You Are Allowed to Outgrow Old Versions of Yourself
By Trent Carter
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There's a version of you that made sense at the time.
The beliefs you held, the way you practiced, the things you were certain about. The identity you built around your work, your role, your reputation in a particular community or institution. It all made sense given what you knew, where you were, and what you'd been through up to that point.
And then something shifted. Maybe gradually, maybe all at once. You learned something that changed how you saw things. You went through something that reorganized your priorities. You looked up one day and realized the person you'd been performing, the one everyone around you expected, wasn't quite who you actually were anymore.
That moment is uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.
Because the people around you haven't updated their picture of you yet. You're still the person who believes that thing, practices that way, holds that position. Changing means explaining yourself, or not explaining yourself, and living with the gap between who you were and who you're becoming. It means disappointing some people. It means admitting, at least implicitly, that you were wrong about something, or at least not as right as you thought.
Most people avoid that discomfort by just not changing. They stay in the old version because the new one costs too much socially. And they spend years quietly at odds with themselves, performing a self they've already outgrown.
I don't think that's a way to live.
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My Own Version of This
I'll tell you where this gets personal for me.
I came up in a medical culture that was skeptical of medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder. That skepticism wasn't unusual. It was the water a lot of us swam in. The idea that you could treat addiction with another substance, that buprenorphine was a real solution rather than just a substitution, was genuinely contested in the circles I was trained in. I absorbed some of that skepticism. I'm not proud of it in retrospect, but I'm not going to pretend it wasn't there.
What changed me was the patients.
Not a study, not a continuing education seminar, though those helped. What actually changed me was sitting across from real people in real pain and watching what worked and what didn't. Watching people try to white-knuckle through withdrawal because someone told them that was the only legitimate path, and watching them relapse. Watching people start buprenorphine and stabilize in ways that were genuinely remarkable. Watching the difference between treating addiction as a moral failure and treating it as a medical condition.
The evidence was in front of me. And I had a choice. I could protect the version of myself that had already formed opinions on this, or I could let the evidence do what evidence is supposed to do.
I chose the evidence. But it wasn't cost-free. It meant quietly acknowledging that some of what I'd believed was wrong. It meant changing how I practiced in ways that not everyone around me agreed with. It meant becoming a different kind of clinician than I'd set out to be.
I'm glad I did it. It took longer than it should have.
The Identity Trap
Here's the thing about outgrowing yourself that makes it hard. It's not just about changing your mind on a specific topic. It's about identity. And identity is one of the stickiest things in human psychology.
We build narratives about who we are. Those narratives feel like facts. I am someone who believes this. I am someone who practices that way. I am the kind of person who would never do such and such. Those statements feel like descriptions of reality rather than what they actually are, which is stories we've chosen to keep telling.
When new information or new experience challenges the narrative, the brain doesn't automatically update. It pushes back. It looks for reasons the new information is wrong. It finds ways to accommodate the challenge without actually changing the story. Psychologists call this motivated reasoning. I call it being human.
The problem in healthcare, in leadership, in any field where your identity is wrapped up in your expertise, is that motivated reasoning can masquerade as professional integrity. Holding your ground feels like principle even when it's actually just comfort. Skepticism of new ideas feels like rigor even when it's actually just defensiveness.
How do you tell the difference? I've asked myself that question a lot. My honest answer is that genuine principle usually holds up when you examine it carefully. Defensiveness doesn't. If your resistance to something new can't survive honest scrutiny, if the best argument you can make for it is that it's what you've always believed, that's a signal.
What Outgrowing Yourself Actually Requires
It requires honesty first. Specifically, the kind of honesty that most high achievers find uncomfortable, the admission that a previous version of you got something wrong. Not in a self-flagellating way. Not as a public performance of humility. Just a quiet, private acknowledgment that the information has changed and so should you.
That step is harder than it sounds. Especially if you've built a reputation on a particular position. Especially if you've taught something to others that you now think was incomplete. Especially if changing means revisiting decisions you made when you believed differently, and sitting with the weight of what those decisions cost.
I've had to do that. It's not comfortable. It's also the only intellectually honest path forward.
The second thing it requires is tolerance for the awkward transition period. There's almost always a gap between when you've internally changed and when the world around you has caught up. During that gap, people are still relating to the old version of you. They expect the old responses, the old positions, the old way of doing things. Correcting that expectation, consistently, over time, without making a big announcement about your personal evolution, that's its own kind of work.
Some people will be confused. Some will be skeptical. Some will say you've changed like it's an accusation. It is not an accusation. It's a description. Yes. I changed. That was intentional.
Third, it requires some grief. This one surprised me when I first noticed it. Outgrowing an old version of yourself means letting that version go. And even when the old version wasn't serving you, even when you're genuinely glad to be past it, there can be a real sense of loss. Loss of certainty. Loss of a simpler picture of yourself and your work. Loss of the version of your future that you'd imagined from inside the old identity.
That grief is legitimate. It doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. It just means the change was real.
The People Who Knew the Old You
This is where it gets socially complicated, and I want to spend some time here because I think it's one of the real reasons people resist changing.
The people who knew the old you have a stake in you staying that way. Not maliciously, usually. It's just that our relationships are built on patterns and expectations, and when someone changes, it disrupts the pattern. It can feel threatening. It can make people wonder what else might change, or whether they actually know you, or whether their own unchanged positions are suddenly being implicitly criticized.
So they push back. Sometimes openly, sometimes in quieter ways. They reference the old you in ways that feel like anchors. They remind you of things you used to say or believe. They frame your change as inconsistency rather than growth.
I've experienced this. Most people who change in meaningful ways have.
The answer is not to become defensive or to over-explain yourself. You don't owe anyone a detailed justification for your own growth. What you do owe is honesty in your current interactions. If someone asks what you think now, you tell them what you think now. You don't pretend to still hold positions you've left behind just to preserve their comfort.
Some relationships survive this process and become richer for it. The people who can engage with who you're actually becoming rather than who they remember you being, those relationships deepen. They're built on something real.
Some relationships don't survive it. That's a real loss and I don't want to minimize it. But staying frozen in an old version of yourself to preserve relationships that require you to not grow isn't connection. It's performance. And the cost of that performance, paid privately, over years, is enormous.
Outgrowing Certainty
One of the versions of myself I've had to outgrow is the one that needed to have all the answers.
Early in my career I thought confidence meant certainty. That being a good clinician meant knowing, and that admitting uncertainty was the same as admitting incompetence. So I performed certainty even when I didn't have it. I made decisions with more confidence than the evidence warranted. I answered questions I should have said I didn't know the answer to.
That version of me wasn't serving my patients. It was serving my ego.
Growing past it meant learning to be comfortable saying I don't know. Getting used to the silence that follows that sentence without rushing to fill it with something that sounded better. Learning that the most trustworthy clinicians I've met aren't the ones who always have an answer. They're the ones who know the difference between what they know and what they're guessing at.
That shift changed how I practice in concrete ways. I order more consults than I used to. I call colleagues more. I tell patients when I'm uncertain about something rather than presenting false confidence that might reassure them in the short term and mislead them in the long run.
I'm a better clinician for it. I'm also less exhausting to be around, I think, because I'm not working so hard to project an image.
Outgrowing the need to seem certain was one of the more valuable things I've done professionally. It just required letting go of a version of myself I'd been invested in for a long time.
Growth Is Not Betrayal
I want to say something to the person reading this who feels guilty about changing.
Growing is not a betrayal of who you were. The old version of you was doing the best it could with what it had. It got you here. That matters. You don't have to trash it or be ashamed of it or spend energy apologizing for it.
But you also don't have to stay loyal to it past the point where it's serving you.
Loyalty to an old version of yourself isn't virtue. It's just inertia dressed up as integrity. Real integrity means following the evidence, honoring your values even when they evolve, being willing to say this is what I believe now even when it's different from what I believed before.
I think about the patients I've seen in recovery who were stuck on an old story about themselves. The one where they were the addict, the failure, the person who always ended up back in the same place. That story was real once. It described something true about their history. But it was no longer an accurate description of who they were, and holding onto it was actively blocking the life that was available to them.
We do the same thing to ourselves in less dramatic ways all the time. We stay attached to old stories about our capabilities, our limitations, our place in a particular system or community. We let yesterday's version of ourselves vote on today's decisions.
You are allowed to update the story. Actually, more than allowed. It's required, if you want to keep growing.
What This Looks Like Going Forward
I try to hold my current beliefs a little more loosely than I used to. Not in a way that makes me wishy-washy or indecisive. I still have convictions. I still argue for things I believe in. But I try to carry my positions with a little more humility about the fact that I've been wrong before and will be wrong again, and that the version of me five years from now will probably look back at some of what I currently think and wince a little.
That's fine. That's how it's supposed to work.
The goal is not to eventually arrive at a final, correct, unchanging version of yourself. The goal is to stay honest enough, and humble enough, and curious enough, to keep updating. To keep letting the evidence and the experience and the relationships and the failures do what they're supposed to do, which is teach you something.
The people I most admire in medicine, and in life honestly, are not the ones who figured it all out early and held the line. They're the ones who kept changing. Who were willing to be wrong. Who cared more about getting it right than about being seen as someone who was always right.
That is a version of yourself worth growing into.
It will probably look different than you expected. It will require giving up some things you were attached to. It will cost you some comfort and some certainty and maybe some relationships that couldn't make the trip with you.
It is worth it. I say that with conviction, which is a funny thing to say in an essay about holding your convictions loosely. But some things you learn by living them, and this is one of them.
You are allowed to outgrow old versions of yourself.
More than allowed. It's the whole point.
-Trent
About Trent Carter
Trent Carter is a clinician, entrepreneur, and addiction recovery advocate dedicated to transforming lives through evidence-based care, innovation, and leadership. He is the founder of Renew Health and the author of The Recovery Tool Belt.
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