You Can Change Your Personality by Doing This One Thing (Podcast Episode 287)

So, you want to change some aspects of your personality. Maybe you’ve got a short fuse and want to be more calm. Maybe you’re shy and introverted and want to be more outgoing. Whatever your reason, you’re likely asking yourself, “Is it even possible to change my personality?” The short answer is, “Yes.” But there are some steps to make that happen. Today you’ll learn the five traits that make up your personality and the one tip (from the research, of course) that will help you make changes that last.

10-minute read

Introduction

Sigmund Freud said that your personality was pretty much set by the time you turned five. And we know from the research that your personality is often relatively stable through adulthood (although it does tend to change some as we age). However, we do know that you can take action to make changes, if you’re willing to take the time to educate yourself and then be consistent with the new behavior I’ll talk about today.

You might also be thinking that if you’re born this way, how can you make changes? You might be saying, “Well, I’ve always been outgoing” or “I’ve never liked meeting new people,” but what we know from the research is that personality is mostly due to a mix of your genes and your environment (so nature and nurture).

The Big Five Personality Traits

Psychologists have spent decades coming up with different theories of what traits make up a person’s personality. In the 1970s, two research teams, working independently, came up with what is now known as The Big Five Personality Traits. The first team was made up of Paul Costa and Robert McCrae at the National Institutes of Health, and the other team was Warren Norman (of the University of Michigan) and Lewis Goldberg (at the University of Oregon). Although they took slightly different paths, they ended up at the same place. What’s most important (to me) to note is that neither set of researchers was trying to find these five dimensions of personality. Instead, these five dimensions emerged as a result of their research.

Curious about your personality type? Take the Big Five Psychology test to learn about your personality.

It’s also important to note that these Big Five traits hold up even when taking culture and language into account. There are, of course, interesting differences when we look at culture and language, but nothing that’s statistically significant (at least so far). All of the personality traits are really continuums, which I’ll explain in a moment. But we’ll start with the traits themselves and then chat about what it means to be high in a trait or low in that trait.

In school, I was taught to remember the big five personality traits with the acronym OCEAN:

O: Openness

C: Conscientiousness

E: Extraversion

A: Agreeableness

N: Neuroticism

Openness

The continuum for openness would start with a high of being very creative and a low of resisting change and new ideas. People who score higher on this dimension would be creative, like new challenges, and be open to trying new things and meeting new people. People on the lower end would be more rigid or conventional with right and wrong thinking, and not very imaginative. They’d likely struggle with abstract concepts and would rather stick to routine and not try new things.

Conscientiousness

The continuum here would start with a high of being thoughtful and organized and a low of procrastination and being more messy (I say with love) in their life and scheduling. People scoring higher on conscientiousness have better impulse control, see the details, and enjoy having a set schedule and goals. Meanwhile, those scoring lower on this dimension don’t generally like structure, often don’t complete tasks, are more easily distracted and can even be irresponsible.

Extroversion

This particular continuum of The Big Five Personality Traits is about how sociable you are. It’s a broad trait with higher scores showing more initiative, feeling energized by others, being more sociable and enjoying new people and experiences, communicativeness, and being comfortable as the center of attention. Introversion would be on the lower end of this spectrum, which would include people who prefer being alone, who feel drained by other people, are more reserved and likely more submissive to authority.

Agreeableness

This trait is all about how you deal with other people. People who are highly agreeable are friendly, altruistic, empathetic, enjoy helping others, care about others and are warm. On the lower end of this spectrum are people who are more shy, suspicious, don’t care about how others feel (more egocentric), are more competitive, have little interest in someone else’s struggles, and even insult, manipulate or belittle others to get what they want.

Neuroticism

This continuum is all about your emotional stability. People scoring higher on this trait are anxious, irritable and more sad. They have less self-confidence, more anxiety and experience a high amount of stress in their lives. People with lower scores on this dimension are more emotionally stable, they’re resilient and bounce back easily from setbacks, they’re more calm, relaxed, confident and satisfied in their lives. They’re rarely sad or depressed.

The research shows (and it doesn’t take a genius to see why) that people who score higher on the first four traits and lower on neuroticism are more satisfied in their lives, report being happier and are physically healthier. The good news is that the research shows that you can likely move these scores into the happier areas. How permanent those changes become boils down to your consistency and changing some important factors. On a last note, before we get to the tips, research shows that personality does tend to change as you age. Becoming calmer and more socially sensitive as we age is generally referred to as the “maturity principle.”

The Top Tip for Changing Your Personality

If you Google “tips for changing your personality” you’ll find things like, try something new once a month if you score lower on extroversion. While that’s all well and good, there’s other research that really gets to the heart of the matter and will help you more in the long term.

Many experts, including one of my girl crushes, Carol Dweck, PhD (Episode 270 is devoted to her most famous work about the importance of having a growth mindset), say that the real answer to creating lasting personality change is centered on changing your underlying beliefs and your daily habits. I’ve got many episodes you can listen to about changing habits, most notably an interview I did with Stanford researcher BJ Fogg about creating Tiny Habits, and I’ve also done an episode on how to start your day off right (the most important habit change I think you should make). So I’ll focus today on changing those underlying beliefs.

Changing Your Underlying Belief Systems

I have spent many hours on this podcast talking about the huge importance of uncovering your underlying belief systems so you can change the ones that don’t work for you. Dweck says, “People’s beliefs include their mental representations of the nature and workings of the self, of their relationships, and of their world. From infancy, humans develop these beliefs and representations, and many prominent personality theorists of different persuasions acknowledge that they are a fundamental part of personality.” She goes on to quote other esteemed personality researchers as she explains that personality includes how we perceive ourselves, others and the events that happen in our lives. How you perceive yourself and others (what you believe) is at the core of what motivates you, how you set goals and how you prioritize. So, if you want to change your personality, you’ve got to look at these beliefs you have about yourself, others and how you perceive the world working!

This all relates to Dweck’s earlier groundbreaking work with the concept of a fixed or growth mindset. So, if you believe that you can figure things out (a growth mindset), you might be open to new things and take on new challenges (which would have you scoring higher on the openness trait), but if you believe you’re stupid or can’t learn new things, then you can see how this is going to have you scoring much lower on this continuum. So, changing how you perceive yourself, and your beliefs about yourself, is key to changing your personality on not just openness, but I would argue on all the Big Five Traits.

Let’s look at each Big Five Personality Trait and discuss how to look at having new beliefs in each. I think the best way to do this would be through some kind of journaling or answering questions in your head (although I think you’d do better to make this a written exercise).

Journaling is the cheapest form of therapy you’ll find! Learn why you should be journaling and how to do it effectively.

Openness: If you score lower on this dimension, I would recommend looking at your beliefs related to being more open so you’d take some time answering these questions:

When I try something new I’m worried that…
I feel safest when…
If I was less rigid/structured, I’m afraid that…