MM_Sept2026 - E3 Being wrong isn't the opposite of being wise_AUDIO
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[00:00:00] None of that means that our original decisions were wrong. It just means that the outcome didn't match what we expected. And those two things feel identical in the moment, even though they're not the same thing at all
[00:00:22] Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness. So take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. This month, we're spending time with decisions, the ones we make, the ones we avoid, and the ones that quietly wear us down before we even realize it.
[00:00:42] Decision-making can get exhausting when we stop trusting ourselves, and this month, we're focusing on choices that feel grounded instead of draining. Last episode, I looked at what happens when a mind runs out of room. It's a capacity thing, not a character [00:01:00] problem, and this week, I'm looking at something different.
[00:01:03] What happens when a decision was actually a good one and the outcome still didn't go the way it was supposed to? Some decisions feel obviously wise the moment you make them, not because you can predict exactly how they'll turn out, because you can't, but more so because everything you actually know in that moment points in the same direction.
[00:01:28] Imagine this. I'm flying back from California. I'm wedged into the middle seat. I'm little. I'm tiny. I have no problem with that. I have my laptop open, and I'm doing everything in my power to project, "Please don't talk to me," to whoever is sitting on either side of me. Flights are one of the only places at that time I could get real, uninterrupted, focused time, and I was deep in it, and then out of nowhere, a voice right next to me sitting in the window [00:02:00] says, "Julia?"
[00:02:02] And I look over, and it's someone I actually know. I didn't even notice until we were in the air. Not well, not a close friend, but someone I'd been acquainted with before. And I'll be honest, as much as I love a quiet flight, there was something genuinely nice about that particular interruption. She was a familiar face, unexpected, and mid-flight, and we got to talking.
[00:02:27] And it turned out I was deep into running, at that time, a group coaching program, and she seemed exactly the kind of person that I built it for. She was sharp, high-functioning, the kind of professional I work with every day in my program. So there was something about already knowing her, too. It was a familiarity that made the whole thing feel, well, felt like a sure thing.
[00:02:52] So I offered her a discovery call, and she signed up for it immediately. It didn't take long. Once she was actually inside my [00:03:00] program and approved, and it was-- it seemed like a good fit, it didn't take long to see that something I hadn't been able to see from our conversation on the plane or in a single discovery call.
[00:03:10] It was an hour-long call. It was something that I'd missed. She was navigating something much deeper than what my coaching model was built to hold, something that needed more psychiatric and psychologic support, not just a group coaching program for highly functioning professionals. My gut in the moment on the plane, I said yes.
[00:03:32] It told me I could help her. And in a very real way, that gut instinct wasn't wrong to trust. I've always trusted it. It was working with everything I had access to at the time on the plane and during the discovery call. The outcome didn't match my prediction, and that gap, that in-between, what I expected versus what turned out to be true, [00:04:00] is exactly where this episode covers.
[00:04:03] Here's the part that still sits uncomfortable with me It wasn't a casual decision to bring her into my group coaching program. I did a genuinely thorough discovery call with her, the kind I do with everybody before they join my group. I asked real questions. I listened. And given my background as a physician and everything I trained in since going through my coaching and hypnotherapy training, I felt equipped, more than equipped, actually.
[00:04:33] I felt like this was exactly the kind of person and the kind of situation I knew how to hold space for. So the surprise that this went sideways really wasn't just about her. It was also about me, about how much I hadn't seen despite actually looking. And it didn't happen all at once. It was smaller moments that stacked up over time.
[00:04:57] She made an offhand comment in the group session that [00:05:00] didn't quite fit the room, or a response to a simple coaching question that really carried more weight than the question ever intended. And underneath it all, something I hadn't fully clocked in during the discovery call. She had real buyer's regret, a fear that she failed no matter what, the way she'd failed in so many other places in her life before.
[00:05:23] And that fear of failure for her wasn't something my discovery call was ever going to fully surface. It came out sideways in the room and over time. And I remember sitting with it, that quiet, uncomfortable knowing that starts before you're ready to really admit something to yourself. What became clear for me wasn't only that she needed a different kind of support.
[00:05:48] It was that she wasn't willing or able to follow my group's structure or to seek outside psychological support that would let her stay in the group. [00:06:00] And that's what mattered. Because my group only works when everyone in it can hold the same container with respect and understanding, and I couldn't make her f- be ready.
[00:06:11] I could only see clearly that she wasn't I'm sharing this story for a particular purpose, not just to share my stories or my failures, but to help unfurl what this episode's about. The conversation with her about telling her gently that what she needed was beyond what I could equip her for during this coaching program, not because she wasn't worth helping, but because helping her the right way meant stepping back and not leaning into the future.
[00:06:44] I reimbursed her in full, and it was one of the harder conversation I've had in my coaching work, precisely because nothing about the original decision or conversation or process that I had to vet somebody for my program was wrong. It felt [00:07:00] right, and that's what made the outcome so disorienting. And this is where I wanna go with this episode.
[00:07:07] Here's what is actually happening. Underneath that disorientation, my brain, our brains, don't just react to the world. They predict it constantly in real time, updating those predictions faster than our conscious mind can keep up with based upon our past, our religion, our upbringing, our education. We have decisions that have built-in expectations of what should happen next based upon our knowledge from the past.
[00:07:40] And when what actually happens diverges from that expectation, our brains generate something researchers call Prediction error. This is a real thing, folks. Prediction error. It's a mismatched signal, the exact size of the gap [00:08:00] between what we expected and what occurred. Prediction error. We predicted something, and we were wrong, right?
[00:08:08] That signal isn't punishment. It's not the brain flagging a mistake. It's just information, raw material that our brain uses to update our model of how the world should be, and then we shift it. A large prediction error simply means that we had a big gap from what we thought was gonna happen and what actually happened, right?
[00:08:32] It says nothing on its own about whether our original prediction was foolish or stupid or wrong or whatever to make. It's just a prediction error. We predicted something, and we were wrong, right? But we did that prediction based upon our past and the evidence we had at the time we made the decision. And once we see it in one place, it's going to tend to show up everywhere else too.
[00:08:57] Once you start looking at your prediction errors, [00:09:00] ah, life becomes a little intriguing. Maybe it's a patient whose lab that I saw looked really reassuring, whose story lined up and whose symptoms were consistent with those labs, who got the plan that I gave for their health, and then something unexpected happened anyway.
[00:09:18] It happens. That's why we call it the practice of medicine, because we predict based upon what we know, but we don't know everything because we're human beings, right? Or maybe we hire somebody who interviews really, really great, and it didn't work out at all. Maybe it's trusting someone's word about their readiness, for example, my program, or their readiness for a relationship, a next step, and watching that readiness turn out to be more complicated than anybody really knew what was going on.
[00:09:54] Because here's the pattern underneath it all. Our minds replay these moments [00:10:00] over and over, hunting for a clue that it should have caught. Was there something I missed or a word that should have tipped me off or something just should have made it clear to us as we do these things? But that replaying in our brain isn't pointless when things go sideways.
[00:10:19] It's just our brain trying to learn something for the next thing that happens for our future. That part's really useful. What's not useful is what usually comes along for the ride. A quiet, creeping feeling that missing a clue somewhere meant that our original call was wrong or bad, that the decision was a mistake in and of itself.
[00:10:47] Because here's the deal. The decision we might make is built on real information, genuine conversations, real listening, real training and education [00:11:00] isn't the same as a guess We make calls made in good faith with everything reasonably available to us at the time. Some of what matters most just isn't visible yet.
[00:11:15] It might show up later over time, because some things only come out when we're actually living inside of a situation, not describing it or predicting something for the future. That's the part that's easy to miss under the sting of being surprised when things go south or unexpected. It doesn't look like a good judgment that ran into more than a single conversation could reveal.
[00:11:43] It looks like a failure that we didn't see something coming, but it isn't. It's just the plain limit of what, in my circumstance, one conversation or one moment can ever tell us about one person before [00:12:00] time exposes and shows us the rest. And we need to stop beating ourselves around on this one, because here's where the meaning actually shifts.
[00:12:11] The moment we realize that a decision we make or a fit wasn't right, that discomfort, that second-guessing, that constant ruminating and replaying all the clues that we may have missed, none of that means that our original decisions were wrong. It just means that the outcome didn't match what we expected, and those two things feel identical in the moment, even though they're not the same thing at all.
[00:12:42] Sometimes our wisdom doesn't get measured by the outcome we get. Our wisdom gets measured by what we reasonably knew at the time we made the decision. Maybe a thorough conversation or really listening or [00:13:00] really leaning in on our experience and our training. That's what a wise decision actually looks like going on.
[00:13:08] But what happens afterwards, once we get new information showing up that we genuinely couldn't have seen in any other way, doesn't reach backwards and rewrite what we just went through. It just gave us something new to work with going forward. That's the real whole shift. Being wrong isn't the opposite of being wise.
[00:13:36] The title and the process of this episode. Being wrong isn't the opposite of being wise. They're not even measuring the same thing. Think about a weather forecaster calling for 70% chance of sunshine, and it rains. Nobody reasonably looks at and says, "Oh, the forecaster was foolish, didn't know what they were [00:14:00] doing."
[00:14:00] They just make the best call available with the information they had. The rain doesn't erase any of that. It just means that this particular day landed in the 30% that nobody could see coming. That's exactly what happened on the plane with me and that client, and during her discovery call, and even in the group.
[00:14:22] Wise was about the decision I made. I listened, I went through the training, I cared, but wrong showed up anyway, and that's just how things turn out. There's real relief in that once it stops being a theory and starts becoming something we can actually believe. It means we were never supposed to predict everything perfectly before making decisions.
[00:14:48] Nobody can. It just means we get to decide as well as we can and what we actually have And let the information update the plan [00:15:00] as we go without letting that update convince us that we were foolish to begin with. I will say that again. This is worth saying. Let me say this for a second way, because there's something sneaky happening in how we remember these moments when things go differently than we originally intended.
[00:15:20] Here's what I mean. Once we already know how something turned out, our brain quietly rewrites the story of how obvious it was. Researchers call this hindsight bias. Hindsight bias, but really it's just our brain's tendency to look back and say, "I should have seen that coming," when honestly, in the moment, we could not have.
[00:15:47] Another example. Think about a football game that you already knew the outcome for. For example, every year at the beach when all the Bowling clan comes together, they re-watch their favorite Ohio State football [00:16:00] game. You know the answer. We've already known that. We've seen it, and most of the people were actually at the game, right?
[00:16:07] But now you go back, and you know your team lost or won, but you can see every mistake. For example, a fumble in the first quarter, "Oh, that's, that's a bad call. They, they screwed that up. That's what ended the game." Or you might say, "That's the turning point." But if you'd been asked to predict the loss in the moment, you probably wouldn't have, right?
[00:16:30] The ending is what's making the beginning look so obvious. Now, we know the end, so we go back and look at the beginning and like, "Oh, there's the mistake. There's the mistake. Should've seen that. Should've seen that," right? That's hindsight bias. In hindsight, we can see how those mistakes led to our end result.
[00:16:49] That's exactly what happened with my client. Looking back, I can now point to a comment here or a hesitation there or a gut instinct, and it's tempting for me [00:17:00] to tell myself, "I should've caught that
[00:17:09] But in the room, in the real time, way back then, before I knew how things would unfold, those moments didn't carry the weight they carry now. They can only look like red flags now because I know where the story ends up. Here's the shift in the meaning, the nagging sentence to yourself, "Ah, I should have known that."
[00:17:25] That feeling isn't actually evidence that we missed something that we should have caught. Most of the time, it's just hindsight, and it's dressed up as insight. Our own memory is playing tricks on us, making the unpredictable feeling like it should have been predictable all along. I hope this makes sense 'cause once that's visible, something small becomes possible.
[00:17:52] The next time that sentence, "I should have seen it coming," or that voice shows up, we can gently [00:18:00] ask it, "Would I have actually known this back then before I knew how this all ended?" Folks, and most of the time, honestly, the answer is no. And that's not a flaw in us. It's just how our memory works when it already knows the ending.
[00:18:18] And once we can see that, we get to offer ourselves something we might have not done before. A little grace for not being able to predict an outcome that, in the moment, genuinely wasn't ours to predict in the past. This is where we have to give ourselves grace and check how the internal dialogue in our own head's going.
[00:18:41] Here's where the mindset itself gets to shift. Not the behavior first, but the story we give it underneath it all. Because most of us carry some version of an old script for moments like that on the plane for me or that discovery call for the group that if it [00:19:00] didn't work out, that means I misjudged, that my gut can't be trusted, that next time I need to be more careful, more suspicious, and slower to say yes.
[00:19:14] There's another way to hold that moment, though. Not that I misjudged this, but I made a wise call with what I had, and the outcome still surprised me. And that's just what happens sometimes, even when we do everything right. Those are two different stories, and one of them is actually true. Because here's the thing.
[00:19:41] If the lessons become trust myself less, that's not actually a lesson. That's just fear wearing a costume of wisdom. The real lesson is smaller, more useful. Vet a little more before bringing [00:20:00] someone else into the group setting. That's it for me. I need to vet a little more before bringing someone else into the group setting, period.
[00:20:08] That's genuinely all this outcome taught me. It didn't teach me that my gut was broken. It taught me one specific practical thing to do differently next time, such as have more distinct questions, which is exactly how good judgment is supposed to grow. You see, that distinction matters more than it might seem.
[00:20:30] Self-trust doesn't mean never being surprised. Self-trust means trusting that we made the best call we could with the information we had in the situation where we were and still being willing to make the call next time too, and not shrieking back from those decisions in the future. I could have said, "I can't trust myself.
[00:20:53] I'm not bringing anybody else into my group coaching program." No, I had to say, "Hmm, wisdom, [00:21:00] I learned, I changed. I'm vetting more." And that's how we want this to land, right? All right. So before moving into today's unicity moment, here's something worth sitting for for a beat. Somewhere in the past, there might have been a decision that didn't turn out the way you want it to or the way you thought it was supposed to.
[00:21:22] Maybe it's still getting replayed in your head, looking for clues like, "Why didn't I pick that up? What should have I done differently?" So what would it be like to ask yourself and your memory one honest question? Given only what I knew then, not what I know now, what I knew then, was it actually a reasonable call or decision?
[00:21:49] No need to answer that out loud or even fully right now. Just let the question sit here for a second and do whatever quiet work needs to do. [00:22:00] Again, you're gonna ask yourself a question somewhere in the past, a decision, whether it was to get married or just bake a cake or go someplace that you didn't wanna go to, or any decision, small or big, right?
[00:22:15] Asking yourself, "Given what I knew then, not what I know now, was it an actual reasonable call?" Before we begin, I wanna offer a gentle note. We are about to do a guided experience, an invitation to slow down and turn inwards, and you're always in control. You can open your eyes, participate a little bit or not at all.
[00:22:38] This is not something you have to do. It's just a gift you can give yourself just to receive what's useful, and just leave whatever isn't on the table. If you're driving a machinery or driving a car, don't close your eyes. You're welcome to stay present and be-- keep your focus on whatever you're doing. Or better yet, just listen to [00:23:00] this maybe a later time.
[00:23:02] And whenever it feels right, you can just soften your gaze downward. Take a couple blinks. If your eyes feel heavy and you're ready for some inner work and peace, just let your eyes close gently
[00:23:23] And bring your attention to one of your hands, either one, and gently, slowly just close it into a soft fist. Not tight, not forced, just closed. And notice what that feels like, the effort of holding something closed
[00:23:48] And now on your next exhale, just let it open. Just let it go. Fingers spreading, palm [00:24:00] relaxing, and nothing to hold anymore
[00:24:06] And notice this difference between the closed hand that you opened and the open one One took effort to maintain, the other one didn't. That open hand is just resting And let your breath find that same quality, the opening and the resting Nothing has to be gripped tightly
[00:24:41] And perhaps somewhere in your memory, there was a decision that your mind is still holding onto maybe a little too tightly. Maybe playing it over and over again, gripping it, looking for a clue that maybe this is something we should have caught along [00:25:00] the way. It might be something small, what to have to drink today, or which route to take to get to somewhere.
[00:25:12] And it might be something that shaped your life for years, whether to marry, whether to leave a marriage, or whether to change jobs or to stay, or to have a conversation that might be simple or complex, ordinary or enormous Somewhere in your mind, there's a decision sitting there still gripped a little too tightly perhaps And you might imagine that memory now, whatever it is, resting in your open palm Not to fix it, [00:26:00] not to relive it Just to hold it loosely instead of tightly.
[00:26:08] The way an open hand holds something instead of a closed fist
[00:26:16] You knew what you knew back then. That's what's resting in your palm Not everything, just what was actually available to you in that moment And that was enough to make the decision that you made back then
[00:26:38] This looseness, this open-handed way of holding onto a decision instead of gripping it, is available anytime you need it Here's how to carry it. The next time an old decision starts replaying, looking for a clue that you think you missed, [00:27:00] try this. Gently close one hand into a soft fist and hold it for just a breath, and then let it open That release, that exact feeling of letting go of the grip, is the same one you're feeling right now.
[00:27:24] It's small. It's quiet. Nobody around you even has to notice. But it's yours. Anytime the mind starts gripping something, it doesn't need to hold onto so tightly And whatever came up for you while you were holding that memory doesn't need to be resolved right now. It can simply rest, open palmed, unexamined[00:28:00]
[00:28:02] And bring your attention back to your breath to the weight of your body and to the sounds all around you Letting both hands rest naturally. And whenever it feels right, gently let your eyes open
[00:28:27] That open hand is available anytime, not just here, but the next time a decision from the past tries to convince you it should have gone differently. Just a breath and an open-handed release to let it go. So maybe this episode was never really about the plane or my discovery call or a group that didn't work out the way it was supposed to.
[00:28:55] It was really about the gap between what we predict things should be [00:29:00] and what actually happens, and how ordinary that gap is. It's not a failure of judgment. It's just the plain limit of what any one moment can tell us. If there's a decision in your brain that's still getting replayed over and over, looking for a clue that we should have noticed to give it away that this was a bad experience or something going wrong or not happening, that's not proof that you had bad judgment, and it's just hindsight, right?
[00:29:33] So next time, I'm going to stay with decisions in the next episode, but we're gonna look at something a little different, what it feels like to brace for a choice long before it's even made, and while bracing can be more exhausting than the decision itself. Thanks everybody. If this episode landed with you, I would genuinely love to hear about it.
[00:29:57] Find me on Instagram. Join my [00:30:00] newsletter at juliabolenmd.com, where I share what's coming up next. Be the first to know. Thank you for spending time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
[00:30:19] Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life.
