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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it might be necessary to then have kind of a restorative niche or a restorative period after each of these presentations where you go back to the hotel room and you read your book and take your bubble bath and have your introvert time. That still counts. That's still personality change as long as you're pushing yourself and you're kind of expanding those boundaries.
Yeah, it was exhausting, and it was great. I think after basically the first class, I was driving away from the class, and I was smiling. I noticed myself smiling and kind of giggling to myself because I had fun, even though I didn't expect that I would have fun. And I kind of had this elevated mood
throughout the night just from, you know, being around other people and being in this situation where I was just kind of being silly. So, you know, you might be surprised by how good it feels to act against your nature sometimes.
Yeah, exactly. And one of the studies that I write about the personality change studies is called you have to follow through. It's really not enough to just wish that you were different. You really do have to kind of do something every day that accords with your quote unquote new personality.
So the person who was trying to start a business, who I was talking about earlier, who kind of didn't know where to start, she honestly started by buying a giant whiteboard and writing everything down on it and hanging it in front of her desk. So she would write down all of her appointments Everything she needed to get done, you know, the time she needed to get it done by, positive affirmations.
Like if it was important, it went on this whiteboard. And that actually worked for her, just having everything in front of her in one place like that. And I really think that variations of that can work for all of the traits and can work for everyone. But you do have to kind of experiment a little to see what will work for you.
I would say both are true. You are a little bit different 80 years later, even if you don't try to become different, but there's still a little piece of you that's gonna be quite similar, right? So if you were a very introverted, anxious child, you're probably gonna be a little bit introverted and anxious as an adult as well.
But the studies that have followed people across decades have found that most people change across at least one personality trait over the course of their lives. And in general, just something to look forward to, people tend to become less neurotic and more conscientious as they get older. And that's not through life hacks or doing anything in particular. That just kind of naturally happens.
Yeah, so about half of it is genetic. So it comes from your genes. Thank you, mom and dad. So you're not going to be exactly like your mom and dad, but your personality is going to be influenced by the genes that they pass on to you, just like they influence how tall you are, your eye color, things like that. So part of it, you're kind of, is just there.
But another part of it is kind of hard to define and they still don't know exactly what makes it up, but it's sort of just the environment. So it's who your friends are, what your life experiences are. Do you go to college? What kind of job do you have? Do you get married? Do you have kids?
All of those kind of environmental factors and experiences contribute to that other part of your personality that isn't really genetic. It's sort of up to you.
That's true, yeah. So like you could see variations on that cycle in like who goes to college, right? So it's usually people who are more open to experiences and then they're around a bunch of other people like them. And they're around a bunch of professors who are also open to experiences. And so they become even more open to experiences in the process.
So your personality leads you into certain situations and then those situations further affect your personality.
So I think that it depends on the scale of what you're trying to do. If you're just trying to become a little bit more conscientious or a little bit more extroverted, I think that it's definitely something that if you put your mind to it, it can pretty easily be done. Some of the traits like neuroticism and agreeableness are a little bit harder to change. So I think that one would be more
require a lot more kind of like inner work and a little bit more struggle to actually become permanently different on. But yeah, I think it is doable for everyone, but it does require new habits and new ways of thinking about yourself. So if you're not ready for those, then I imagine it would be hard. Oh, and as far as, sorry, as far as how long,
the changes last the studies that have been done suggest that they last for a few months but that's because uh we don't have longer term studies and whether like what happens to those people after a few months we we don't know i did talk to one person who had a pretty radical personality change that he has now kept up for a few years um kind of across all the personality traits
And a few other people I talked to were able to change, you know, just one or two traits for a few years.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah. And Sonia Lubomirsky, one of the researchers that I talked to, explained this, which is that, you know, a lot of times things don't feel very natural at first because we're not very good at them. And she actually used the example of becoming a runner where she now runs pretty regularly, but
it was kind of hard for her at first to commit to doing it and to do it regularly. But once you are kind of doing something more and more, you become more familiar with it and it becomes less intimidating and less scary in a way. So, I mean, in that way, yeah, it does become easier just because like, you know what to do in a room full of strangers now.
I've actually come across both. There was a sort of a book about people being inspired to basically change completely called Quantum Change. And that one was like a mix of out of the blue, plus like near death experiences, plus like voice of God type thing. But some of the people I talked to from my book, it was just sort of like,
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