The willingness to be wrong can lead to great things. “Opening up to changing your mind allows others to inspire you and expand your ideas in ways you never thought possible,” says Rhonda Britten, author of Change Your Life in 30 Days: A Journey to Finding Your True Self (Dutton, $22, www.amazon.com ). Opening yourself up can also literally change your mind. If you’re a pessimist who wants to be an optimist, you can practice rerouting your thoughts to change them. “Your brain circuitry gets set up so that when your thoughts start rolling in a particular direction, they create a rut in your brain,” says New York City psychiatrist Susan C. Vaughan, author of Half Empty, Half Full: How to Take Control and Live Life as an Optimist (Harvest, $14, www.amazon.com). “When you challenge how you’re thinking, you can retune your neurocircuitry and change your brain.” But it takes practice. The next time you have a pessimistic thought, Vaughan suggests, make a list of all the reasons that thought may be wrong. (Think no one will hire you? Wrong. List all the reasons why they will.) Do this every time you have a pessimistic thought, Vaughan says, and over time this metacognition, or thinking about thinking, “will actually change your thinking.”

If changing your mind is going to inconvenience others, at least try to do it sooner rather than later, says wedding consultant Joanne M. Kersten of Le Glacé Events, in Dallas. “A bride can change the color of her flowers, but because florists need to place their orders with the growers sometimes as much as two weeks prior to the event, changing her mind can be a very, very costly matter.” Still, Britten warns against letting fear of the fallout freeze you from changing your mind. She says she has met plenty of brides and grooms who have chosen not to — and regretted it. “In my practice,” she says, “I’d say over 50 percent of my clients tell me that on the day of wedding, they knew they were making the wrong decision but didn’t have the courage to change their mind because of the consequences.” Charles Foster, Ph.D., author of What Do I Do Now? Dr. Foster’s 30 Laws of Great Decision Making (Simon & Schuster, $24, www.amazon.com), points out that changing your mind rarely comes without risk. He advises that if you’re leaning strongly in one direction, you should stop wavering and go forward. “Good decision makers never wait until they’re 100 percent convinced,” he says. “You never will be.”