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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

The two most crucial factors influencing your ability to make choices are your social and cultural environments, as well as your emotional development as a person. The more emotionally evolved you become, the less defined you’ll be by your past and the less constrained you’ll be by your circumstances.

Instead of being fixed, you will be flexible. Instead of avoiding or suppressing emotions, you’ll embrace and be transformed through them.

That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate but trained. It can and does change. It can and should be chosen and designed. Choosing one’s own way is a primary purpose of our lives. Yet there is a fear in making choices, because choices have consequences. As a result, people avoid making decisions, fail to choose their own way, and limit their capacity for growth, learning, and change.

Sure, it’s helpful when growing up to get guidance and direction, but fundamental to maturity is making your own decisions, defining a meaningful purpose for yourself, and elevating yourself and others through that purpose.

It truly doesn’t matter what your past has been. It doesn’t matter what some stupid personality test says or what people from your high school think about you. What matters is who you want to be. What matters are the choices you make.

And in a world where information, travel, connection, and experience are easier to get than ever before, many of the constraints of previous generations are gone. Choice is far more abundant, even overabundant. And as a result, responsibility for choice, and who we become as individuals and societies, is far higher.

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.

An obvious way to see that our personality has changed over time is how we respond to our previous decisions.

when you begin actively and intentionally moving forward in your life, not only does your future get better but your past does as well. Your past increasingly becomes something happening for you, not to you.