Changing Personality is Possible - Here’s How to Make It Happen
The journey to become a badass is a long and exciting one, but it’s also very difficult. It involves facing discomfort head on and battling challenge after challenge.
And on that path, one of the challenges you’ll eventually bump up against is actually yourself – or more accurately, your personality.
You see, as much as some of us like to think we’re perfect, none of us are. We all have strengths and weaknesses. We all have aspects of our personality that help us, as well as aspects that hinder us.
To complicate matters, strengths and weaknesses can also change from moment to moment or situation to situation.
Being highly extraverted might be a strength when you’re out at a party, but it can create problems when you need to lock yourself away in your office to finish a project.
Even without the nuance of the situation, personality is already a deeply complicated topic. Combine the two and we’re left in muddy water with no clue which way is up.
But all is not lost – psychologists are working hard to clear the mud away.
The best attempt psychological science has made at simplifying personality so far comes in the form of The Big 5 Personality Model. Let’s run through it quickly.
The Big 5
In simple terms, The Big 5 Model is the idea that an individual’s personality can be summarised based on where they sit across 5 key traits. These traits are:
Openness to experience – How open the individual is to new experiences
Conscientiousness – Orderliness, industriousness, and attention to detail
Extraversion – Sociability and how much the individual is drawn to external stimuli and environments
Agreeableness – The ability to understand others and empathise with them, as well as the desire to keep them happy
Neuroticism – Emotional volatility and the tendency to worry
Disclaimer: the above are quick and dirty definitions, designed to give you a general sense for the traits. I recommend reading the book I’ll be mentioning a little later in the article. That’ll give you a more complete definition along with examples. Anyway, moving on…
The idea is that each of the above exists on a spectrum. Take openness to experience for example – it’s possible to be anywhere from extremely open to new experiences, to not at all. It’s also entirely possible that you sit in the middle and find yourself somewhat open to some new experiences but not others.
To provide a more personal example, I sit roughly in the middle for extraversion. I often find myself wanting to leave my house, talk to people, and engage with the world. However, the introverted half of my personality also frequently demands that I take some quiet time to decompress.
This is where the Big 5 Model works – the nuance is built in. There’s no binary system categorising you as either an introvert or extravert. On all traits, most people are likely to be a shade of grey; somewhere between the two extremes. Find out where you sit by taking the test HERE.
But this is all just some necessary context. The point of this article is less about the traits themselves and more about how you might be able to change where you sit on the spectrum for each. Assuming you want to, of course.
This idea came from one of my recent reads, ‘Be Who You Want’ by Christian Jarrett. Throughout the book, he talks about how people can change, within the context of the Big 5 Personality Traits.
And one of the most profound ideas I took away from it was that research supports not only that our personalities can and do change over time, but also that we can direct how they change.
Luckily, Jarrett covered some methods for how to do this throughout the book – I’ll talk through one now but I highly recommend reading it yourself for a full breakdown.
My hands down favourite method was quite simple: changing personality is possible by being deliberate about how they spend their time. The idea being that how we spend our days dictates who we become.
It sounds obvious as I write it out… and it definitely is, but that raises the question – why aren’t more people using this to their advantage?
Why aren’t people who wish they had a stronger work ethic deliberately seeking out situations that demand they work for longer periods?
Why aren’t aspiring extraverts forcing themselves out of the house into high-stimulation environments?
And that’s really the takeaway here – who could you become if you were more deliberate about changing your personality?
With that in mind, take some time to think about these two questions:
How would you like to shift your personality over the next 12 months?
How should you be spending your time to support yourself in changing personality?
Have a think about these and then start changing up how you spend your time accordingly. You’ll have a badass personality in no time.