Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Second Nature
Your personality isn't necessarily set in stone. With a little experimentation, the ornery and bleak can reshape their temperaments and inject pluck and passion into their lives.
Call it the cult of the ugly duckling. We devour stories of personal transformation: the uptight guy who learns to cut loose, the wallflower who becomes the life of the party. It's the staple of self-help books and romantic comedies—as well as the primary reason that people drag themselves to high-school reunions. ("Can you believe that guy who never talked is now a real estate mogul?") But psychologists have long believed that major personality makeovers are impossible. In fact, the big themes of personality—whether you are shy or outgoing, relaxed or a worrywart—seem to be scripted at a very young age.
However, personality researchers have begun looking more closely at the smaller ways we can and do change. Positive psychologists, who investigate human talents, have identified 24 character strengths—familiar qualities we admire, such as integrity, loyalty, kindness, vitality—and are limning them to find out why these faculties come so naturally to some people. What they're discovering is that many of these qualities amount to habitual ways of responding to the world—habits that can be learned.
"The evidence is good that most of these things can be changed," says Christopher Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "That doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't come in a flash." Psychologists talk about personality change the way doctors talk about the biological set point for weight: Nature designed some of us to be heavy, and others to be slim. It's not impossible to alter your weight, but it requires going against your own grain.
But eventually, the new way of being can come to feel like second nature. Peterson cites himself as an example. Inherently introverted, he realized early on in his career as an academic that his reticence would prove disastrous in the lecture hall. So he learned to be more outgoing, to crack jokes, and to entertain big classes full of psychology students. "Do I still have an introverted temperament? Yes, in that if I'm in a big crowd, I get anxious," he says. "But my behavior is consistently extroverted, because I've worked to make it that way. Now, it's very spontaneous."
Whether Peterson's personality has truly changed is almost beside the point. He may not be an extrovert, technically speaking, but he behaves like one, and is treated like one. Tweaking the way you interpret and react to the world can be a transformative experience, freeing you up to act in new ways. At first, it feels awkward, even bizarre. But with new behaviors come new experiences, creating a feedback loop that, over time, reinforces the transition.
Some sought-after qualities are easier to develop than others. Courage, joy, passion, and optimism are among the more amenable to cultivation, but each requires mastering a different—and sometimes surprising—set of skills. To bring more joy and passion into your life, you must paradoxically be more open to experiencing sadness, anxiety, and fear. Learning to think like an optimist, it turns out, is less important than acting like one. And being courageous has nothing to do with how afraid you are: It's a matter of how strongly you feel about your goals. Cultivating these characteristics puts you on the road to that blend of happiness, satisfaction, and purpose that is the height of human functioning, what positive psychologists call "the good life."
18 eavesdropped
