Your personality is not fixed. Would you like to improve yours?

In 2011, I had the chance to be a participant in research on personality change. The project was titled “The utility of coaching in facilitating positive personality change.” It sounded fascinating as well as beneficial.

            I didn’t have big problems with my personality, but was interested in participating due to my long-term interest in personal development, teaching a class on happiness, and attending coaching workshops the previous year.

            For a long time, most psychologists believed that a person’s personality — the way they relate to themselves and others — was mostly fixed. It might change during childhood, but as an adult you would stay pretty much the same, whether you were relaxed or nervous, cautious or adventure-seeking, pleasant or obnoxious. However, this view about personality has gradually come under question.

            The project was run by Wollongong University PhD student Sue Martin — no relation to me. I started by taking the standard questionnaire used to assess personality according to five traits: emotionality, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Then I had ten coaching sessions with a psychologist to decide what I wanted to change and develop ways to do it.

Sue Martin

            The questionnaire we filled out was the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO PI-R for short. It has 240 statements, each one to be answered with strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree or strongly disagree. Here are a few of the statements.

• I am not a worrier.
• I really like most people I meet.
• I have a very active imagination.
• I tend to be cynical and skeptical of others’ intentions.
• I’m known for my prudence and common sense.

For the research, I ended up filling out the NEO PI-R five times, to see whether and how my personality changed. That’s a lot of responses. I even sent a note to Sue about my difficulty responding to a few of the statements. For example, one statement was

• I’m better than most people, and I know it.

My comment: “Better in what sense? Morally? Driving a car? (Definitely far worse, because I don’t drive.) Being smarter? Swimming?”

            The way personality traits and sub-traits were derived from our responses was not revealed to us. However, some connections were obvious enough. My guess is that answering “strongly disagree” to “I am not a worrier” means being higher on emotionality, and answering “strongly agree” to “I really like most people I meet” means being higher on agreeableness — and maybe feeds into scores on emotionality and extroversion.

            My coach, Louise Turner, told me that most participants wanted to change some aspect of the trait called emotionality, also known as neuroticism. This is about feelings of anxiety, depression and self-consciousness. If you have high levels of anxiety, it would be wonderful to become less anxious.

            Each of the “big five” personality traits is broken down into six sub-traits. For example, the emotionality sub-traits are anxiety, anger, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability. Based on my questionnaire answers, I received a score for each sub-trait and an overall score for the trait. In our trait profiles, each sub-trait was explained. For example, the depression sub-trait “measures the tendency to experience depressive feelings, such as sadness, hopelessness, guilt and loneliness”, and the vulnerability sub-trait assesses vulnerability to stress.

            All up, there were 30 sub-trait assessments, providing quite a detailed picture of my personality. The five-trait tool is standard in psychology, and has been verified repeatedly, mainly in Western cultures. What if I lied in answering the questionnaire? Well, the assessments would be wrong. However, I had no reason to lie. I wanted to see how I could improve.

            Unlike most of the participants in Sue’s project, I didn’t need to reduce my emotionality score. Due to good luck — genetics and/or upbringing — it was rock bottom. Before taking these personality tests, I hadn’t fully recognised how lucky I was to have low levels of anxiety and depression.

Louise Turner

            Talking with my coach Louise, I decided to try to increase my scores on the trait called openness. Some of the statements feeding into openness sub-traits are about liking poetry, and that didn’t appeal to me. So we decided to work on a sub-trait about being aware of other people’s emotions. I had always thought I was no good at that, and my scores on that sub-trait were low, confirming my assumption. Louise suggested a task for me, which I did carefully and systematically. (I’m high on the trait of conscientiousness.)

            For this task, when I had an extended interaction with someone, I tried to notice how they were feeling. Then, to check my perception, I asked them if my assessment was right. I kept a “feelings log.” One entry, for example, was about a meeting in my office with a student of mine, who I’ll call Maria. I took note of my feelings: “relaxed; attentive.” Regarding Maria’s feelings, I wrote, “Maria was cheery and bubbly, as usual, but became more serious (with brow change visible) when discussing her thesis.” I wrote, “She agreed with my comment about her feelings.” My general observation about this was, “Maria is usually very positive; I was able to notice when she slightly changed her attitude: she seemed stressed underneath the overall positivity.”

            After two weeks of keeping a feelings log, Louise commented that I seemed to be fairly good at noticing other people’s feelings. Previously this was intuitive; now I was bringing this to conscious awareness. On retaking the NEO PI-R questionnaire, my score on the openness trait was much higher. However, Louise didn’t think my personality had changed very much. She thought I just had a better understanding of it.

            Even though my personality might have remained much the same, this experience made me appreciate the potential value of personality change, and the role of coaching in the process. Without Louise to guide me, it would have been difficult to decide what to try to change and how to go about it.

            After drafting this post, I contacted Sue, who now works as a psychologist, to check that it’s accurate. She said it was. She said her study was the first intervention study that explored whether personality could be intentionally changed, and commented that since then, there has been more exploration of this area, including by using apps. You can find her publications by searching Google Scholar for “Lesley Sue Martin personality”.

Me, but better

This experience with personality improvement stuck with me. Recently, I heard about a new book about personality change and quickly got hold of it. The author, Olga Khazan, is a US journalist who became interested in the topic and started writing about it. And what better way to connect theory and practice than by trying it out yourself?

            In her book Me, But Better, Khazan tells her readers about herself, her hang-ups, relationships and much else, in the course of one year in which she tried to improve on all five traits in the five-trait model. This wouldn’t be very interesting if she was already close to her ideal self, but — luckily for being able to describe a fascinating journey — there was much she wanted, indeed needed, to improve.

            First let me say that it’s not a good idea to follow her example by trying to change all facets of your personality over a year. It’s too much too quickly. For sustained change, it’s usually better to work on one trait at a time, cementing desirable new thoughts and behaviours over a long enough time so they become habitual, before trying to change another trait. Khazan’s major-personality-makeover approach is akin to crash dieting, which can produce impressive short-term results but is often followed by rebound weight gain. However, there’s one thing to be said for Khazan’s approach: it makes for a much more entertaining story than the slow-but-sure tortoise approach.

            In Me, But Better, we learn a lot about Khazan herself. She had severe anxiety and often behaved obnoxiously. She makes it obvious that she needed to address the traits of neuroticism and agreeableness. And not just for herself. Also for her boyfriend Rich, who she presents as amazingly loving and tolerant, and being willing to put up with her tirades. When she was upset, she verbally took it out on the nearest target: him.

Olga Khazan

            You may or may not be interested in Khazan’s personality transformation, but there’s another side to her book. Along the way she tells about research in the area in a most engaging way, by contacting leading figures in the field and describing their insights. She tells a bit about the history of beliefs about personality, and how it’s measured. The famous US psychologist William James helped solidify the belief that personality, after being established in early life, is fixed. Khazan tells how that belief gradually was whittled away, with personality-change research flourishing in recent years.

            She notes that the Myers-Briggs test, through which you are categorised as one of 16 personality types, is popular but has not been validated scientifically. I too took the Myers-Briggs test, decades ago, but it didn’t provide any guidance on improving, nor did I feel it captured who I was.

            Khazan devotes a chapter to each of the big-five traits, telling how she went about making changes. The basic technique is summed up in the slogan, “Fake it until you make it.” By behaving in the way you’d like to be, after a while — sometimes quite a while — you become a different person.

            I knew this already. As a child and through my teenage years, I was introverted and shy. Attending university, living on campus, opened me up. Being around extroverts can make a person more extroverted. But I also changed through conscious effort. Though it’s not my natural inclination, I’ve tried to initiate conversations with people I didn’t know, for example when sitting next to a stranger on the bus. Eventually I became comfortable doing this, and just needed to be careful not to intrude.

            Khazan, over the course of a year, sought to improve on all five traits, but she didn’t start out poor on all of them. She was high in conscientiousness. Instead of trying to become even higher, which might have taken her into obsessiveness, she recalled being a chronic procrastinator when she was younger. She wanted to become a journalist, and to achieve this, it’s vital to meet deadlines. So great was her desire to be a journalist that she became much more conscientious.

            Me, But Better is an engaging mix of personal anecdote and discussion of research findings. The book showcases evidence challenging the old idea that personality is fixed. Personality can be changed, though it takes time and effort, and it’s not easy to do it alone, without help. Reading Khazan’s book can provide inspiration for change. Khazan notes that some people don’t want to change — they prefer to remain disagreeable.

            Khazan writes, “The best personality-change interventions help people figure out what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to continue changing.” That made me better appreciate my participation in Sue Martin’s research. Louise’s guidance helped me decide what to change and how to go about it.

            Is there a danger that by changing your personality, you will lose something vital about yourself? Khazan tackles this fear, in her case linked to a stereotype that creative geniuses are neurotic. If she reduced her usual levels of anxiety, would she become less creative? It’s reassuring to learn there’s little evidence behind the stereotype.

            On a more general level, personality change raises the threat that you will no longer be the same you. One response is to note that personality changes due to external causes, at any age. So why not take some control over the process and use it to become better at what you want to do and who you want to be? Whatever happens, your identity won’t disappear: you’ll still be you. At least that’s what Khazan indicates with her title, Me, But Better.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela and Suzzanne Gray for useful comments.