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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

The most scientifically backed theory of personality breaks it up into what are called the “five factors”: How open you are to learning and experiencing new things (openness to new experience) How organized, motivated, and goal-directed you are (conscientiousness) How energized and connected you are around other people (extroversion) How friendly and optimistic you are toward other people (agreeableness) How well you handle stress and other negative emotions (neuroticism)

Extreme change is more than possible. Indeed, all of the five factors are behaviors and, really, all are learnable skills. You can learn to become more open to new experiences, just as you can actually learn to become less open. You can learn to become more organized and goal-focused. You can learn to become more introverted or extroverted. You can learn to be better at relating to different types of people. You can become more emotionally intelligent rather than reactive and victim-oriented.

In psychology, the name for this phenomenon is the “end-of-history illusion,” and it occurs in people of all ages who believe they have experienced significant personal growth and changes up to the present moment but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.

As Gilbert says, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

It’s harder to imagine the future we want than to remember the past we’ve lived through. Imagination is a skill to be developed, one that few adults truly master. Instead, adults become less creative and imaginative as they age, and increasingly fixed and dogmatic in their narrow viewpoints.

Quick question: How much time do you spend imagining your future self? For most people, the answer is not very much.

What I’ve just described are two major obstacles that prevent people from predicting and creating their future personality: We assume our present personality is a finished product (the end-of-history illusion). We overemphasize the importance of the past, which leads u...

We make countless choices in life, some large and some seemingly small. Looking back, we can see what a great difference some of our choices made in our lives. We make better choices and decisions if we look at the alternatives and ponder where they will lead. . . . Our present and our future will be happier if we are always conscious of the future. . . . “Where will this lead?” is also important in choosing how we label or think of ourselves. . . . Don’t choose to label yourselves or think of yourselves in terms that put a limit on a goal for which you might strive.

Who you want to be in the future is more important than who you are now, and should actually inform who you are now. Your intended future self should direct your current identity and personality far more than your former self does.

there are four far deeper reasons, which keep people stuck in patterns: They continue to be defined by past traumas that haven’t been reframed. They have an identity narrative based on the past, not the future. Their subconscious keeps them consistent with their former self and emotions. They have an environment supporting their current rather than future identity. These are the levers that drive personality—and whether you realize it or not, you can control them.

We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present

If you’re still angry with your parents for your childhood, for example, this speaks more to who you currently are than what actually happened in your childhood. To continue blaming any person or event from the past makes you the victim, and reflects more on you than whoever or whatever it is you’re blaming.

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.”