In this article I’m going to show you three things:

• The Myers Briggs Type Indicator and other personality systems often overexaggerate what is fixed or a result of your personality type, reducing all our behaviours and actions to be a result of our innate personality type.
• Traditional beliefs that people are a “Tabula Rasa” – a blank piece of paper that can be filled with beliefs or a personality as a result of their education and upbringing – are false.
• Your values and feelings are usually more innate, while your thinking and cognition is more changeable, and your daily behaviour is the most easy to change.

Your behaviour is constantly changing

Most personality descriptions focus on your behaviour, what is most easy to observe and understand in yourself and others. ESFJs are talkative, INTPs are quiet. Yet these statements are the easiest to disprove. Any ESFJ you meet can vow to spending a lot of time in a day in silence, and most INTPs you meet can bring up examples of situations where they are very talkative.

Describing people by their behaviour is well and good, but assuming that your behaviour is fixed or the result of your personality type is blatantly incorrect. No personality indicator has ever been able to consistently and correctly be able to predict human behaviour. Human behaviour is like quantum mechanics, the most chaotic, contradictory, and results on a day to day basis are constantly changing as a result of your daily mood and the context. People adapt their behaviour to the situation. Because of this, personality models that focus on behaviour are generally superficial and overly simplistic, and they don’t produce a real genuine understanding of our human or individual nature.

Your thoughts and mindsets are slowly evolving

Thoughts, mindsets, are like developed skills. And similar to building a skill, like developing a new language, or learning to think critically, building up a mindset takes time. Because of this, most people will perceive their mindset as a part of their personality, even if it is something that can change. Many even think it’s impossible to change their own thinking.

Ofcourse it is, but it takes time, habits, and long-term thinking. You also don’t always want to or need to change your thinking, as long as you think it’s healthy and allows you to fulfil your dreams. But if it fundamentally limits you from achieving your goals or the project of self-actualization, cognitive development and change is healthy and necessary. If it feels impossible to change your thinking, reflect on how your thinking has changed or been proven wrong in the past. Most people have experienced AHA Moments where they suddenly became aware of how something worked or realized things were different from their initial beliefs. We are all constantly learning, growing, and changing.

You might have been more positive or optimistic in the past, and you might have switched to a more critical mindset later in life, due to past evidence or behaviour or experiences from the past, and you might want to find your way to rebuild or reconnect with your inner optimist. If you’re successful, your personality will change, and the process to getting there can take months or years, but you will eventually end up there. When we try to map or categorize personalities based on cognition, we end up with something that feels fairly consistent, yet it can change.

I don’t want to change!

The last and most consistent part of your personality is arguably your feelings and values. These things take decades to change, if they even change at all. The things that are most persistant about your personality is your capacity towards enthusiasm, sensitivity, aggression.

People tend to have unique and distinct – hard-wired and genetic ways of building up and regulating their own neurobiology. There are many things that are so hard-wired that they are near impossible to change, like your tendency towards addiction.

You can’t change that, you can only change in the sense that you can avoid addictive substances. And you can channel that same tendency towards addiction to healthy addictions, like towards oxygen, or working out and getting endorphins in another way.

If you hit on a situation when you feel pressure to change or be different, be it at work or in a relationship, and a strong part of you rejects that or lashes out against it, you’ve hit on a value. You’ve found something you for some reason don’t want to change about yourself. It may be something fundamental. This small thing may not be important, but it may feel important, because it’s a core process that is a part of a system of personality or behaviour. Healthy personality descriptions focus not on behaviour – and only to an extent on cognition, perhaps using subtype or development theory to isolate specific mindsets or temporary modes of thinking – and finally, the most consistent personality descriptions are based on this final, core, emotional level. Sadly, this level is the most difficult to measure or explain.

Since most personality inventories are focused only on what is easy to measure, most personality theories will keep trying to measure and generalize based on your behaviour. I think if we want to understand people though, we need to try to do something much more difficult – understand the inner core of the person, not the external, ever changing surface.

What’s easy and difficult to change?

Difficult

How you feel in response to certain stimulation, like how you respond to fear, excitement or anger. Things like being left-handed or right-handed (your entire brain development and nervous system is influenced by this) – society has tried to change this but you can still see if somebody is left handed using brain scans. No matter how hard you try to beat it out of a person. You’ve only effectively tied their hand behind their back.

Moderately difficult

How you think about something, e.g, the capacity for scientific thinking, how you empathize or attach or relate in social relationships, your ability to express you feelings. We often think this is somebody’s fixed personality, but interventions and slow change can completely change this about a person.

Easy

How talkative you are, how polite you are, or how many critical questions you ask in a discussion. This changes on a daily or even hourly basis, depending on where you are or who you are with.

What do you find easy or difficult to change in yourself?