The change happened in an instant.
The anointing would not have been possible if that were not true.
He was so moved by that single experience that his life’s work flipped as a result of it.
It didn’t flip over a matter of minutes, hours, days, months, or years.
As soon as the experience occurred, Saul was a changed man.
The story is not specific to such a low level of detail and we could speculate till doomsday.
However the moment of truth, when it came, would have come when Paul understood Jesus as a quintessentially kind person that he had been madly persecuting because their manners were fundamentally incompatible. It was the duh, I could have had a V8 moment.
This kind of rejection still goes on in non Christian Jewish circles. What do you mean all our work, slaving over the scriptures and the traditions, to pin down God is in vain? That this character Jesus did everything necessary on our behalf and that God isn’t as simple as we made Him out to be?
Pride cannot coexist with love, is the bottom line. Love needs humility.
Something was changing that's for sure!
The anointing would not have been possible if that were not true.
I contend that the change was incomplete until he was filled with the Spirit.
Titus 3:5-6 ...but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
I am equating "saved" with regeneration and conversion in Paul's writing to Titus.