Being a high self-monitor allows you to shape-shift when necessary, without rearranging your entire personality.

I found this to be an uplifting take on personality change: that it can be temporary, but still valid. Free traits allow you the flexibility to act out of character while knowing there's something inside you that's constant and steady.

To Robert, his negative thoughts were the other stronger guy, the one overpowering him. He decided to just drop the rope—to exist alongside the negative thoughts but to stop resisting them. Avoiding discomfort wasn't making him any less uncomfortable; it just mired him in weary inertia.

This meant that he resolved to move forward despite his

Jerome Bruner said “You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action,” and I had literally acted

This new way of looking at personality comports with the Buddhist concept of “no self,” or the idea that there’s no core “you.” To believe otherwise, the sutras say, is a source of suffering.

One of the main reasons some people get angrier than others is "inflammatory labeling," or the tendency to view people and situations more negatively than is realistic. Inflammatory labeling is calling a coworker who made a minor mistake a "total idiot," even if it's only in your head. Instead of making you feel better—That person, sorted!--these

“Personality is what you do habitually, automatically, without thinking about it, whether it’s how you think about things, how you feel about things, or whether you do certain things,” says Brent Roberts, a prominent personality psychologist at the University of Illinois.

I wish I could dry-erase all my cognitive distortions and fill my mental whiteboard with cool visions instead.

As the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book ‘Future Tense,’ anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail-orientation. Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that achieving our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should

One of the biggest obstacles to changing personality is this kind of ambivalence: a sense that yeah, maybe you should get around to being less angry or drunk or chronically late, and maybe one day you will, but not today. After all, you're a fun drunk, and you get angry for a reason, right?