As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Yoon wrote in a 2022 review on personality psychology, âAlthough it is still widely thought that personality is not changeable, recent research has roundly contradicted that notion. In a review of over 200 intervention studies, personality traits, and especially neuroticism, were found to be modifiable through clinical intervention, with changes being on average half of a standard deviation over periods as short as 6 weeks.
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When we taught people the growth mindset, it changed the way they reacted to their depressed mood. The worse they felt, the more motivated they became and the more they confronted the problems that faced them.
In short, when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way. Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources.
Itâs also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, theyâre not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people who did not have natural ability, but who developed exceptional skills. These experiences make our research participants into growth-minded thinkers, at least for the moment - and they act like growth-minded thinkers, too.
...simply evaluating where leaders stand on the general dimensions of personalityâthe big fiveâ accounted for around 50 percent of the variability in leadership emergence and effectiveness, meaning that half of your success as a leader is dictated by your personality. Furthermore, whereas it takes a great deal of time and effort to change even the smallest of personal habits, personality can be evaluated rapidly with standardized assessments that can be administered remotely in less than forty-five minutes.
Jung said that every time you serve as a therapist, you always have to deal with your own issues. In Jungâs words (1966), âThe doctor must change himself if he is to become capable of changing his patient. We have learned to place in the foreground the personality of the doctor as a curative or harmful factor; and that what is now demanded is his own transformationâthe self-education of the educatorâ (p. 73).
We could spend weeks, months, even years laboring with the Personality Ethic trying to change our attitudes and behaviors and not even begin to approach the phenomenon of change that occurs spontaneously when we see things differently. It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. In the words of Thoreau, âFor every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.â We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get
to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.