(2 years ago today, in Dallas)
Are you the kind of person others would describe as "cynical", "angry" or any variant of "unhappy"? Perhaps, you see yourself as a permanently unhappy person, like I did. Pardes is never satisfied with her lot in life. Pardes is always unhappy, on about something. Nothing is ever good enough for Pardes. And so forth.
A big part of developing as a human is getting to know yourself, and understanding why you are the way you are. Chances are, if you don't take the time to do this, nobody else will.
What I learned about myself over the past 31 years is that despite the stories I've told about myself repeatedly in the past, I am not a cynical person. I am not angry, nor am I toxic or unhappy, and actually, I am not anything. I am just alive, which means my body and brain are constantly sending signals to each other and responding accordingly, until the day I die.
This is a very new thing to learn about myself: I am not a happy person, nor am I an unhappy person; I am just an alive person. And, I can choose what personality my live body will wear over time, by manipulating the signals my brain and body are receiving from each other and the environment.
I was never an unhappy person. I was just living for many years in a reality that didn't support my mind or body, and I didn't know if I would ever find one that did. These things take time. So, seeking some kind of personal identity while not yet seeing an end in sight, I told myself I was a permanently unhappy person, and then I continued to feel and act in the way a permanently unhappy person would, further cementing myself into such an unhappy reality. Even when I did find things I liked or enjoyed eventually, I didn't believe that it would do anything to change what I was overall: an unhappy person.
If you want a personality that screams more safety and self-confidence, you might create an environment for yourself that sustains a safe and confident feeling version of you. You might move to a new city and cut anyone or anything from your life that triggers you back into the older unappealing version of yourself. You might change your entire sphere of influence from the ground up, including switching up the music you listen to, movies you watch, and messaging you are exposed to and regurgitating to yourself internally.
Reinventing yourself at the personality level can take time and feel a bit grueling. Anything that reminds you of an old version of yourself, can snap you back to that unfavorable version of you. Anyone who has ever had to deal with bedbugs knows the feeling. But the outcome is completely doable and often rewarding.
I'm extremely fortunate for being aware of this; most people aren't, because they've never seen it happen in their personal lives. I was fortunate enough to see firsthand how parts of my life and personality, and that of others, changed drastically change over time, based on certain changing factors in their lifestyle and environment. And since I was aware it was possible, I was able to maintain enough hope to do it.
Presumably, you want a better personality, not a worse one. So, let's talk more about how we do this.
The first and hardest step toward getting a personality makeover is understanding whether or not it serves you to do so. If you are a very guarded person, for example, it might serve you to be that way, because of other factors in your personality or personal life situation. Perhaps, you are easily susceptible to emotional manipulation or crossing of boundaries. In such a case, you might rather continue to have a guarded personality, and just want to change minor parts of your personality or environment, such as your internal confidence level, until your need for a guarded personality fades away.
Another example: you are a highly cynical person, and you expect the worst from every situation. This, too, could be a mechanism your body learned over time, to protect you from disappointment, because you are deep down a very easily excitable person. So, instead of taking away your cynicism, you might create a strategy on how to attract more wins into your life, so that your personality has a reason to not need this protection anymore.
The second most important step in your personality makeover is believing your personality can change. "People don't change," say people who have never truly seen a person change from the core out, or have never had the chance to change their own attitude.
I promise you, people do change. Just like the leaves on a tree change color between seasons, and a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, and a girl changes into a woman, every living being changes whether or not they want to. Your cells are changing every second. You are never the same person from one moment to the next. Even if you stayed in the same exact environment and had the same exact friends and family around you and kept the same beliefs and did the same exact things every day, you would still be constantly changing.
A living being is a vessel of constantly fluctuating energy flow. You are constantly sending energy to your environment, constantly receiving energy from your environment, and exchanging energy within yourself. In a way, you are being constantly conditioned by these energy exchanges, or "connections". If you were to take stock of all the receptors in your environment and within yourself that connected with you on a daily basis, and then tweaked a few of those receptors, you would essentially be tweaking your own long-term conditioning.
It is really important for your personal belief system to seek places and people that are no strangers to positive dramatic life changes, and spend time around those places and people until the belief of positive change becomes more cemented in your mind.
Typically, people who spend a long time within a less "changing" ecosystem or paradigm, become stagnant and eventually cemented within a certain energy exchange with themselves and their environment, and over time, are unable to notice and manipulate the small changes happening in their environment because they have lost practice in the appropriate receptors to be able to do so. If you have spent a long time using the same languages, mindsets, neurotransmitters and muscles, and sensors, without reason to grow new ones, then trying to grow an entire new personality can feel like an uphill battle.
But as long as you're not dead, and thus your body is still constantly changing, it is still possible!
This brings us to the third crucial step in changing your personality: decide to change your reality. Your personality is essentially an answer to your reality, which is made up of your mind, body, environment, and the relationships between all these things. To change the answer, which is your personality, you'll want to change the question, which is your reality.
The more you change about your reality, which includes your lifestyle, circle of friends, sphere of influence, diet, belief system, and physical health, the better chance you give to your personality makeover.
To me, the lowest hanging fruit in this process is your physical health. Since your body is the most "alive" being in your reality, it is also going to be the most changing and thus the easiest for you to control. If you look very closely at public figures who became wealthy over a notably short period of time, their journey toward extreme prosperity typically began with their body.
Your physical health and body image may seem inconsequential to a personality change when your entire reality feels like a dumpster fire, and you've been forced to dissociate from your body for years. But regardless of how dissociated you are, your body is still the fastest changing live thing in your reality, and also the thing that will create all the other changes to your overall reality and those around you. So, starting by investing in your body is the fastest and most efficient way to catalyze a change in everything else your body is connected to, including your mind and environment.
Investing in your body might look like cutting out processed foods and exercising more, or it might look like getting a massage or getting your hair done. Just because you are already a physical healthy person, it doesn't mean your body can't use an extra bit of pampering and love.
Investing in my body meant learning how to calm my nervous system and creating a situation for myself where I could get massages, make art, engage in outdoor activities, and start a new business, without being worried about my immediate survival. I wrote about my personal self-reinvention strategy in House Hackers Anonymous: a 12-step survival program for my younger self.
Once you have:
agreed that it serves you to improve your personality (and thus your reality),
believe with all your heart and soul that it can happen, and
decided to go on this journey, starting with your body,
...the rest will happen with or without your conscious effort. The changes to your body will slowly create changes within your nerve signals. The changes in your nerve signals will create changes in your brain, which will create changes in your actions, thoughts, and feelings. The changes in your actions, thoughts, and feelings, will create changes in the way you relate to your environment, which will create catalyze changes in your environment.
Over time, your environment will change the way it communicates with you. And in a phase of strong upward momentum, even if you were to slack on the way you treat your body, your newly trained environment will continue to move your mind and body in the direction you implemented for it.
You are not a timid person. You are not cynical, or angry, or shy, or unhappy. You are just a person who fits with your reality in the way it fits with you. And as long as you are alive, this can change. I believe it, and if it serves you, so can you.
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