"It's Just My Personality"

 

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend about a serious shoulder injury and I suggested a Buddhist practice for dealing with the pain and preventing further injury.  He responded by saying “I’d have to have a different personality to do that.”  I replied with “Why don’t you change your personality?”  My friend signaled me with one of his fingers; he may have thought I was joking or saying something totally absurd.  But I was not joking, and it got me thinking.

It seems to me that this view of personality is not at all uncommon.  Most people think that their personality is just what it is, it’s who they are, end of story.  It cannot be changed any more than you can change your blood type: “With my personality?  I could never do that.”

Angry, fearful, untrusting, shy, consistently avoiding confronting difficult problems with other people, difficulty saying no or setting boundaries, talking endlessly and without listening—these are all behaviors where it is common to say “It’s just her personality.  There’s nothing that can be done about it.”

But if we reflect on this a minute, we know that personality does change.  I don’t have the same personality now that I had when I was three years old, or ten years, or twenty years.  And we have all seen instances in which a person’s personality changed dramatically and spontaneously as a result of some powerful event or series of events.  Examples of this are numerous:    going to war, traveling to another country, visiting a slaughter house, going away to college and encountering new people and new ideas.  There are also moments of epiphany, such as suddenly seeing that your constant joking is a way of avoiding getting in touch with and expressing your real feelings and connecting on a deep level with other people.  

So yes, personality does change as a result of life experiences.  But… can we intentionally bring about a change in our personality?  Yes, we can.  I know because I’ve done it and I know other people who have done it.  What we call personality change comes about as the result of a choice that is made, and then accompanied by consistent effort to create the change toward something more beneficial. 

But in order to change your personality, or some part of it, there must first be a desire to change it.  If the desire is not there, nothing will ever happen.  Sometimes we hold on to “My personality is my personality and that’s just the way things are” because it provides us with an excuse for not doing anything about our unacknowledged suffering.  As we become more mindful, we begin to notice how we are using the idea of a permanent personality as an excuse that simply perpetuates our suffering by not dealing with the underlying issues.

So if I have the desire to change, how do I actually go about creating the change?  I offer my own experience as an example.

From fairly early on in life I prided myself on not being gullible, being fact based and logic based, and having good critical thinking skills.  This became accentuated in college, especially by my philosophy classes.  I constantly found the flaws in someone’s reasoning and beliefs, in various laws and policies, in religion and politics, choices made by others, and more.  You could say that this was my personality; this was who I was as a person.

                Learning to get quiet and meditate helped me to see what I was doing and to change.  When I looked deeply, I saw clearly that this “part of my personality” was costing me—it was causing suffering for myself and for others.  My habitual fault finding with everything was driving people away from me.  Additionally, my focusing only of what was wrong caused me to not see what was right, and so the whole world seemed like a horrible depressing mess.  When I saw this, I began cultivating the habit of looking for the good in everyone and everything—and I found it!  It had been there all along.  I started to be happier and more optimistic about the state of the world, and noticed that people were much more interested in spending time with me.

                But a long-standing habit may persist unless there is consistent attention given to changing it.  I developed a practice for bringing about change.  It starts by noticing when I have done or said something negative in interacting with someone.   I stop and take what I call a “do-over.”  I say to the person:  “I’m working on my habit of finding fault with everything and I just realized I’ve done it again.  What I should have said instead is that you had two great points in what you said.  The first one was that…”  

This do over can happen an hour later, or the next day.  If the other person involved is not available, I can say the do-over silently to myself.   When I catch myself, I try to do this practice without harsh self judgement.  Over time, I found that the interval of time that passed between my negative act and noticing what I had done became shorter and shorter.  It eventually became only a minute, then a few seconds, or I would catch myself during the act itself and stopped and took a do-over.  Lastly, I began to notice the impulse in to say something negative arise in my mind, and then chose not to say it.  This was great progress, and eventually a new personality trait was born!  At some point, the new way of engaging life became automatic—my new “default setting.”    

It is worth saying here that not all parts of a personality need changes--we all have our collection of harmless and endearing quirks.  But often there are aspects of our predispositions that cause suffering to ourselves and to others.  These are things that can be changed and are worth changing.  And it is worth making the effort because doing so greatly reduces the suffering we create for ourselves as well as others.  Once you get the hang of how to change in this way, doing the work is not drudgery or tedious at all.  It can actually be interesting, exciting, and enjoyable.  And each time we experience a reduction in our suffering we receive powerful motivation to continue with the practice.   

 

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Website:  https://www.ahimsaacres.org/ 

 

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