Shade Zahrai

Because for a very long time, that's what the research told us.

In fact, that's what the research still tells us, that it is stable across the lifespan.

But there is a caveat here.

It is stable unless you choose to intervene.

And so you can intervene with what's called an intervention, where you can target a specific trait or a number of traits and go through a process.

of changing that element of your personality, which I think is phenomenal.

So we tested this when I was doing the PhD, we had one study, which was a six week program to determine whether people can change their baseline levels of what's called action orientation.

So it's that inclination to just take action.

It's basically what big trust allows you to do, right?

So we wanted to determine, so we put them through a training.

We then had another group doing an unrelated training on communication, and then we had another group doing no training.

Why we had to have that second group in there is because any kind of training will have some positive effect.

We need to determine whether the effect that we see is a result of

fundamentally changing the action orientation collection of traits or whether it's just because they were part of a training and that's exciting and that changes how you see yourself so we had the three groups we had the six weeks we tested them before after and then one month after this intervention and we found that just in that period there was a significantly statistically significant increase in their personality trait of action orientation which is wild

That's six weeks and it lasted for one month later.

And if we did another three month or a 12 month follow up, it probably would have lasted.

So what does this tell us?

You can fundamentally change who you are.

The brain is essentially, it's this neuroplastic feature in our bodies, right?

We can continually create new pathways.