How To Grow Your Personality

“…a recently published longitudinal study spanning more than sixty years…began with data from a 1950s survey of 1,208 fourteen-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of mood, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn.

“More than sixty years later, researchers retested 674 of the original participants. This time, at seventy-seven years old, the participants rated themselves on the six personality traits, and also nominated a close friend or relative to do the same. There was a little to no overlap from the questionnaires taken sixty-three years earlier. As the researchers state, “We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis” (Personality Isn’t Permanent by Benjamin Hardy, 2020, p34, emphasis mine).

I’ve taken quite a few personality tests. And I never just took them—I would study them to understand how they worked and what they were measuring. However, over the years, I started to wonder how much they actually help.

According to the study above, your personality will change throughout your life. And it probably even changes when you’re in different settings, doing different jobs, and with different people.

Personality tests can convince you that you’re stuck. But you’re not stuck. Your personality will change whether you like it or not. You might as well guide that change and turn it into growth.

How do you do that? Stop using a personality test to decide what you should want and what you should do. Instead, 1) decide what you want to do, 2) figure out who you need to become in order to do that, and 3) become that person.

What do you think?
Joseph