Altered Ego

If she wanted her life to work, she had to become independent—she had to change. So at age 24, Lauren left the rage-filled boyfriend, got a studio apartment, and vowed to stay independent and single, until being alone was no longer hard. She thought the transition would take months but it ended up taking years—the most difficult and disciplined years of her life. During that period she worked steadily not just on her confidence but also on her writing career, becoming more resilient, more organized, more assertive, and more optimistic about her future. Lauren's effort to stand alone required conscious vigilance in the way an alcoholic must steel himself to avoid drink. To aid in the project, she acquired a new, less social circle of female friends; furnished her apartment with a single bed, and spent the long nights of solitude reading seven volumes of Proust. She even posted a New Yorker cartoon in her apartment to symbolize her resolve: Depicting a lone human drinking with aliens at a bar in outer space, its caption read, "As soon as I've made it, I'll come back to earth." Like that space traveler, reaching her goal required years of rigor. When Lauren finally touched down, she felt independent enough to withstand the lure of dysfunctional relationships. She knew she had truly changed when she married a man who, with his straightforward honesty and enormous flexibility, supported her goals without trying to control her or diminish her sense of self.

Some might view Lauren's twentysomething odyssey as garden-variety growing pains, a woman fully maturing into herself. But her struggle to achieve confidence and independent footing is just as easily seen as a case study in self-directed change. "For almost a century, psychologists have struggled with the question of whether adult personality and personality traits change in consequential ways, whether they are set like plaster or marked by persistent change," says University of Oregon psychologist Sanjay Srivastava.

If lifelong temperaments are predestined or at least calcified by a certain age, then what do we make of the whole Western canon of self-reinvention and auto-improvement manuals? On the other hand, if our dispositions are supple—if we can, with enough intellectual and psychological elbow grease, use our noodles to change how we deal with stress, opportunity, and each other—then can we simply retool the way we view the world? And should we be expected to smooth out bumptious traits, alter our egos to suit mates and bosses, and replace undesirable, unpopular or uncomfortable aspects of our adult selves?

Historically, the predominant scientific view of personality was that it was pretty much "set" while we weren't looking, if not by the time of Freud's id-driven age 5 calculator, then at least by about age 30 or so. "People don't really change," was the perennial refrain, among researchers and laymen alike. Even psychologists who allowed that personality continued to develop well into early adulthood and in the context of life experience considered basic temperaments shockproof and mostly rooted in our genes. The child who was generally pleasant, adaptable, and approachable at age 3 was likely to stay that way. The difficult, whiny, emotionally high-strung infant, alarmed at a new face, was destined to be difficult and predictably indisposed. In short, the early patterns of behavior, thought, motive, and emotion, called personality, marked people forever, and no matter what they did or what happened to them, the shy would not morph into the gregarious and the social clod would not rise to lead charm brigades.

More recently, though, a new wave of research has offered evidence that fundamental personality traits—modern psychology's so-called Big Five Factors—not only evolve over our life span but in some cases can be changed at will. In this view, our inner Woody Allens aren't necessarily replaced by Cary Grants, but changes in conscientiousness (ability to handle tasks and organize skills), agreeableness (warmth, generosity, and helpfulness), neuroticism (worry and sense of instability), openness to experience (desire to try new things) and extroversion (need to seek social support)—occur naturally and may be to some extent self-directed if we ourselves only try.

"Temperament is not stable," says Stanford University developmental psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, and a leader of the morphing personality school. "Even when we are able to predict adult personality from infant or childhood temperaments, it's only in the extreme 5 percent at the top and bottom of personality that we can do so. While the vast majority of mindsets are powerful and long lasting, they can indeed be changed. We all have the potential to make those changes and we are wasting that potential if we don't."