"Identity has the power to shape and thus also to constrict," writes the cultural critic Sheila Liming. "That is why so much of human life is devoted to a kind of poking at its edges. We seek to discover who we are by locating the boundaries of what we are willing to be."

… the way to change personality is, essentially, by faking it until you make it. Virtually all researchers agree that the key to changing personality is to alter your daily thoughts and actions. The best personality-change interventions help people figure out what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to continue changing.

In fact, Little and some others say the key to a healthy personality may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality from one situation to another. "The thing that makes a personality trait maladaptive is not being high or low on something, it's m

A person … who is willing to flex her personality to meet the demands of the moment, is called a "high self-monitor," according to psychologists. A "low self-monitor," meanwhile, is someone who remains true to themselves, no matter what situation they're in. (The lingo is a bit confusing, but you can think of a high self-monitor

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?

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 ta

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.

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 pers