Olga Khazan
speaker
118 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Olga Khazan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yes, people who did change their personality traits in the desired direction tend to be happy with the results. So, you know, you might be surprised by how good it feels to act against your nature sometimes.
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, that's one theory, and that was a prominent theory about personality several decades ago. William James famously said it was set like plaster by the age of 30. But actually, newer research has shown that it is possible to change your personality. You do have to really work at it. It's not just something you can snap your fingers and make happen.
But researchers who have asked people if they would like to change their personality traits and then given them little assignments or tasks or behaviors to do every day that would put them closer in alignment with the personality trait they'd like to have, they then found that those people actually did change their personality traits.
Yes. People who did change their personality traits in the desired direction tend to be happy with the results.
So personality, according to most researchers, is sort of the thoughts and behaviors and mindset that come most reflexively to you. They're the things that you kind of do automatically without thinking about it. Now, Nathan Hudson, who is one of the researchers, he kind of adds onto that by saying that personality is like a tool that helps you get what you want.
there's five traits of personality. And for example, the trait of agreeableness, which is sort of like warmth and empathy, that can help you make more friends. It can help you deepen your relationships. It can help you become more enmeshed in community. And so that is actually, you can think of it as almost like a tool in your toolkit for living the kind of life you'd like to live.
Absolutely. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. So O for openness to experiences. This is sort of like imaginativeness and creativity. Then C for conscientiousness. This is being organized and on time, meeting deadlines, not being messy, not forgetting things, things like that. E for extroversion. We all know extroverts, they love to socialize and talk to people. They're cheerful.
They like to go and do activities. A for agreeableness, which I just mentioned, which is sort of like warmth and empathy and trust in others. And then N is a little funny. It's for neuroticism, which is a bad thing. It's associated with anxiety and depression. So the others are positive. Neuroticism is a negative thing.
The flip side of neuroticism is called emotional stability, and that's the one that you want to be.
Yeah, that's the personality trait of conscientiousness.
You know, the reason why people are sometimes resistant to change on these traits is that personality can have a little bit of an identity component. So if you see yourself as an introvert, it can be really hard to give that up. You know, it's almost like changing your name or something like that.
Yeah, and sometimes it's about not knowing what actions to take. So particularly in the case of conscientiousness, that can be a really tough one where people want to be on the other side of it, right? They want to be organized. They want to be proactive. It can be really hard to see how to get there from where you are.
And so a lot of the people that I talked to for that chapter, you know, they were like, I'm going to start a business. And then they just kind of sat around watching TV because they weren't really conscientious to begin with and they weren't really sure how to make themselves conscientious.
What you do about that is make systems and habits that you set up that you do every single day, even if you don't feel like it. One good example of this is extroversion, which is a trait that I was working to increase. I wanted to become more extroverted and get out and have more social connections and just socialize more, not be so isolated. In the beginning, I really did not want to do this.
I found it really hard to get myself out of the house and to actually talking to people. So what I did is I signed up for things that I could not back out of. I signed up for an improv class where you could only miss two classes and still kind of complete the course.
So even when I really did not feel like going, and most of the time I did not, I had to go because otherwise I would lose my money on signing up for this class. So I would really recommend that to anyone who wants to change their personality but finds it difficult is to sign up for things that you can't back out of.
you might feel that way. I mean, if you're really, really far on the introversion scale, you might feel that way and just think like that Olga woman was wrong. But I will say that in lab experiments, when they have introverts go out and act like extroverts, which usually just means socializing for a few minutes, they actually say that they felt better afterward.
Like they had a little mood boost from behaving like an extrovert for a little while. And they also said they felt truer to themselves when they were behaving like extroverts, which suggests that it's not really that important to act exactly in accordance with what you think your personality is all the time. Now, one thing that some researchers say is that let's say you are doing this.
Let's say you're really introverted, but you're pushing yourself. You're going out and giving a bunch of sales presentations because you want to meet your sales goals.
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