Holding a Position vs. Being a Position
We like to think we have opinions.
Unfortunately, most of the time, the opinion has us.
Today, I want to talk about a trap that we all fall into. The trap of feeling that we are our opinions, all the time. And once an opinion is you, being wrong stops feeling like course correction, and it feels like a personal attack.
We confuse the position we hold with ourselves
Most people don’t hold a position on a topic. They are the position.
At some point an idea stops being something you picked up because the evidence, experience or personality pointed that way. The idea becomes a load-bearing wall in your sense of self.
If someone attacks your idea, you feel they’re not attacking the idea anymore, they’re attacking the person. So you defend it the way you’d defend your house: armed to the teeth.
The cost when you do that is brutal: if changing your mind feels like losing, you’ll stop changing your mind or, at most, do it with extreme pain. And a person who stops changing their mind will stop growing.
Politics is just the extreme version
Now that we are speaking of ideas and holding positions about topics, let’s speak about the most difficult topic to debate.
Why are politics so hard to discuss? Even in group setting, if you have friends that disagree with you on a political level, it’s very hard to discuss politics in an healthy way.
That is because, in politics, almost nobody holds a position. They are the positioning. The other side isn’t “people who weighed the same evidence and landed somewhere else.” They’re wrong, negative, the bad guys. The tribe comes first, and the argument gets reverse-engineered to fit it.
Fortunately, most work is not about debating politics. But that doesn’t prevent us from falling into the tribalistic view of ideas.
The fix: hold your opinion like a tool
A position about any topic is not a tattoo. It’s a tool. You pick it up because it’s useful right now, given what reality is showing you today. When reality shows you something better, you put it down and pick up the new one.
The best environments to be in are the ones where people treat their opinions as tools, not as identity. Tools get picked up, tested, swapped, put down when a better one shows up.
You can still argue hard (harder, sometimes, because you want to get to the truth) but when someone puts a sharper piece of evidence on the table, there’s few resistance.
That’s the whole skill. Argue for your view with everything you’ve got, and stay willing to drop it anytime.
This matters most at work
When team members tie their identities to their ideas, organizations pay an 'identity tax' in lost time and money.
Every team pays some version of this tax. It happens whenever someone defends their idea to the bitter end, despite obvious disagreement and valid counterarguments.
In low-performing teams, inconvenient data is immediately dismissed. When the facts say 'pivot', they freeze, because moving forward requires admitting they were wrong. They cannot change their minds without damaging their self-worth, because they have become indistinguishable from their ideas.
Keep updating
Reality isn’t static, so your positions shouldn’t be either. When you tie your identity to your ideas, you leave a massive amount of untapped potential and personal growth on the table.
The goal isn’t to have no convictions, of course. The goal is to hold convictions that are earned and revised by evidence. And when someone disagrees with your idea, you don’t feel personally attacked.
So next time you're deep in an argument, ask yourself one question: am I defending the idea, or am I defending me?
— Ivo