteem.
That’s right, refusing to admit you are wrong makes us feel good. (At least in the short term.)
Why refusing to admit when you are wrong is damaging
But as much as it may feel good in the short term, refusing to admit when you are wrong is dangerous.
As psychologist Mike Brooks, Ph.D. puts it:
We know that change is constant from our own experiences. Our kids grow older, we change jobs and careers, technology evolves, thoughts and feelings come and go, the sun rises and sets, and even stars and galaxies are born and die. Our present becomes the past every moment. Adhering to a fixed mental position of “I am right, and you are wrong” is at odds with the dynamic, changing nature of the universe.
Life is a constant stream of change. From the moment we’re born, we are constantly growing and developing. With every experience we undergo, we’re evolving into a new person. It may not feel like it on a day to day basis, but when you look back on your life, it’s obvious. Take a moment to think back to different points in your life. Were you the same person at 20 as you were at 25? Or from 15 to 20? Or 25 to 30?
No. You weren’t.
And that growth came from learning. Some of it came from studying things, while some came from experiences you went through. But all of it came from facing new facts and experiences and internalising the new things you learned about yourself, the world, and others.
And so, refusing to admit mistakes, to accept when you are wrong, means you are preventing yourself from growing as a person.
The trick to turn being wrong into a positive
When you are wrong, your ego takes a hit. And, as we’ve already discussed, the quickest and easiest way to boost your ego is to refuse to admit that you are wrong.
So, instead, we need to find another way to shore up our ego when we’re wrong about something. We need to turn being wrong into a positive experience.
How do we do that?
Okay, I want to tell a quick story about my previous life. When I was a project manager, I line managed all the new-starters in my company. This meant they were eager but inexperienced, and this is a combination that often leads people to rush ahead and make mistakes.
And when this happened, of course, they felt awful. They were trying to impress me. To show that they knew what they were doing. They wanted to prove to me they deserved the trust I’d given them.
And when these things happened, I had a saying: There are no such things as mistakes. Only “Learning Experiences”.
I didn’t shame them or yell at them. I didn’t even frame what had happened as a “mistake”. I made it so that the only real consequence of being wrong was a chance to learn.
This is how we turn being wrong into an ego-boost. We make it an opportunity to better ourselves. Yes, we were wrong, but now we’ve learned better. And so, rather than it battering at our ego, it reinforces it. You are now a better person because you were wrong.
Whenever something points out I’m wrong about something, I take a moment, process it, and then tell myself, “Okay, I’ve learned something today. That’s good.”
Because it is good. I’m learning and becoming a better person with a more accurate set of knowledge in my head. Being wrong hasn’t made me less valuable to the people around, but more valuable.
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If you refuse to admit when you are wrong, all you are doing is holding yourself back and preventing yourself from growing.
Of course, you’re not always going to be wrong, just because someone disagrees with you. But once you learn how to turn being wrong into a positive experience, you open up your mind to the reality that you might be wrong. And with that possibility open to you, you are making yourself free to grow and change as a person.
It doesn’t matter if we were ever wrong. Everyone is, at some point or another. All that matters is learning from it and moving forward as a better, more educated human being.