Personality Isn't Permanent

Personality Isn’t Permanent will shatter your long-held beliefs that you’re stuck as yourself, flaws and all, by identifying why the person you are is changeable and giving you specific and actionable steps to change.

Science and the many experiences that Hardy shares in the book prove that people can and do change. You know that you want to improve your life, but believing that your personality is fixed is damning your progress.

Here are the five myths of personality that keep you from being your best self:

You can categorize personality into “types.” Your personality is ingrained and unchangeable. What happened to you in the past determines your personality. You have to discover your personality. Your personality test results describe who you really are.

Let’s briefly dive into these and discover why they’re false.

Type-based personality tests aren’t scientific. It’s a gross misrepresentation of the complexity of what it means to be human to think we can categorize people into types.

Additionally, research shows that your personality changes dramatically over the years. Think about who you were 10 or 20 years ago and you’ll realize how true this is.

You think your personality is permanent because of past traumas, the identity you think you have, your subconscious, and your environment. Our perception of historical events changes over time, so why can’t the way we think about ourselves?

George Bernard Shaw perfectly captures the meaning of myth four in this quote:

And finally, the last myth is destructive because trying to be “true to yourself” keeps you from being flexible and learning to change.

Every action you perform has a purpose. Another word for purpose is goal. And whether you consciously think of them or not, your goals determine your identity. Andre Norman’s experience of getting into Harvard after 14 years in prison is the perfect example of this. Once his decisions in his teenage years got him locked up, all Andre wanted was to climb the prison hierarchy by killing. But after what he calls a revelation from God, he questioned his goals, upgraded them to be healthy, and changed his personality. Goals drive every decision you make. To find out the aims you want to have to change your personality, look at three sources: Exposure Desire Confidence Open your eyes to the possibilities around you. Get more experiences to see what the world has to offer. In the wise words of Hardy himself: Next, your desires are important because you don’t do anything if you don’t want it. If what you want isn’t healthy right now, train it by actively changing it to what you know is healthy. And lastly, you need to have confidence that you can accomplish…