Mar 1

Mar 1 Personality Isn’t Permanent: You’ll Want To Read This Book

In the musical Hamilton, the song “Satisfied” depicts the party where Hamilton meets the Schuyler sisters, and ultimately he marries one. Hamilton first meets Angelica. The usual questions arise, focusing on status and class.

“My name is Angelica Schuyler.” “Alexander Hamilton.”

“Where’s your fam’ly from?”

“Unimportant. There’s a million things I haven’t done but Just you wait, just you wait . . .”

This excerpt from the book Personality isn’t Permanent by organizational psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Ben Hardy, captures the main point of his book: our future self is more important than our past or even current self.

While most self-development books focus on improving your current self, Hardy shows the reader why it’s critical to focus on your future self. Our future selves will be different than our current selves, and that gap is where the work begins. Only by seeing where we want to go, can we begin to create the plan of how to get there. If you had a vague goal of going on a few errands and were to drive aimlessly turning at random streets, you would most likely end up in a place that was not your errand. There is too much randomness and entropy in the world for us to end up where we want to be without effort —continually evaluating and re-evaluating where we want to go. Physics teaches us this lesson in the law of thermodynamics — entropy of any isolated system always increases.

This is why we must create ourselves. Who we become is a choice. Our choice. If we don’t make the choice ourselves, society, bosses, entropy, and our peers will make it for us. If we don’t make the choice ourselves, our past will define us.

People use the past as the excuse to remain stuck in habits and attitudes that keep them from growing.

According to Hardy, we create our future self when we:

Reframe our past and our trauma
See our identity as malleable and not fixed
Distinguish between our current and future selves
Pursue a single, bigger-than-us goal
Upgrade our subconscious
Change our environment

The Past

Your view of the world says more about you than it does about the world.

Past trauma shatters hope and eliminates the future. We must reframe our past and shift from blame to meaning. Looking back we remember our past in a new context, and see it in a way that serves us. As Malcolm Gladwell said, “sometimes the past deserves a second chance.” When we move from feeling bad about our past to having compassion for our past, we change the narrative.

A mindfulness practice teaches us to observe our thoughts as separate from us creating the smallest yet powerful space between who we are and our thoughts. This is a similar idea when we reflect on our our past from a different lens. When we make space between who we were and who we are now, we no longer identify with it.

How we describe, interpret, and identify with our past has far more to do with where we are, here and now, than it has to do with our actual past. If you’re still angry with your parents for your childhood, for example, this speaks more to who you currently are than what actually happened in your childhood. To continue blaming any person or event from the past makes you the victim, and reflects more on you than whatever it is you’re blaming. — Hardy

Holding on to trauma is like leaving a splinter in your finger. The initial pain subsides into a nagging, lesser pain but never goes away until we remove the splinter. Upon removal, the pain sharpens intensely and then eases completely. We can begin an exploration of reframing our past and releasing pent-up emotions by asking the following questions.

Personality Isn’t Permanent by Ben Hardy

Your Identity

Hardy dismisses personality tests. Instead, he emphasizes seeing your identity as malleable and flexible. Defining yourself as a specific type produces blocks, and even shame. The key to personal transformation is to become psychologically flexible and not over-attach to your current identity or perspectives. Our personalities are not innate.

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. — Daniel Gilbert

Start by asking yourself what fixed personality attributes do you hold close? What happened in your life to solidify those views? How might those attributes be no longer serving you now? One of mine is that I’m bad at pronunciation and speaking other languages. For most of my life, this has been a fixed personality trait as recognizable to my mind as my first name. This year, I’ve taken on a daily DuoLingo Spanish practice to show myself this is no longer part of my identity — I don’t attach to that self-limiting, fixed personality trait any longer.

Your Present vs. Future Self

After seeing our identity as flexible, we begin the process of distinguishing our present self from our future self. They aren’t the same person. What a relief! It takes the pressure off knowing that we can be better than who we are today, and more importantly — that it’s attainable.

Daunting as it seems, creating your future self can be an easily structured journaling event. Hardy provides a set of questions to see your future self from the 10,000-foot view to the micro-details. Think of it as reading the book cover summary and the book.

Personality Isn’t Permanent by Ben Hardy

One day you will become your future self. Who is going to be?

I find this process exhilarating and fun. I love imagining bigger than what I think is possible — the very point of this exercise. Become emotionally invested in this future self as you do with your favorite character in a book or your favorite sports star. Get excited about the future self because what comes next is hard if you aren’t enamored by this person.

The Goal

Designing our future self means designing something that doesn’t exist. Similar to writing a play, there is an ending, and the plot works backward from that ending. We want to produce a future self that is a better version of us working toward something greater. There must be a goal. The best way to do this is to lay out a new, bigger-than-you goal — a purpose worth pursuing that will motivate your current self to become this future self you carefully crafted above. Creating a keystone goal that you aggressively pursue helps you do everything else you do. It becomes the reason behind everything you do.

Hardy takes a different view than most self-growth peddlers and says it’s not enough to have a big goal. Results matter. Often self-growth culture tells us to focus on progress and not the outcome. “You get whatever results you’re committed to,” says Hardy. If your goal is to launch your business and the results are to achieve six figures in eighteen months, you will be more committed. Results force honesty. Results clarify your identity. Results force you to improve. You will openly decline a happy hour to be fresh-minded for work the next day. You will identify as an entrepreneur, and start reading materials that educate you and solidify that view. You won’t settle at $5,000 in sales in month two because your results are more significant than that.

It’s not enough to create a goal for you. It has to be bigger than you. Go from “what can the world offer me” to “what can I offer the world.” According to Cal Newport, author, and professor, the most successful people in the world know that work is about helping and creating value for other people. Constructing a goal that helps others makes us part of something more meaningful. Launching your business to provide for your family in a way that you never had, or to have more money to give back to something you care about will motivate you beyond simply launching a business.

After identifying the goal, it’s important to identify the obstacles that will prevent you from achieving this goal.

“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” — Robert Brault

It is not the obstacles between ourselves and our dreams that stop us. Instead, we are stopped by our commitment to the idea — to the identity — that we can never actually achieve our goals.

Hardy explains that by having a single goal you are committed to, it’s easier to choose “smaller” behaviors to support that goal.

Every behavior has a reason. Realizing why you’re engaging in a specific behavior is fundamental to becoming a conscious human being. Applying mindfulness and introspection to our current behaviors is the first step in changing them.

Hardy suggests that all behavior is goal-driven. But where do “goals” come from? There are three sources.

Exposure
Desire
Confidence

Our goals are either limited to or expanded from what we’ve been exposed to. This is the same idea of ‘see it to believe it.’ We must show our subconscious the things we want to have through exposure.

Desire is about our future self having an acquired taste. We must learn to want — if our future self is successful, we must learn to want what it takes to be successful. This is how we fill in the gap between who we are now and who we want to be today — we define this current period as desiring to learn to be that person. Using desire to become our future self relieves some of the pressure because it’s okay to make mistakes when you are learning to become a successful entrepreneur versus having to be a successful entrepreneur on day one.

Confidence is built through action and shattered by trauma. Confidence precedes motivation and sprouts from action — when you take a small step toward your goal, it motivates you because you’re becoming more like the person that achieves their goals, which makes you more likely to work toward the goal. Smalls steps turn into the flywheel effect — positive feedback loops build momentum, increasing the payoff of incremental effort.

Your Subconscious

Once we’ve outlined who we want to become and what we want to achieve, we must continuously feed our subconscious material to help it see what we want to achieve. We must uplevel our subconscious to overcome the patterns of your former self like facing and reframing your trauma. Hardy posits that trauma destroys your confidence, and people often have very limited goals due to unresolved trauma.

How many people do you know casually throw around self-limiting beliefs like “I’m not a math person,” “I’m not creative,” “I’m not athletic.” Somewhere on their path, likely at a young age, a traumatic event left a mark on their mind. It could have been as “small” as someone laughing at their drawing, coming in last at every track meet, or being teased at the whiteboard writing out a math problem. While it was a small event years ago, it left a large impact.

How do we go about this? One way is through journaling. Hardy, a journaling-enthusiast, says, “your journal is where you actively convince yourself, emotionally, that what you want is already yours — you influence yourself through strategic communication.”

When we journal, it’s important to express gratitude for the GAIN and not anxiety about the GAP. Where have you made progress? How have you shown up for future self? Then it’s about putting together an action plan to continue that progress toward your goal and commitment to results. Instead of constantly measuring yourself against your ideal, you measure yourself against where you formerly were. Your confidence increases, which fans the flames of fire of pursuing your future self.

Our subconscious pulls us back to homeostasis but can be continually upgraded through emotional experiences and future-self behaviors.

Emotional experiences could be sharing your future self and big goal with people in your life, which give your brain evidence to seek out behaviors to reaffirm this story. Tell your professional network. Start an accountability group with people who put together their future self and big goal plan, too.

Future-self behaviors mean doing things that support who you will become and not who you are today. On day one of the goal of launching your business, forming an LLC and enrolling in an entrepreneur online course shows your subconscious that you are an entrepreneur, even if you’re still in the process of learning to become one. Combining big commitments with emotional experiences will help your subconscious see to believe.

It’s common to see first-time marathon runners collect donations for a cause and tell their network they are running a marathon for the first time. They are creating an emotional experience of being courageous and brave with a huge commitment by sharing with the world before they’ve achieved the goal.

Your environment

Our environment affects us more than we realize. Change your environment, and you change your future identity. The more psychologically rigid a person is, the more they see themselves as the same person in every situation they are. This narrow approach limits our ability to adopt a new identity. Hardy suggests engaging in new roles and new environments, taking on new challenges, and experiencing new emotions.

Running your first marathon is. a first-time event that puts you in a new role (marathon runner) in a new situation (joining a new running group) that will then change your identity from “I’m lazy” to “I’m a marathon runner.”

Hardy also emphasizes the importance of choosing your peer group based on a vast amount of research showing they powerfully influence your behavior and choices. Specifically, research shows that peer and social group affects everything from how productive you are at work to your financial decisions to your chances of becoming an entrepreneur.

According to business school professor, David Burkus, we are NOT the average of the five people we spend the most time with. The impact is bigger than that. Your friends are your future. In a follow-up study, Christakis and Fowler found something similar with smoking rates. Using the same social network data they had borrowed from the Framingham Heart Study, they found that if your friend smokes, you are 61 percent more likely to be a smoker yourself. If a friend of your friend smokes, you are still 29 percent more likely to smoke. And for a friend of a friend, the likelihood is 11 percent. Perhaps the most telling study was of happiness. The two researchers found that happy friends make you happier — no surprise there.But if your friend of a friend of a friend is happy with their life, then you have a 6 percent greater likelihood of being happy yourself. Now six percent might not seem like much, but consider that other studies suggest that if I gave you a $10,000 raise, that would only trigger about a 2 percent increase in your happiness.

Who are you spending the most time with? Who might you like to spend more time with will help you become your future self, and that you can help them become their future selves? Who are you following on social media? What authors do you spend the most time with? Take an outsider’s view of your peer group, and add in more people if you need more positive influences.

Your Story

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.— Alain de Botton

I loved reading Personality Isn’t Permanent because it reminded me of the importance that Life Is Practice. It’s a daily opportunity to train. To progress. To be better than who you were yesterday. To contribute to something meaningful. He reminds us that we are the author of our story.