Why Do We Struggle So Much With People Changing?

Why Do We Struggle So Much With People Changing?

Somewhere along the way, many of us, particularly in Western society, have picked up this belief that we’re supposed to know who we are and stick to it. We’re encouraged to define ourselves early on, choose a path, settle into a role, and stay there. Whether it’s personality types, careers, hobbies, or even favourite colours, there’s this underlying pressure to decide, and then not waver.

It’s as though we’ve forgotten that we’re allowed to change.

We’ve gone so far down the road of categorising and personality profiling that we’ve made it difficult for people to simply be. There are colour-based personality tests, bird analogies (are you the owl or the dove?), career profiling, love languages, and endless self-development quizzes, all trying to pin down our essence. They can be helpful in some ways, offering insight or language for self-understanding — but they often become more like cages than tools.

We forget that we can be many things at once. You might resonate with the boldness of red and the calm of blue. You might feel like a lion on some days and a dolphin on others. One week your favourite flower is a rose, the next it’s a buttercup. One season of your life you might thrive in structure, and the next you might need wildness, spontaneity, or stillness. None of this is a contradiction. It’s just being human.

Yet the moment someone shifts, changes their opinion, or chooses a new direction, we often label it as flaky, indecisive, inconsistent. We want people to be understandable, even predictable. We want to know where they stand so we can work out how to relate to them. But life doesn’t really work like that, does it?

There’s a Buddhist teaching I love that compares the oak tree to the bamboo. The oak is strong, rooted, unmoving. But in a storm, it can snap. The bamboo, by contrast, bends with the wind — it’s flexible, responsive, resilient. That’s what allows it to survive. We can be like that too. But somewhere along the line, flexibility became something to be suspicious of, as if changing your mind makes you untrustworthy.

I think we need to separate the concept of values from identity. You can stay rooted in your values, like kindness, integrity, curiosity — and still evolve how you express them. Just because someone changes jobs, explores a new way of thinking, or realises they no longer love the things they used to, doesn’t mean they’re lost or ungrounded. They might just be growing.

The truth is, most of us change all the time — but we’re conditioned to pretend we don’t. We announce our favourite colour as a child, and for some reason that becomes part of our identity. We commit to a football team as a teenager and feel guilty if we start admiring another. We choose a university subject at 18 and then struggle with shame or confusion if we realise it’s not what we want at 30. As though being loyal to a past version of ourselves is more important than being honest in the present.

What if we allowed ourselves… and each other — to be works in progress?

What if we stopped needing everyone to be one fixed thing, and accepted that change is part of what makes us alive?

There’s something so beautiful about letting yourself evolve. One day you love pink, the next it’s green. One year you feel driven and ambitious, and the next all you want is rest and gentleness. That doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you’re listening. You’re in relationship with yourself, not just performing a version of you that made sense once upon a time.

So no, you don’t have to pick one label and stick with it. You don’t have to fit in a box. You don’t have to explain or justify every change. It’s okay to be different today than you were yesterday.

You are allowed to be the oak and the bamboo.

Or neither.

Or both — depending on the weather.