Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

by Benjamin P. Hardy

It isn’t the contents of your past that need changing, but how you view them today. As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It’s not about seeing a million things, but being able to see the same things a million different ways. And hopefully in better and more useful ways.

Viewing your past in more effective and healthy ways is a natural aspect of evolving as a person. Seeking new experiences is an essential and powerful part of this evolution. However, far too often, people fail to learn from or be transformed by their experiences. Instead, they often avoid them, or fail to learn from them as they happen.

In order to actively create new experiences and be transformed by them, you’ll need to become more psychologically flexible. Psychological flexibility is the skill of being fluid and adaptive, holding your emotions loosely, and moving toward chosen goals or values. You need psychological flexibility to reframe your past and imagine a future self. The more flexible you become, ...

Becoming psychologically flexible is part of becoming more emotionally evolved as a human being. Emotional development is at the core of understanding personality. The less emotionally developed and flexible a person is, the more they will avoid hard experiences. The more they’ll be limited and defined by painful experiences from their past. This is counterintuitive, as many people come to believe the...

You become more psychologically flexible and emotionally evolved by facing your past, head-on, and by getting help from other people. Every ...

Emotions are the doorway to growth and learning. The reason people’s personalities plateau and get stuck in repetitive cycles is because they are avoiding the difficult and challenging emotions involved in learning and in connecting with themselves and others. As a result, they remain weighted down by their limited perceptions of their past far longer than necessary.