Introduction

Beyond the complex morning routines and the productivity techniques, i want to ask a deeper question. Can we change who we are fundamentally ?, how much choice do we really have over the kind of people we are ?.

I guess we can't really answer that without knowing who we are. So, i'm going to ask you a question, who are you ?.

I would consider myself to be a lot of things, i'm a brother, a friend, a university grad, a metal head, but all of these things they're not who i truly am. They're all labels, right ?.

Describing Ourself with 5 Key features

Who we are on a deeper level is a little bit different. It's the sum of our actions our behaviors and our values and to a large extent our personality, but that's pretty hard to define as well.If you were to list all of the qualities that you think you have as a person and then ask your friends and your family to do the same, You'd probably end up with a few words that are pretty similar, for example honest and trustworthy might come up or resilient and confident.

If we group together all of the similar descriptions we have we end up with kind of five key features that describe who we are as people and it makes a handy acronym OCEAN.

That is Openness to experience so whether you prefer routine or novelty. Conscientiousness. So, whether you're more organized or disorderly. Extroversion, which describes how outgoing or reserved you are. Agreeableness, your tendency to be compassionate or critical and neuroticism which is basically a measure of your emotional sensitivity and intuitively most of us have a pretty good idea where we land on the spectrum.

Just take a look at the traditional world of self-improvement. It's usually focused on changing just a couple of these. Promising that we can become more extroverted or more conscientious if we just buy the right book or follow the right course.

Look Deeper To Answer Our Questions

Why are we so obsessed with changing our personality in the first place ?, why do we care ?. Well, it seems that for the most part, many of us want to change our personalities in order to get something that we didn't previously have. We often feel like the present version of ourselves isn't enough to get the achievements or accolades that we feel like we deserve.

But not just that, many of us change our personalities from a place of fear, because we're scared of not fitting in. We're scared of being ostracized or being pushed aside. That social desirability is a pretty big fuel for change. i know it was for me.

The problem is it's not a very effective feel and to understand why we need to talk more about the desire to change?, and what it actually means ?.

Okay, so one interchange is just like one part of the equation. There are six commonly agreed steps between the person you are and the person you want to be. Wanting to change represents kind of that middle step. After you've broken through the initial denial but before you've actually reached the stage where you've created some kind of long lasting meaningful change, and the issue with this step is that it is fueled largely by motivation and motivation can be a really good thing. It can get you off your backside and get you making changes, but it has some really big flaws.

The first is that motivation fades really really quickly and when it fades our instinct or mind at least was to get another burst of motivation, and you end up stuck in this cycle where you get just enough motivation to start changing but not enough to actually commit to it. you end up stuck in the cycle of changing but not really changing at the same time.

This is even worse when all of our motivation is extrinsic, when it comes from the promise of external goals. When we laser focus on the outcomes, on the extrinsic rewards for a task it can actually crowd out our intrinsic motivation.

we can forget that these activities that we're engaging in have value in and of themselves, and become hyper fixated on the external. we can really quickly go from trying to change because it's something we want to do, to trying to change because it's something that we think we should do.

Ideas To Get Our jobs Done

So, what do we do ? how do you push through this ?. Well, i'm going to share with you a few ideas that i like to implement this is more of a framework for change rather than a step-by-step guide, but there are a few ideas that have really helped me change how i think about change in a personal sense and really create something that's long-lasting and durable.

I have done just about every single self-improvement positive internet habit that you could think of from cold showers to meditation, to waking up at 5:00 a.m every morning, and today most of them have been left by the wayside. but I don't feel guilty for doing that.

The reality is for a lot of these changes i just didn't want to do. It's really easy to convince yourself that you want, what the people around you also want.

We're all in our own little echo chambers as much as we want to deny it. The truth is good habits and good change is something that only you can define. No book or no video on the internet can tell you what that looks like for your specific life. Only you can decide that, and i think the first step to creating any kind of long lasting change is to ask yourself.

Is this something i want ?, and to not just default to the easiest answer to really question if it's something that you want, but once you do have some idea and you're fairly certain that something that you do actually want to do.

I think the next stage is to figure out how to translate this vague idea. For example, i want to be more social into some concrete actions and specifically the easiest actions that you possibly can do. Make your targets ridiculously easy. So easy that failure almost becomes more difficult than following through. For example, I stretch every morning but I didn't always do that and in order to begin i set myself the target of stretching for three minutes every day.

Which might sound pathetically low, it was like three stretches at most. That might sound a bit too easy but once you can do the easy stuff, the hard stuff comes naturally.

Final Words

At the end of the day, the best habits are the ones that you stick to, and in my opinion that's what bridges the gap between motivation and habit. Small easy repeatable tasks.

But i think the most important thing to remember is that change isn't linear and true change can only come from a place of love. So, make sure you treat yourself with the same compassion that you would show to your best friend or to any other loved one.

We all have our ups and downs, if you do feel like you're going in circles, it's important to take stop of how much you've learned across those so-called failures. Even if you fall back into old habits or you change your idea of what progress looks like completely. It doesn't mean that you've failed.

You've learned a little bit about yourself if nothing else and what other knowledge could be more valuable than that. If you start from a place of love then there's no way you can really lose

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