Personality & Developing Character Part 2: Can You Change Your Personality?

This podcast, Can You Change Your Personality, is part 2 of a series on personality and the building of character. It begins with a brief summary of what personality is and then focuses on the deeply debated question of whether you can substantially change your personality. Recent research suggests by mindfully practising alternative approaches you can somewhat recalibrate the expression of your underlying personality. It is not wholesale change. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly helpful. Typically, we seek to chang personality where our natural preferences lead to trouble, especially where our egocentric bias leads us astray. Moderating these mismatches between personality and the world is a great idea. This then leads to an introduction to the idea that character is what results from this kind of intentional , mindful practice. An analogy is made with computing: that personality is akin to the computer’s operating system and recalibration is like software patch applied to fix glitches. Finally, I discuss how this recalibration can have deep moral implications, a topic I’ll take up in the third podcast.