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Many of us have some aspect of our personalities we wish we could change. Maybe you’d love to be a bit more outgoing, daring, resilient, or hard-working. But it can feel as if shifting something as fundamental as your personality is mission impossible.
Aren’t we stuck with the traits we’re born with?
Actually no, says science. Of course, genetics plays some role in personality. As anyone who has dealt with two or more toddlers can tell you, some of us are born shyer or chattier than others, and these tendencies follow us to some extent throughout our lives.
But when one 64-year-long study examined personality tests for the same individuals over decades, it found basically no relationship between people’s results in their teens and their later years. You are a totally different person at 72 than you were at 14.
Which invites the question, if personality shifts over time, can you consciously control the process? Can you speed it up? Can you direct it? The answer according to both fascinating personal experience and research appears to be yes.
From teenage slacker to successful achiever
We’ll start with a personal story from Shannon Sauer-Zavala, a University of Kentucky psychology professor. In a recent Psychology Today post, she explained she definitely wasn’t voted most likely to succeed in high school. In fact she was a shy, messy wallflower who skipped so many math classes she needed to repeat algebra and was repeatedly told by teachers she “wasn’t living up to her potential.”
Now she has a PhD, a TEDx Talk, and a successful career under her belt, and she regularly puts herself out there as living proof that personality change is possible.
“I love telling people about my own personality change story as a way to bust the myth that traits are set in stone,” she writes. So how did she do it?
Sauer-Zavala seems to have been lucky enough not to be carrying any extreme trauma or a difficult diagnosis. She was just a run-of-the mill, low-motivation high school kid, which allowed her to mold her personality with little more than curiosity, passion, and a series of small, doable behavior shifts.
First, she stumbled on psychology in college and discovered something she truly was interested in.
“I was not a strong student in high school and that definitely carried over into college. In my freshman year, unclear on where to focus my studies, I took an Introduction to Psychology course that caught my eye; despite the 8 am start time, I managed to get myself out of bed to attend class. I was rewarded by performing very well on the first exam and the teaching assistant encouraged me to ‘seriously consider majoring in Psychology,'” Sauer-Zavala reports.
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