Is it Possible to Change Your Personality?
Kevin Price, Editor at Large for USA Business Radio and Host of the Price of Business Show, has recently become hooked on Quora. In addition to daily hosting the Price of Business, Kevin has numerous writing obligations on this and other sites for which he serves as an editor and with his syndicated column, so we decided that if he’s going to write at Quora, he is going to share that content on this website. If you are on Quora, make sure to follow Kevin. You can check out his page here.
Kevin’s hot topics on Quora are history, free market economics, philosophy, and Myers Briggs typology, and many others. The following is one of his recent answers to the question in the title.
Is there a way to change your personality? The answer is, yes, of course. Our personality is made up of so many things and include up bringing as well as DNA. However, are you going to make an INTJ into an ESFP? No, not even close. A better question is, why would you want to change one’s personality?
Each personality type has strengths an weaknesses. If a person takes their natural personality (MBTI) and allow it to stay in its most primitive and immature state, they are unlikely to reach their full potential or be as happy as they like to be. So instead of trashing whichever personality you naturally developed through, it makes more sense to look at one’s current type — focusing heavily on the weaknesses — and work on becoming well rounded.
In doing this, I love the tools of Personality Hacker and their treatment of the “car model” in particular. According to their website:
“Let’s pretend your mind is a four passenger vehicle. (These four ‘passengers’ represent four distinct mental processes which influence you the most.) In the front seat you have a Driver. Next to the Driver you have a navigator, or a Co-Pilot. Directly behind the Co-Pilot sits a 10 year old, and directly behind the Driver is a 3 year old.
“The Driver is the part of your personality that you identify with the most. If I were to ask you to describe yourself you would spend 80% of your time describing this process. We call this your Flow State.
“The Co-Pilot is a part of you that you identify with, but not nearly as strongly as the Driver. It’s an incredibly important part of ourselves that we tend to undervalue. (I’ll get to that in a moment.) We call this the Growth Position.
“The 10 Year Old is a part of you that you know is there, but have a push/pull relationship with. Sometimes you think you’re good at it, sometimes it trips you up. We call the 10 Year Old the Defensive Position.
“The 3 Year Old is the most unsophisticated part of you, and so you have a tendency to not see it. It often influences you from the shadows until it makes its presence known, usually through inner turmoil. We call the 3 Year Old the Blind Spot.”
In order to be all one can be, one needs to focus on the co-pilot, 10 year old, and the 3 year old. To reach optimal success, focusing heavily on the co-pilot is crucial. To move out of being defensive and into a more healthy and proactive mode, working on the 10 year old trait is important. And if one doesn’t want to find themselves stuck in behavior that makes them miserable, they have to overcome the blind spot that is part and parcel of being a 3 year old.
As an INTJ my 10 year old is vulnerability (feelings) and my 3 year old is sensing.
The greatest weakness of the INTJ is sensing, we can get caught up in our own world of binging on things (from information to drugs, you name it) to check out, which makes isolation even easier for us (and it is a default position anyway for this type). “Sensing” is the INTJ’s 3 year old. In some ways, even worse, is out problem with feelings and emotions. That is the INTJs ten year old. They say the biggest fear of an INTJ is… (read more, while there FOLLOW Kevin and check out more of his work)
