Book review: Personality Isn’t Permanent: Break Free From Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

Covid-19 has provided us with a space to pause, reflect and course correct.You may not be able to change circumstances or external events but the one area you do have control over is who you want to show up as during this time and who you want to become.In Personality Isn’t Permanent, Dr. Benjamin Hardy draws on psychological research to demolish the popular misconception that personality—a person’s consistent attitudes and behaviors—is innate and unchanging. Hardy liberates us from the limiting belief that our “true selves” are to be discovered, and shows how we can intentionally create our best selves and achieve big goals instead.The timing of this book is impeccable and offers practical, science-based advice for self-reinvention.Here are some of the nuggets I have learned from the book:

Personality is not fixed but a choice

Ben brings a fresh new perspective to how we view ourselves and shatters the paradigm of personality tests. He warns us to be weary of personality tests and putting ourselves into boxes. The risk being that you tend to steer away from opportunities that don’t fit your ‘profile’.If you’re an introvert, you will naturally avoid public speaking. However, if you see yourself in a powerful role in the future, delivering talks is part of the criteria. So you will then need to throw yourself into situations to develop the skills and go through the discomfort of pushing yourself outside your comfort zone.However, it is the choice to have a growth mind-set and belief that you can develop the skills necessary to transform yourself. Ben generously offers science based strategies, stories, research and detailed steps on how to achieve this.

“You become who you choose to be. That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate, but trained. It can and does change. It can and should be chosen and designed. Choosing one’s own way is a primary purpose to our lives”.

Ben provides inspiring journaling prompts to get you out of your present thinking and circumstances and gives you permission to dream big in order to become the person equal to the goal. 

Your future-self shapes your present day personality

Ben encourages you to distinguish your present self from your future self and actually view them as two different people.The reason for this is it forces you to think about the choices you are making daily with a sense of accountability to someone else. He talks about an example of Nate who is heavily addicted to sugar and how Nate is picturing his 70 year old self if he does not make some drastic changes today.

“The problem is Nate’s imagined future with sugar, versus his imagined future without it. If he imagines his future without it, he sees all sorts of possibilities that aren’t there when with it. You can and should do this for yourself”.

Your future self will have a different trajectory if you consciously make better decisions today.When you adopt this mind-set, you no longer require willpower to get through the day because ultimately you are your own motivation. The role model you aspire to be is yourself! 

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

Ben delivers practical tools to become the architect of your identity. It’s not about steering away from your authentic self but giving you the choice and power to understand you are not complete.Think about the person you were five years ago. You have changed, grown and achieved. So why would the version of yourself in five years stay the same as you are now?Ben asks some incredibly thought provoking questions which he encourages you to explore through journaling -

“Who would you be if you could creatively design yourself?”

Personality Isn’t Permanent gifts you with practical strategies for re-framing past memories, becoming the scribe of your identity narrative, upgrading your conscious and redesigning your environment in order to close the gap between your current and future self.

Own your story

We are not defined by past experiences, they may have shaped us but Ben gives us insightful tools to shift our perspective that our personality does not need to be limited to our past. It is how we give meaning to past experiences that enables us to move past the event or situation.He challenges you to that instead of being guided by your past to shape you, you should be looking to the vision of your future self.

“We understand the meaning of our experiences through stories. We have stories for our lives, for specific events, even for a given day. The more intentional you get about your life, the more you become the author of the story. You shape the meaning of your past. You also shape the meaning of current and future experiences in order to have the story you want for your past. You get to write your own story”.

I highly recommend you make some time to read this book because it is a gift and will change your life. Here is the link to receive first chapter for free - : https://benjaminhardy88-gmail-com.ck.page/cfb71d6ac8Here is the link to pre-order -  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607021/personality-isnt-permanent-by-benjamin-hardy-phd/ 

About Ben Hardy

Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of Willpower Doesn’t Work. His blogs have been read by over 100 million people and are featured on Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, Cheddar, Big Think, and many others. He is a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today and from 2015-2018, he was the #1 writer, in the world, on Medium.com.  He and his wife Lauren adopted three children through the foster system in February 2018 and, one month later, Lauren became pregnant with twins, who were born in December of 2018. They live in Orlando.Here’s to showing up for your future self, Warm wishesLori