Want To Change Your Personality? Try This.
You’ll get a lot more doing one of these things rather than attending self-help events.
“Well one new development that I’m looking forward to is I might have a job helping out someone file income taxes for his clients. Best of all, he has a lot of them so I’ll probably be busy all year round with work from him if I pass his test.”
“So what changed?”
“I had a talk with another entrepreneur who told me it would be helpful to lean onto something less risky. To use it as a crutch to build yourself up financially.”
“Huh that sounds very familiar.”
“Yeah, I know dad. But back then I was more interested in doing writing than I was with accounting.”
This was one of the conversations I had with my dad a while ago where I might have a gig filing income taxes. I’m confident in my skills in this compared to accounting since I do my own taxes and it’s one of the few areas where I got more hands-on training.
But 8 years ago I was someone different. I was someone who saw moving back home as a bad move, especially when I valued being more independent. I didn’t feel like I needed my degree and that it was a huge waste of my time, especially since I lost interest in the profession near the end.
I finished it out of the sheer necessity since I dragged myself through years of college and university.
But all in all, I changed. It took eight years of writing in self-help, learning about myself, developing my style, and meeting new people, that I’ll at least dabble in the field.
This is just one recent example that I can point to, but over all kinds of points in my life, I can look back and note where my personality changed — for better or for worse. And the most important thing of all is that for the vast majority of them, they never stemmed from a self-help event that promised to “change my life forever”.
They came from particular circumstances that entered my life.
Long-term studies of measuring one’s personality can be chalked up to five big traits:
- Conscientiousness — how impulsive, organized, and disciplined you are.
- Agreeableness — how modest, trusting, and caring you are.
- Extraversion — how much you love to meet new people and engage with other people.
- Openness To Experience — how curious you are of the world and how dedicated to routine you are.
- Neuroticism — your overall emotional stability.
But what triggers these personality changes have alluded us for decades. That is until recently when a team of scientists conducted a meta-analysis and revealed specific life events that trigger a change in someone’s personality.
What Sparks The Change?
The authors of the study focused on ten life events:
- Entering a new relationship
- Getting married
- A birth of a child
- Separation
- Divorce
- Widowhood
- Graduation
- Getting your first job
- Getting unemployed
- Retiring
From there, they found 44 studies that tracked the big five personality traits before and after as well as the studies and compiled them together. Involving 121,187 participants — most from Western countries — the study concluded specific events yielded the biggest personality shifts:
- New relationships and divorce appeared to make someone more conscientious. In other words, after one of these events, a person is likely to be more dutiful and disciplined.
- Landing your first job also boosts conscientiousness even further.
- Marriage is more likely to lower your openness as you’re more likely to be predictable in patterns and averse to change.
- Graduation lowers neuroticism as you’re likely to grow calmer and confident in yourself.
During the initial events, these effects are small, but the authors equate those life events lead to big personality changes over time. Furthermore these experiences and when they occur can also depend on a person’s life circumstances, contexts, and habits.
Case and point, even after eight years of writing, I am still confident in my accounting skills to some extent. A point of pride for me is the fact I never had to go to H&R Block or hire an accountant to do my books or taxes. I’m confident in my ability to do that just fine.
To be fair, I wouldn’t call this a universal rule. After all, the study focused on mostly Western countries and it also requires self-reporting (which is often unreliable, but a necessary evil in social science studies for obvious reasons).
However the Western part of the world is I’d say more exposed to self-improvement and the hype that surrounds it. Where each guru promises that their course or program or event will change your life forever for the better. And so even if this study has some glaring limitations, I think it would still be relevant to a niche group.
After all, it’s a reminder that a self-help guru’s promise to change someone’s life around is a pretty empty one in the grand scheme of things.
But Our Personality Does Gradually Change Too
But the other thing to note about our personality is that it is shifting at least a little bit. A lot of older work reveals that our personalities “improve” naturally as we grow older.
It’s kinda like the adage of “the older you get, the wiser you become.”
Except when you get older, generally you grow more extraverted, agreeable, and conscientious with age. Meanwhile you become less neurotic. This transition is a gradual one, to the point that we don’t actually realize it until we reflect on who we were many years ago.
In essence, what the study mentioned before does is speed up that personality-changing process in us.
It’s important to recognize that our personalities shift little by little regardless of our age. Think back to who you were ten years ago or even five and you’ll notice there are some differences in your views and who you are.
It’s important for us to remember this especially when we are exposed to so many self-help stuff. Gurus promising all kinds of things or offering strategies that can change your life around. Keeping this simple thing in mind that we are constantly changing because of this phenomenon means we might not need what they are offering.
In other words, it can serve as a check for us to step back and consider the practicality of something.
After all, if the self-help gurus themselves aren’t going to hold themselves accountable for the bad or regressive advice they spout out, it’s important for the people the advice is directed to to keep certain things in mind and ask whether something is really good for them or not helpful at all.
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