Mindset, Memory, and the Myth of “Just Think Differently”

Ever noticed how hard it is to shift someone’s thinking, even when the evidence for change is right in front of them?

That’s because mindset - an individual's beliefs about their abilities - profoundly impacts memory by influencing how people approach learning, remember events, and perceive their own knowledge is a form of memory.

Our brains don’t just store facts; they store beliefs and frameworks about how the world works. Over time, these get reinforced so strongly they feel like truth. Challenging them means challenging something deeply encoded in long-term memory, forcing people to challenge their subjective experience of memory.

This, unsurprisingly, is deeply uncomfortable, yet I see it frequently played out in change and transformation programmes.

How many times have you been told to develop a growth mindset, which seems great in principle, but doesn’t quite translate in practice? Leaders might say, “we’re agile now,” but people still approach decisions with a risk-averse, committee-first mindset.

It’s not stubbornness - it’s the brain protecting long-held patterns of thinking that once kept you safe and successful.

It’s the very origin of what it means to be human, and the oldest part of our brain has evolved to prioritise safety and predictability. Our long-term memory encodes the routines, behaviours, and mindsets that once kept us safe - they worked before, so they’re trusted survival strategies. Overwriting them feels like giving up protection.

Mindset change takes more than new structures and slogans. It takes more than just training and on-demand resources. It requires creating repeated experiences that contradict the old pattern and make the new one feel natural. You can’t just tell people to think differently, you have to help them experience a different outcome enough times that it becomes their new default.

As a strategy leader working with clients on these very problems, you can’t just tell people to change their mindset. You have to help them live through new experiences that feel safe and successful. That means surfacing the old patterns, creating small experiments, engineering quick wins, and reinforcing them until they become the new default. Mindset change happens when people experience a different outcome enough times that their brain decides it’s safer than the old way.

Next time you wonder why a mindset won’t shift, remember: the brain is protecting what once worked. I hope this resonates, but even if not, it may give you a different lens on mindset change.