How to Change Your Personality with Olga Khazan

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Health & Fitness, Education, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can we really change our personalities? In this episode, Forrest is joined by someone who’s actually tried most of the things we talk about on the podcast: journalist and author Olga Khazan. Olga shares the personal experiments that led to her becoming more extroverted and agreeable, and less neurotic. They discuss the Big Five personality traits, how behavior shapes identity, the role of self-concept, authenticity, and some of the common challenges people face when trying to change a core aspect of who they are. About Our Guest: Olga Khazan is a writer at The Atlantic, where she covers health, culture, and the complexities of human behavior. She's the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World and her new book Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change. You can watch this episode on YouTube. Key Topics: 0:00: Introduction 1:15: Olga’s personal background with personality change 5:20: Age, extroversion, self-concept, and Olga’s improv classes 10:10: Unconditional positive regard, meditation, and mindfulness 20:55: Trying on different traits, and acceptance vs. change 24:25: Conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness, and individualism 36:20: Changing at the ‘trait level’, and the changes Olga has embraced most 43:50: Psychedelics, non-self, and identifying what’s really true 53:50: Nature vs. nurture and the aspects we can’t change 56:30: Parenting and personality change 1:02:05: Recap Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link. Sponsors Head to fastgrowingtrees.com/BEINGWELL to get 15% off the best deals for your yard. Use BEINGWELL at checkout, and take advantage of their Alive and Thrive Guarantee! Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/beingwell. Go to ZOE.com and find out what ZOE Membership could do for you. Use code WELL10 to get 10% off membership. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BEINGWELL at https://www.oneskin.co/ Connect with the show: Subscribe on iTunes Follow Forrest on YouTube Follow us on Instagram Follow Forrest on Instagram Follow Rick on Facebook Follow Forrest on Facebook Visit Forrest's website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen.
0:09.6	If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before,
0:13.2	welcome back. We tend to think of our personality as something that's relatively fixed.
0:18.1	You're either extroverted or introverted. You're the type A who plans the group
0:21.7	outing or the type B who's along for the ride. You're confident or you're anxious. But this idea
0:26.4	that personality is simply who we are can be a real problem for people because almost everyone
0:31.8	has something about themselves they would like to change. So are we just stuck with the parts of
0:36.1	ourselves we don't like? Or is there something we can actually do about any of this? So today we're going to be
0:40.6	exploring that question with Olga Hazan, a journalist at the Atlantic, and the author of the new
0:45.0	book, Me But Better, the Science and Promise of Personality Change. So Olga, thanks for joining me
0:49.9	today. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to have you here.
0:54.8	In large part, because we talk about a lot of the stuff that you've actually tried on the podcast.
1:00.0	So you're kind of this incredible test case for us here. You talk about meditation in the book,
1:04.7	a lot of therapeutic approaches, stuff from act, which we talk about pretty regularly, even psychedelics.
1:09.6	So your experience is really like a
1:11.1	great test case here for us. And it was so cool to read about it. Let's start kind of at the
1:15.5	beginning here. How changeable is our personality? Our personalities are pretty changeable. Most of us
1:21.1	change throughout our lives, even if we don't try to change. So you probably are not the same person you were in high school or in college.
1:30.1	You know, if you're now like a parent or something like that, you probably notice changes that
1:34.2	have happened in the intervening years. You'll probably continue to change as you get older.
1:38.7	But also what my book is really about is about research that shows that you can actually change
1:43.3	your personality even more by taking consistent action and by changing your daily behaviors.
	...

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