Starting over regardless of age
Starting over sounds like an idea reserved for crises. For moments when something has irreversibly fallen apart, so there is no point in continuing the old way. Rarely does anyone imagine a new beginning in the middle of a perfectly orderly life. Days that are, objectively, good, but internally feel somewhat wrongly arranged.
In our Materia Book Club this February we read the book Me, but Better by journalist Olga Khazan, which poses a question. Can personality change without a major reason, other than the desire to live differently?
Can we really change our personality?
While a financial planner or real estate agent can help you get your finances in order and find a bigger home, advice on how to improve your own personality is much harder to find, and to believe in.
We often think that someone has started over or significantly changed their character only because they experienced some kind of trauma. Or we believe they have reached a point where they no longer see how to continue with their current lifestyle. The word starting over sounds exhausting, while simultaneously liberating. Our personality changes significantly and quickly in our twenties, yet later we become less and less flexible and believe less and less that changes are possible. The author of the book Olga Khazan wrote precisely about these changes.
The fact is that our personality is constantly changing. Julian Baggini in his book The Ego Trick: In Search of the Self writes "The subject of personal identity, strictly speaking, does not really exist. It is important to recognize that we are not beings who simply came into existence at birth, continued to exist as the same thing, and then disappeared on the edge of death or passed into some other realm".
Humans are an extremely complex and ordered entirety of different elements and precisely because we are structured this way, we are capable of thinking of ourselves as unique individuals, writes Julian Baggini. However, there is no single fixed person, we are actually constantly changing with or without intention.
Why do we change?
We often surrender to dissatisfaction almost out of habit. We have a perfectly good day, but it suddenly gets ruined by mere minor irritations like traffic jams, a bad haircut or the inability to find parking. Then we react as if everything is falling apart. We immediately think about how bad our life is, instead of reflecting on the fact of how good it actually is in a broader context.
Many people want to achieve something, start their own business, expand their circle of friends, but they do not know how to get there. Very often the roots of such changes lie precisely in the habits and behavioral patterns that make up our personality.
The trait of conscientiousness, for example, can help in achieving better results and faster professional advancement. Extroversion opens opportunities by expanding one's social network and contacts.
By changing daily thoughts, actions and routines it is possible to change your own personality as well, and thereby reap the benefits that come with someone being, for example, highly conscientious or open towards others.
In the book we read conversations with people who actually did this. At the same time, we also read about the author's experience, her process in which she strives to become more extroverted, accommodating and emotionally stable.
Research shows that by changing daily habits and behavioral patterns, personality traits can gradually be changed as well, thereby opening up space for a life that is closer to one's own desires.
The Big Five: how we measure personality and why it matters
Psychology usually describes personality as a relatively stable pattern of thoughts, emotions and behaviors through which we react to the world. What we call "stable" is actually far more flexible than we think. One of the most influential models, the so-called Big Five, breaks personality down into five dimensions. Openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
These are continuums, not categories, and no one is simply "like that" or "not like that". Someone can be prone to routine, but occasionally seek something new. They can be sociable in a familiar circle, but withdrawn in an unfamiliar one. It is precisely this mobility that opens the space for change.
If personality consists of patterns, and not of fixed properties, then a logical question arises. What happens when those patterns begin to change? Research suggests that change does not happen through sudden decisions, but through repetition. The way we think, react and structure our everyday life over time shapes what we recognize as "ourselves".
In this sense, personality is not the cause of behavior, but its result. We do not avoid people because we are introverted. We become introverted because we consistently avoid them. That small inversion changes the entire perspective. What seemed like a trait becomes a habit.
How personality actually changes
1. "Fake it until you make it"
The fundamental principle is simple. Behavior precedes identity. By repeating certain patterns, even when they feel unnatural, they gradually become part of the personality.
2. Embracing discomfort
Change necessarily involves resistance. Discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong, but that one is stepping out of familiar patterns. It is precisely this phase that allows the creation of new reactions.
3. The belief that change is possible
People who believe that personality can be developed persist more easily in the process and reinterpret failures more easily as part of learning.
4. Designing the environment
The environment strongly shapes behavior. Choosing a context that encourages desired traits, such as people, activities, and structures, increases the probability of change.
If personality can change, excuses stop being valid
The most important insight that emerges from the author's approach is that personality is not a final version of oneself, but a process that is constantly being shaped.
Change does not require radical cuts, but a consistent shifting of daily patterns. It is precisely in those small, repetitive decisions. What we think, how we react, what we direct our attention to. We gradually build a different way of being.
Although this often sounds demanding, because it clearly returns responsibility to the individual instead of leaving it to genetics or "innate" traits that often serve as an explanation for what has not been achieved, such a perspective also carries a strong potential for hope.
Changes are possible, and goals are achievable. This does not mean they are simple or that life unfolds without resistance, but it points to something more important. The quality of life largely depends on the willingness to question and adapt one's own patterns. That process, in its simplest form, always begins with a thought.
Changing one's personality is something that can be started today, with the resources that are already at our disposal and with the time that exists, regardless of the goal being pursued. It is not necessary to join an expensive fitness club or achieve massive profit or business success overnight. It is enough to start behaving like the person you want to become, even if only for a few minutes a day. Over time, those small shifts grow into a real change.
