How You Can Proactively Improve Your Personality

Episode 3: How You Can Proactively Improve Your Personality

Welcome to podcast number three. Today we're going to be talking about a really controversial idea that I have about personalities and our lives.

I have always, or at least since I was 18, I've always believed that we can change our personalities in any way that we want and I'm going to share with you some tools I've learned along the way that have helped me do what I consider to be improvements on my personality.

So to take you back a little bit into how I maybe got the seeds of this belief, my mom told me that when she was in high school and at the start of her university degree she was quite nervous. She didn't like being extroverted and meeting people and that sort of thing, and she realized that she was just simply too shy for what she wanted out of life.

So she made the proactive decision to change that.

She would call her friends and say meet me at the bar at seven, and she would make sure that she got to the bar at six, so that for an hour she was by herself and she'd have no choice but to speak to people. She'd stand at the bar and people would come up and speak to her and she'd have an hour of practice every time she did that.

So maybe that planted the seeds of letting me know that we can change who we are. We're not stuck, and I do remember as a as a teenager thinking, am I stuck like this? When certain parts of my personality were letting me down I was thinking, it's just who I am. It could be, I'm just someone that loses my temper, I'm just someone that forgets things, I'm just someone that is mean.

I firmly, firmly believe when its things like that, you can completely change them because they're just habitual. They're just our most used neural pathways I believe. Like I can't prove any of this but in my experience it's what's happened.

I've been able to change features of myself that I wanted to and I'll tell you how it all first started for me. I was 18 and just starting university and very excited to get into the job market. My friend said that an employer had told him that he would never hire someone who hasn't read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Very old book. So I immediately went to the bookstore bought the book and read it and my eyes were completely opened to the fact that we have the ability to change who we are.

So that book teaches you a bunch of skills about how to be more personable, how a conversation is better when it's about the other person instead of about yourself, and things like that. If you really want to have a good conversation with someone, try and speak about things that they're interested in, for example, is was one of the main tips I remember from that book. But that sent me on a path that has led to me reading a lot of books, on not just self-improvement books but books that I can learn things from.

And it opened my eyes to the fact that we have control of how we change ourselves, so the next book I came across was, it's one of the most popular books ever, it's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That taught me the skill of seeing things through the lens of someone else's eyes so when you're looking at a problem you've got your lens that you your world view that you see the world through and they're going to have their own world view shaped by their experiences and that sort of thing. So that was a book that I guess strengthened my empathy skills and my conversation, my argument, my persuasion skills because it taught me that feature of people having different world views.

And it gets more exciting because I just kept reading and reading but it taught me that if I ever have a problem I can fix it I can go find and locate the right book for that issue and it's going to lead me in the right direction.

So a few years later I was on the dating scene and I'd gone on a date with a girl and we met up again and she let me know that she wasn't keen for a third date and I said “why?” and she said “you just doubt yourself too much.”

She was very blunt but unfortunately for me one of my family members had also told me that recently a few times and I trusted them so I said “hey these two people must be right.”

So I went home and I was thinking, I if I doubt myself then it's my time to go improve my confidence let's go and see how we do that.

And I went to the library and I went to the section on psychology or self-improvement and I found a book, I think it was the sequel to the one I'm about to show you, but it was by the same author the Instant Confidence book or series. And each chapter just ends with an exercise that you can use to improve your confidence.

So one of the ones I liked was it says close your eyes picture yourself looking at a more confident version of yourself how you're standing how you're sitting how you're what you're wearing what your face looks like what your body language is and now enter that body imagine yourself entering that person.

You're now that confident person and once you're there you look back on an even more confident version of yourself so now you're looking at a person that's even more confident than that one and then you enter that body and then you just do that again repeating it keep on seeing a more confident version of yourself.

And once you enter that person, you imagine yourself becoming that more and more confident person you're actually going to feel that way and if you do that enough you're going to change your habitual feeling of confidence.

Another exercise from this book was to pick someone that you know truly loves you, so for me I pictured one of my best friends or two of my best friends and the book says try and see yourself from their eyes, so put yourself in their body and picture yourself as them, and now look upon yourself through their eyes and think, what did they think of you.

And it was very surprising and eye-opening um from my best friend's perspective I saw myself in a really positive light all the good features stood out the things I wouldn't notice about myself. Normally I know my best friends think I'm funny, think I'm loyal etc. and by putting myself in their shoes and looking upon myself in my imagination, it was really good it helps you discover a higher value in yourself so that was a really awesome technique and there's plenty more.

But the purpose of this is to discuss, when you have things that you want to improve about yourself there's resources and exercises that you can do to improve that, and if I ever want to explain that to someone I explained that the old WWE wrestlers would become their characters because they were on the road for hundreds of days out of the year pretending to be a character, a lot of them would just become that character.

And to me that's proof that if you change your character habits enough you really will become that person. So if I do these uh confidence exercises enough I will be that person if I do the old famous Ben Franklin technique that I read about, which is where he would set like seven or nine virtues for himself like being on time, being honest etc., you'd have to check it for yourself the Ben Franklin method, and at the end of each day he'd score himself out of those nine virtues how many did he actually perform that day.

And at the end of the week you'd see his tally and by measuring his character ethic in that sense he could improve it. And I tried that for a while, I don’t do that anymore, but back when I was younger I did and there's just plenty of exercises that you can do to improve yourself. So don't feel like you're stuck in your current level of thinking your current level of performance, discipline, etc.

Seriously go on the internet, better yet go to a library so you can get a full book. You're going to lose focus if you're jumping around the internet, but if you've got the task of finishing a book, it can really help you and focus you in.

So that's my advice the old-fashioned way of go to the library to solve your problems and feel free to steal any of those techniques and comment if you have any of your own that you want to add to it so thanks for joining me and please give us a subscribe so we can bring you more content.