My upcoming book, The Age of Self-Realization, is strongly connected to the question: how do you change your personality? But it starts with a disclaimer. You can’t create or become the perfect person you wish you were. I wish I had known that when younger. In my latest video/podcast, I discuss how I tried, in vain, to change my personality in the past and how I approach it differently today. In this blog article, I’m going to talk about the logic of personality change.
You can only become what you were always meant to be. What I’ve found is that most people waste their lives trying to attain a magical ideal of perfection, chasing impossible standards, and forgetting that they are human beings. This is my guide to how you can change your personality (with an emphasis on the persona in personality)
How personality change starts
Personality change cannot be forced or willed. You can’t fake your way to kindness, can’t force yourself to pay attention in class, can’t pretend to be confident until one day you are. What’s really happening is that you’re letting go of layers that hold you back until one day you can connect with the truth that was always there. By no surprise, then, the biggest drivers of personality change are:
Meditation. People who meditate or engage in mindfulness on a consistent, daily basis tend to experience the biggest personal life changes and inner transformations.
Personal breakdowns or “Dark nights of the soul”. People who confront their fears and shadows and let go tend to experience dramatic shifts in their energy, personality, and behavior.
Traveling to another country. Moving to Amsterdam and later to Barcelona meant letting go of my old home and starting fresh in a new place with new friends and a new job.
Falling in love. Not just romantic love, mind you. Love of a new hobby, a cause, or a community.
All of these events help you, at least for a moment, let go of your ego, your made-up defenses that protect your consciousness from being aware of the deeper truth and beauty in life.
“The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”
- Carl Jung
The key? You can’t fill up your cup with new water while it’s already filled to the brim with thoughts, made-up opinions, a set mindset, a belief system, or an ideology. People are constantly trying to skip over the act of emptying the cup in favor of constantly adding new things onto it. Then they ask themselves why “nothing ever sticks.”
Think of when you tell yourself you’re going to become more disciplined and hard-working, but at the same time, you’re not willing to let go of your desire to please other people, making you constantly bend and change your routine to fit others’ needs. And then, you ask yourself why, a week later, you’ve made no progress at all.
You need to breathe out in order to be able to breathe in.
But letting go feels like a failure!
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
- Carl Jung
You’ll have to reconcile with the fact that letting go will always feel like a failure at first. People are so focused on what they have lost that they can’t even see what they stand to gain. There’s a liminal space of transformation that feels disheartening. We have to learn to recognize that discomfort will be there. It’s not about letting go of things you don’t want to do. It’s about letting go of things that a part of you thinks you want to do. It will feel like a failure. It’s normal. You won’t be able to see what you are meant to do because you have built up an imaginary idea of what your life should be. Right now, that imaginary idea feels very real.
But over time, you’ll find that you’re going to start to reframe everything. You’ll change your mind about what it was that you really wanted. You’ll discover something new or unexpected. You’ll find yourself surprised. Maybe you’ll go back to the old thing, but with new eyes, and you’ll find a new approach that is more you. You’ll have the chance to confront your genuine failures and mistakes and to learn from them. You’ll get insights from sitting with those emotions. You would never get those insights if you never allowed yourself to let go. You’d keep chasing rainbows forever without ever learning about the real rainbow that was beyond that first, imaginary one.
Many people tell themselves to think positively and to keep going. They think that somehow, giving up, is immoral, a sign of cowardice. That you’re “manifesting” and that somehow, the universe will reward your blind, stubborn pursuit of a fantasy. No, if the universe rewards anything, it is those who are willing to see the universe for what it really is, and can be, if we are willing to face it with open eyes. To me, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey will always come with a grand failure somewhere in the middle. The hero is the person who faces that failure with open eyes, learns from it, and grows from it.
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”
- Carl Jung
Why personality change sticks
The biggest reason personality change doesn’t stick is that it feels inauthentic.
You tell yourself to smile more, but your smile feels forced and unnatural. You feel like other people see through you. You ask yourself: “Maybe this is just who I am. Maybe I’m just not a smile-y kind of person.”
You tell yourself to be more confident and to speak up more, but every time you do, you feel naked, vulnerable, and exposed, and you feel like you’re making a fool out of yourself. You ask yourself: “Is there something wrong with me that makes me less worthy of being the center of attention?”
You tell yourself you can become a more responsible, mature adult, but then you spend time with your family, and no matter how hard you try to seem like you have it all together, they still remember all the times you failed. You feel like you’re back to your kid version of yourself again, and that you will never be able to change, no matter how much you try.
Personality change only sticks when it feels like letting go of what you were always meant to be and stepping into it. Personality change sticks when you recognize that the present-day self that you are now was always a facade.
There was always a smile waiting to break out inside of you. You just had to find it. You found it when you found something to feel grateful and happy about. You found it when you let go of the worries and stressors that you thought were so important in the past.
There was always a social butterfly inside of you that wanted to emerge, but you were just stuck in your cocoon. You found it when you recognized your inner worth, that people were genuinely interested in and curious about you, and that they wanted to hear your voice.
There was a responsible, mature adult inside of you, and it can coexist with your playful, silly, and childlike self, and your fun-loving, embarrassing moments are as much a part of you as the part of you that takes out the trash and pays the bills at the end of the day. One does not negate the other.
This is the practice of “becoming what you are”.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
- Carl Jung
You are more than you will ever know
You don’t know who you are, in the sense that you don’t know your potential, you don’t know the millions of layers underneath whatever it is that you have trained yourself to be. You don’t know how much there is inside of you.
How many unknown hobbies could you have? How many hidden motivations exist inside of you? How many desires?
This is the core message of the Age of Self-Realization. It’s time to start undressing yourself; it’s not about putting on more layers, it’s about scaling back the layers. Let go of your ego defenses and walls. Let go of the unnecessary conventions of your social culture. Let go of perceived limitations. Let go of fixed boxes. Find real, lasting, meaningful personality change.
Stop thinking of yourself as an introvert and start discovering and building a relationship with your unconscious extroverted sides. Recognize when you are walling yourself in or hiding from the world, when you don’t speak up when you should, and when you compromise your personality out of fear of standing out or being seen.
Stop thinking of yourself as an extrovert and start integrating your inner introvert into your life. Recognize the moments when you feel socially overwhelmed, when you are missing introspection, and when you forget to listen to your own inner voice, and how it removes your center.
Finally, see yourself as you are, not as you think “should” be.
In fact, whenever you tell yourself you “should” do something, stop and ask yourself:
Do I really want to do that?
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