Personality is only ripe when a man has made truth his own - Soren Kierkegaard (Dannish Philosophor) Before I start I wanted to check what is personality according to the Webster's dictionary. It states - "the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character". Then using logic I wanted to check if an individual's distinctive character can change? I looked all around me and found that it cannot change. (Yes, I looked at my wife - I rest my case) Can Tendulkar behave like Afridi or Michael Jordan playing defense or Arnab Ghoswamy doing a soft debate? I think you get my point. Of course some of them are constant and they do not change but then I looked at their personality and also found that they did not change. Tendulkar's personality was the same at 16, at 18 or at 40. So I decided to challenge this and see if I can prove otherwise. When I looked into research papers I got only this fact - It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. I decided to get a little more deeper to see what makes up ones personality? Since traits and patterns of thought plus emotion play important roles which makes it easy for us to bucket them into 4 main categories:
With frustration of not able to prove what I initially assumed, I started to think that we are who we are - it must be constant and there is nothing that I can do about it. Then suddenly something hit me - S-L-A-P.(My wife woke me up) I remembered the fact is that we choose our personality and who we are. Hence it must be changeable. I got my energy back - our personality is shaped by the choices we make over time. If there was a choice available, then there is a possibility for change. (Thanks to my course on Statistical Methods which I never understood but is helping me now). Although we are to an extent hardwired in the brain, there is some amount of change possible. It is this change that I wish to elaborate today incidentally breaking certain myths on the way. Are you ready?
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AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
June 2023
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