The Truth About Your Personality | Dr Benjamin Hardy | Modern Wisdom Podcast 185

Your personality should be something that you design yourself. You know, that's obviously the core argument of the book is that it can be a choice. The research is pretty clear that over time your personality is going to change. You, as an example, are not the same person you were 5 or 10 years ago.

(wind blowing) Benjamin Hardy in the building. How are you doing, man?

Doing good. Happy to be with you, man. Really happy to be with you.

Very happy to be with you. Talking about personality today. How do we define it? What is a personality?

(laughs) Well, there's a lot of different ways to look at it, but I think kind of the most surface level, just basic way of looking at it is that it's your consistent attitudes and behaviors, you know, just a per- a person's consistent way of being.

Okay, so the way that you act in the world.

Yeah. A way... Yeah, very much act, you know, and how you kind of... And your attitudes, so it's how you show up regularly in situations.

Okay. That seems pretty basic. That doesn't seem like there should be any debate about what's going on with it.

(laughs)

You know? This is what you do, that's your personality. Okay. So, what are the biggest myths about personality?

Uh, one being that it's hardwired, that it's innate, that it can't change, um, that the best way to understand your personality is by looking to the past and, you know, uh, which makes sense. I mean, if, if you're trying to understand who a person's going to be, it makes sense to go and look to the past and be like, "Oh, well, that's how that person's been, so that's probably how they're always gonna be." Um, other kind of general views are that it's something you can discover. Because it's innate, because it's viewed as hardwired, your, your job is to discover it. And then once you've finally discovered who you truly are, then you can finally go and create that life that's tailor-made and fit perfectly for you, and you can find your perfect spouse and perfect friends so it all fits nice and neat, and you don't have to go through any change or grinding, you know. Just your life will be perfect once you've found that out.

Just falls into place?

Exactly.

Okay. So if you're not... or if that's a myth, if one of the myths is that you discover your personality, which by the definition that we came up with earlier on is the way that you act in the world, if you don't discover that by looking backwards, how do you discover what your personality is? Is there anything to discover?

Uh, I mean, it depends on how you wanna look at it. I think that there are things you can learn about yourself without question, um, but ultimately, your personality should be something you desi- you design yourself. You know, that's obviously the core argument of the book is that it can be a choice. The research is pretty clear that over time your personality is going to change. You, as an example, are not the same person you were 5 or 10 years ago. You know, you're, you actually have changed. Even... You've actually probably changed more than you think you have because we see the world through the lens of our identity, and so we think we've actually probably changed less than we actually have because we see the world through, through our identity. One, one important crucial thing here, just to clarify, is that identity and personality are two different things. Identity is how you define and describe yourself. It's your self-concept, whereas personality is how you consistently act in the world, but your identity is way more important. Your identity, again, is how you define and describe yourself. So if you said, "I'm an introvert," that's a statement about your identity. It may not actually be true. In fact, I would say it's not always true, but your, your self-concept drives your behavior, and your behavior over time becomes your personality. And so a big problem with identity is, is that we, we get very fixated on our identity, you know. We define ourselves certain ways. "This is the type of person I am." It's, it's shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves, and those stories are usually either pre- present-based or past-based. Very rarely will you hear someone talk about who they aspire to be.