Sometimes, we fantasize about a future version of ourselves—a person who is spontaneous or decisive, charismatic or playful or something else that we want to be. In the fantasy, you simply become that person one day.
But, on our more grounded days, it is hard to escape the feeling that the chasm between that person and us is simply unbridgeable. The fantasy exists in the clouds, and there is no conceivable stairway in the world that can get us there.
And that hopeless sentiment has weight: our personalities appear persistent. You could, in the course of one miraculous day, win a lottery, travel the world, perform with rock stars and fall in love.
But, if you’re the kind of person who fixates on their body image, then at the end of that crazy night, you will still steal a resentful glance at your mirror before you go to bed.
Regardless of how our circumstances transform, personality change it seems, is beyond us. It is after all, who we are.
I disagree. Our personalities change all the time—and radically so. Usually, this change happens involuntarily. But, in understanding what shapes our personality, we can take the reins of our personality in our own hands.
The Two Forces That Shape Our Personality
I found that you can systematically transform who you are when you start to understand what makes you the way you are. The two forces shape our personality throughout our life are:
- Actions
- Interpreted Identity
Following from these two aspects are two key strategies: one which is obvious but difficult, and the other which is ridiculous but simple.
One worry is that personality is fully genetic and thus unchangeable. For good reasons, I disagree. In fact, our genetics allows for radical personality change through practice. I discuss this point in the appendix at the end.
Now, let’s dive into the first aspect of personality formation.
Actions: You Are How You Act
An alcoholic could tell you a million times that he has changed. When would you believe him? When he’s been sober for a year.
At a concrete level, your personality is nothing other than how you act in different situations in life. You know you’re introverted because most Fridays you choose video games over parties.
Identity comes from the Latin word identidem which means “again and again”. Your personality just is what you do again and again. There is no way you could act a certain way throughout life without that being your personality trait.
There we have it. Want personality change? Well, just change your actions! You want to be an extrovert? Go out and talk to people every chance you get. Talk about the weather on the subway. Ask the barista about her shoes. Tell an acquaintance that you two should get lunch and then actually follow up with lunch plans.
That simple enough for ya?
Obviously not. After all, the only reason you’d want personality change is so that you could act differently in the same situations. Telling you to do charismatic things so that you can be charismatic is ridiculous. The entire point for wanting to be charismatic was so you could do charismatic things—which doesn’t come easily to you now.
So that’s the conundrum. To have a better personality you’d have to act better. But, to act better, you’d have to have a better personality.
But even though overhauling your actions is impossible at once, you can use action to effect your personality. You just need to be strategic about it. It all goes down to the micro-moments.
Personality Change Strategy 1: Control the Micro Moment
For most of the day, your life is dictated by habit. You wake up, you check your phone, you brush your teeth and then go about employing roughly the same routines you do on most days.
It’s not possible for you to change the entire make-up of your day all at once. You simply will not have the willpower or energy to go against your conditioning over and over again.
But, when you’re trying to change your identity, you don’t need to control every moment. You need to control particular moments in the day—moments where the identity you want can be established by one single action. I call them micro moments.
In marketing, micro moments are those instants when a decision is made—when a user decides to buy something, read something, watch something, or subscribe. If you’re trying to shape consumer behavior, all of your marketing-strategy is building up to this is the crucial moment.
If you’re in the business of shaping your own behavior and personality, the pattern is the same. A micro moment is the instant when you make a single decision that stamps your identity concretely. Usually this decision also goes on to influence the moments that follow.
For example, if you’re trying to be more extroverted, a micro moment could be when you walk into an elevator with a stranger. Usually—if you’re shy—you wouldn’t start a conversation in these situations.
But, even if it doesn’t feel natural to you, you can, with a single sentence, start a conversation. It will take some energy and courage—but even the shyest of us can do this. And, in the moment that you speak, you are the person who starts conversations with strangers. Instantly, for this one moment, you’re a social, extroverted person.
While the conversation may end soon, the ripple effect continues. We tend to infer our mental states partly from our own actions. So, the confident action of starting a conversation has the feedback of making us feel socially confident in the next moment—which makes it more likely that we’ll be social with the next person we meet.
In general, the day you act on this micro-moment, you leave the elevator a little more extroverted than when you entered it. Now it’s time to adapt this to a personality trait you want.
Action Tip: Identify the moments where a single action can demonstrate a personality trait that you desire but don't yet have (E.g: When listening to a friend rant, kind people express empathy more often than they give advice.) An ideal micro moment is one which recurs often (e.g. ordering a coffee) and where taking your desired action is uncomfortable, but not too difficult or costly. Finally, make sure you act in the identified micro moment at least once in the next 24 hours. Set a reminder to make sure you don’t forget.
Yet, while controlling each micro-moment adds one stamp to your new identity, true, lasting personality change takes consistent effort. That’s why, you need to make the routine stick.
Make it a Habit
By building a habit out of a positive action in the micro-moment, you make personality change inevitable. By choosing micro moments that occur often and where the desired action is not too costly, you are making the desired action easily repeatable.
After that, the principles of fundamental habit change apply. Have a visual reminder (like a calendar). Increase the cost of missing a day (by marking a streak on a calendar). And finally, decrease the minimum cost of success so you can do this even on a day you don’t feel like.
In the elevator case, the minimum success might just be saying hello and asking how the other person is doing. While you usually might try to have a longer conversation, you can still keep up the habit even on your most tiring days by simply saying a hello.
Habit building is an art and science unto itself, so I will not go into it further here (James Clear’s Atomic Habits is a fantastic guide for this). Generally, it’s important to keep the action simple and to not leave the execution of the habit to chance or to your will at the moment of execution.
Action Tip: Spend a week identifying micro moments and taking action for the personality train you desire. See which action works and can be sustained. Now, treat this action like a habit you must install, and build the system necessary to make follow-through inevitable.
Now onto the second aspect of personality formation:
Interpreted Identity
We know that your previous actions influence your present identity. But, in any new situation, your mind does not go through a complex calculation of your previous actions to determine how to act. You simply know how you want to act—it comes naturally to you.
Your understanding of who you are comes from your interpreted identity. This interpreted identity is not tied to any particular action or instance, but is a culmination of the things you know about yourself. Using the evidence of your life, interpreted identity give you the abstract picture of who you are.
If your actions are the concrete surface of your personality, interpreted identity is the fluid core inside. And by defining your personality, interpreted identity drives your present actions. And in molding your interpreted identity you gain the second key of personality change.
So where’s your interpreted identity coming from? Its story time.
Scene 1: You promised your friend you’d help him with his project so now you’re sitting in a café, after a long day of work, editing his draft. You’re tired and just want to lie down under a fountain of water, but you promised, so you’re doing it.
Scene 2: As you’re working on your friend’s project, the lady sitting next to you forgets her bag and walks out of the café. You call out to her but she doesn’t hear you, so you rush outside to hand her the bag back.
She’s gasps with relief and then says: “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I lost my bad. It’s so kind of you to have helped me.”
Scene 3: Lying in bed that night, you wonder whether you should’ve struck up a longer conversation with the woman in the café. “Wish I wasn’t so terrible at talking to strangers” you tell yourself.
The three scenes depict the three ways that we form opinions about ourselves and how we act:
- What your actions say about you: In the first scene, you do something for a friend despite being exhausted. Your actions are telling you loud and clear that you’d rather suffer through editing after a long day of work than let your friend down.
Here, your action in a key moment is a testament to the kind of person you are: you are reliable. This will shape your beliefs about yourself and your future actions when your reliability is tested.
- What others say about you: In the second scene, you return a woman’s bag without thinking much of it. Then she gestures at how kind you are. And suddenly, you notice: you are kind. Again, this will shape your beliefs about yourself, and your future actions.
- What you say about yourself: In the third scene, you are talking to yourself while lying in bed. Rethinking the moment, you flubbed your conversation with that woman, you realize: you are a bad conversationalist. Again, this is your belief about yourself, and it impacts your future actions.
And, this self-talk isn’t objective or directly tied to your actual abilities. After all, you could have been thinking of many things that night—the work you did for your friend, the way you helped the woman with her bag or something else entirely.
Yet, you focus on this one specific moment and interpret it as you being a bad conversationalist. However you perceived your conversation in the moment, this is an entirely new stamp on your personality, one that has come simply from your self-talk.
Now, what is the strategy for personality change through interpreted identity?
Obviously, changing your actions would help even your interpreted identity, and we’ve talked about that already. Changing what other people say about you is something you don’t have too much choice in.
But the aspect of interpreted identity that is in your greatest control is what you say about yourself.
Achieve Ideal Self-Talk
But first, let’s address that this is extremely difficult. Self talk isn’t usually in our control. Most of the time, our thoughts run rampage in the mosh-pit of our minds:
“When I finish this application I’m going to get lunch. Maybe I’ll get pasta. Steve goes to the pasta place a lot. Why did I agree to go to Ikea with Steve this weekend? I’m always trying to please people. I was trying to please the barber when I told him I liked the haircut. My head looks like an umbrella in this haircut. The interviewers are going to think I’m such a chump when they see me. Why am I even applying to a job I’m not going to get?”
Right. Our mental chatter is constantly bouncing. It defies physical laws and never asks for permission. So, overhauling your self-talk is a monumental task. But again, the strategy is to control a brief and crucial moment, and build from there. The strategy is affirmations.
Personality Change Strategy 2: Affirmations
Affirmations are the practice of repeatedly tell yourself that you already have an identity or accomplishment that you desire. For example, I might say: “I, Siddharth Chatterjee, am thrilled to interact with new people today.”
Generally, you could repeat the affirmation 10-15 times, and you could say them out loud or in your mind. Its best done early in the day.
The effect of affirmations is pronounced when done with visualization, where you close your eyes and lightly focus on cultivating that particular state of being (say a state of confident exuberance if you’re trying to be more social) while doing your affirmations. In a visualization, by trying to viscerally imagine that you’re in this state, you start to fall into it.
Affirmations and visualizations sound ridiculous, and the claims people make about their power are even more so. I agree: affirmations do not work magic and expecting them to will only lead to disappointment or delusion.
Note that I advise using affirmations only to inculcate mindsets and beliefs about yourself. I do not know if affirmations work for achieving concrete goals that are somewhat out of your control (like being published in a particular magazine). I have never tried this and do not endorse it.
What I do know is that affirmations are a powerful tool for directly effecting changes in mindset and subconscious belief. And so, anyone interested in identity change should experiment with them.
So, without promising you the presidency, let me show you two ways to expect affirmations to work for you:
Why Affirmations Work
The first reason affirmations work is that they are statements of intention—which makes it more likely that you will follow through on the actions you intend.
The second reason affirmations work is that they affect your interpreted identity, because what you say matters. By repeating a positive affirmation, you are piling up the evidence of a positive personality trait in your interpreted identity.
Affirmations help you change your view of your own self partly because of the illusory truth effect, which is our psychological tendency to be more likely to believe information the more we have been exposed to it.1
This belief transforming capability of affirmations is enhanced by your mind’s tendency to forget the sources of its information. This means that after some time, your mind does not even remember that you were the source of this positive information about your identity.
When combined with actual action in the micro moments, this shift in interpreted identity begins to gradually shift your real identity.
This contributes to the final way that affirmations help. They turn the tide in the critical micro moments.
Remember the micro moment of meeting a stranger in the elevator? If you’re shy, its hard to interrupt the pattern of avoiding conversation. That’s because there’s no question of your personal identity—you’re a shy person and there’s only one natural way to act.
But, on the days you do affirmations on your social confidence, there is an actual pull for you to start a conversation. Because, there’s conflicting evidence. Of course, your patterns still push you to act the way you always have. But, there is also the more recent memory of a different affirmed identity—one that’s pulling you to act in a new way.
When I was trying to build an evening routine, I used to affirm every morning that “I, Siddharth Chatterjee, will follow my evening routine.” Ever since I started doing that affirmation, around sundown, I would invariably be reminded of doing the evening routine.
It didn’t make doing the routine effortless or involuntary. It was just a pull in the right direction. It made acting in the new way feel natural.
Action Tip: For one week, experiment with affirmations for identity change. Identify the state from which the personality trait you desire comes naturally. For example, better listeners are genuinely interested in other people.
Then, do ten affirmations saying you have this attitude. (E.g: I, {your name}, am genuinely interested in people" ). You can do this in the shower every morning. Combine that by imagining yourself being in this state (E.g: imagine feeling that genuine curiosity).
Note how this shapes your day, and whether it affects your mood or behaviors.
By tilting the odds in favor of your new person in the micro moment, affirmations make change easier, and ultimately they make change natural.
And, when change becomes natural, you change. You change so much that you realize you’ve become what you’d fantasized.
At that point of course, I don’t expect you to notice. Because by then you’ll be seeing what I see right now: You have always been amazing. You just don’t know it yet.
I’m on a mission to build an internet for big ideas. And I would like to do it with you.
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Appendix: The Role of Genetics
If our personality was genetically programmed, there would be no sense in talking about personality change. And, our genetics do play an important role in our personality.
But genetics does not define the flavor of our personality, it simply provides a vast list of ingredients to choose from. This means that our actual personality is one shaped very much by our environment and practice. Your environment and practice determine which genetic elements are applied or enhanced, which genetic elements are avoided altogether and which new elements are introduced.
I have two reasons for believing this:
First, genetics seems to have a varying effect on different traits and in most cases this effect is below 50%. A popular study of twin siblings seemed to reveal that about 40% of our personality is genetically defined while another study revealed that only 6.6% of sensation-seeking behavior is explained by dopamine-related genes2,3.
Secondly, the effect of genetics on personality must be very loosely determined. Genetic material codes for protein formation on the granular level, while a high-level personality traits are a combination of extremely complex interactions in our physiology and consciousness.
More importantly, how genes express themselves depends on the environment, and in some environments, genes that would otherwise be strongly expressed are never activated.
Thus, genetic material can only outline the possibilities of our personality in a highly loose way, leaving room for millions of versions of “genetically supported” personality types for each of us.
When people say that they have always been this way, what they are identifying are tendencies learnt in early nurture—that is from their experiences in childhood. These experiences exert a strong force on our personality, but again, they are can be changed through practice.
The practices that allow us to experiment with our genetic possibilities and to remold our learned tendencies and identities are such as the ones that I’ve written about above.
References
- Hasher, Lynn; Goldstein, David; Toppino, Thomas (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. 16 (1): 107–112.
- Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250(4978), 223–228.
- Derringer, Jaime et al. “Predicting sensation seeking from dopamine genes. A candidate-system approach.” Psychological science vol. 21,9 (2010): 1282-90.