Can you change your personality?

Have you ever thought of changing your personality?

Because most of my work involves people communicating with each other – either through B2B sales training or the various stages of strategic planning – I often include a communication style assessment with programs I deliver.

Not only does this raise the self-awareness of each individual with regard to their own communication style, but the group discussion always improves understanding of teammates and helps create smoother communication and better outcomes.

And there is one question that is often asked.

Can you change your personality?

Now, first up let me add a disclaimer. In workshops I do make it clear the communication style assessment isn’t a complete personality profile. But people are still curious and want to know, can you change your style?

Here’s the answer…

(Note: this is my TL;DR summary of a lengthy BBC article you can read here)

A growing number of studies suggest that with targeted interventions, we can achieve the degree of personality change typically seen over a lifetime in just a few months.

To test the process, a BBC (UK) journalist was tasked with following recommendations from recent research to see if she could change her personality over the course of 6 weeks.

While some recent studies have found personality traits can be shifted in the desired direction, the amount of change achieved has only been in the range of 10%-20% for specific personality factors (the factors are based on the Big Five model – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).

As with this BBC experiment, most study results are based on pre- and post-intervention self-assessment using a validated assessment tool. For the journalist, she recognised some progress on a few of the personality factors. A modest achievement.

Bottom line…

Brent Roberts, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US and one of the most influential personality researchers, says:

Although the greatest changes recorded by studies to date are huge by researchers standards… is it huge from a layperson’s perspective? Probably not. It seems, generally speaking, most people stay mostly the same.

So, there you have it.

Yes it seems you can possibly change (or more correctly, adapt) your personality to some degree given enough time and a conscious effort to resist your initial impulse and push yourself to adopt the ‘new’ behaviours and thought patterns you wouldn’t usually do.

Further thoughts…

But upon deeper reflection, is the process of adopting new behaviours, feelings and thought processes not so much about leaving one style behind and taking on a new one, but more about expanding your comfort zone to be more flexible and successfully deal with a broader range of people and situations?

And maybe, is changing your communication style simply a result of life experience and learning what works for you and what doesn’t?

If you’d like to expand the capability of your team why not get in touch for an obligation-free exploration of appropriate options.