How to change your personality: 8 tips
A series of recommendations and tips to improve your way of being and relating to others.
It is normal and relatively frequent that people seek to improve themselves and their way of being. However, sometimes the change sought is very deep, structural. Is it possible to become a very different person from what you have always been?
In this article we will see some tips and recommendations about how to change your personality through the introduction of different habits in your day to day life..
How to change your personality
Personality is by definition something that is maintained over time, that tends to be constant. Specifically, it is the set of psychological dispositions that orient us towards certain behavioral dynamics and not others, and it is based on a genetic component and a learned one, born of experience.
However, as is the case with most psychological phenomena, personality is not an element imposed on the individual, personality is not an element imposed on us in a deterministic way, but we can influence it.We can influence it in surprising ways. It is practically impossible to turn it completely around and become something that shows absolutely nothing of what we once were, but radical changes are possible with effort and time.
So, to change your personality follow these tips.
1. Make your goals concrete
The goal of "changing my personality" is too abstract, too ambiguous. If you don't break it down into different specific objectives, you will get lost in vagueness and will not make significant progress..
Therefore, write down on a piece of paper which aspects of your way of being you would like to change, making a filter of priorities, and focus on it. After all, it is absurd to aim for total change in all aspects of one's personality; target those areas that give problems or are perceived as weaknesses.
2. Create commitment
Whenever we set an ambitious goal that requires effort, it is good to make sure that we are fully committed to it. One way to do this is to talk about it with other people, thereby creating expectation and more reasons not to give up.
Generating this kind of self-obligations is very positive in order to achieve goals and not to give up. to achieve goals and not give up, even though it may seem to limit our freedom.
3. Distance yourself from your previous failures
On many occasions, one of the obstacles that make it difficult for someone to change his or her personality for the better is the fact that he or she falls into the trap of believing that he or she will fall again and again into the kind of failures he or she fell into in the past.
It is true that we all have weaknesses that characterize us, but that does not mean that we cannot arm ourselves against these kinds of mistakes. With enough effort and learning, we can develop extraordinary skills.. Even if we don't, this simple thought helps us to stop being afraid of those aspects of life that we have never been quite good at, which serves to make us less vulnerable to them.
4. Give up what people will say
Your changes in personal development should only concern you. It is clear that people always have reason to talk behind your back and criticize you, but that is precisely why what others think should not obsess us; no one knows us as well as we know ourselves, and that is why the vast majority of judgments and moral judgments we receive from others are worthless.
Being aware of this, and of the fact that everyone has the same weaknesses for which we ourselves are capable of hating ourselves on certain occasions, helps to put things in perspective and to not to feel condemned to be always the sameIt helps to put things in perspective and not feel condemned to always be the same: people around us change radically for better and for worse, and we can do the same. The question is to guide this change for the better.
5. Surround yourself with people who inspire you.
Much of the learning happens spontaneously by the simple fact of surrounding ourselves with those who give us reasons to improve and content to work on to become better.
If we avoid falling into the trap of constantly comparing ourselves to those we consider the best, we will begin to absorb and adapt to our way of being, we will begin to absorb and adapt to our way of being those elements that we consider to be positive: having more patience, learning to listen to others, learning to be more positive.We can be more patient, learn to listen and put ourselves in other people's shoes, be more creative by not discarding the most outlandish ideas, and so on.
6. Do not assume your own identity, modify what you already have.
It is important not to cover ourselves with tics that define the personality of others, but to develop our own version of what we want to become. For example, if we want to work on our self-esteem in order to be more confident in our abilities, we should not use the expressions or body language of another person in an impostured way, but rather look at what we usually do and make corrections.
Focusing on oneself is an indispensable element to change one's own personality, since it is necessary to work with what is most important to us.You have to work with what you have; pretending that you are a blank sheet of paper will only generate frustration.
7. Introduce small changes in the day to day
Spend some time each day to look at what you are doing and correct it on the fly to tend to the desired goal. The rest of the day, don't worry about it. This way you will be doing work intensively, while then you won't have to work at it and you can recover (which prevents you from getting too stressed).
Little by little, the repetition of those moments in which you make an effort to change will make them become automaticand you will be able to extend little by little the time window that you dedicate to develop an improved personality.
8. Count on the help of psychologists
If necessary, psychologists can help you through psychotherapy. Professional accompaniment is often very useful to find new strategies to improve and to detect errors that had gone unnoticed.
Bibliographical references:
- Corr, Philip J.; Matthews, Gerald (2009). The Cambridge handbook of personality psychology (1. publ. ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
- González, José (1987). Psicología de la personalidad. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva.
(Updated at Apr 12 / 2024)