Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf]
I&#x27;m a personality type coach and I help people implement the kinds of changes described in the paper. There are many different models that deal with this kind of change. But taking one step back, I think it should be made more clear up front that &quot;having a desire to change one&#x27;s personality traits&quot; itself is a trait. There is no need to pressure (most) people to change, and many good people feel a strong pressure to change just by being on the internet. Some seem to have a natural desire to change. They are self-improvers by nature. Some are curious, more open in general. They try this or that and wonder how life would change if they were more of an introvert, or more conscientious. Others are pushed into change, brought to their knees, so to speak, by patterns of poor outcomes in their lives.<p>One of the often-unspoken realities here is that this growth and change will cause anxiety directly. It&#x27;s observable in any living organism. (Now think about New Year&#x27;s resolutions...they can be real anxiety spikers) If any really pleasing dopamine reward is to come of this process in humans, its full manifestation is often very time-delayed as the change process itself takes its course. So depending on the traits and their role in the trait-changer&#x27;s own systems, models, and beliefs, it is helpful to identify pathways that can involve the trait-changer&#x27;s strengths and yield some increased leverage. For example, &quot;being open to _what_ is less stressful than being open to _that thing I can&#x27;t typically stand being open to_?&quot; There&#x27;s this blended approach.<p>Beyond traits, I find that typologies and archetypes are very helpful in establishing a quick and dirty template for change. If you identify as a &quot;type&quot; that finds benefit from developing cleverness, even if you yourself aren&#x27;t very clever _right now_, we may see some surprising success if we try some exercises to identify and harness a latent cleverness in service of your goals. If you are a natural idealist, an idealistic princess who befriends all the little forest creatures, that&#x27;s actually a very helpful model to examine as well. The story has been shared across cultures for many centuries, and it&#x27;s a matter of running down the list of type attributes and noting the deltas with regard to your current life. I call my own method Type &#x2F; Trait Interleave and so far I&#x27;ve been happy with the outcomes for my clients.<p>With traits we quickly understand the contextual you and your contextually-variant patterns. With type we get at questions of your core self and begin to understand how your contextually-variant patterns could be sabotaging or benefiting some other system functioning in your life. Thanks op for the thought-provoking post, I didn&#x27;t expect to see it here. :-)