Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits? (2015) [pdf]

May I forward some advice that was given to me and worked quite well?

Firstly, don't worry about impostor syndrome. Given you're trying to be someone you're currently not, it's entirely normal.

Secondly, and teaching a class is perfect for this, set up a situation where you can plan what you want to say. Not word for word, but the key points you wish to get across. Make sure you're clear, to yourself, what are the key points and what are asides. When you present, it's fine to use words like "generally" and "usually" while you explain key points but stop yourself from describing or explaining asides.

The first few times are uncomfortable but it should get easier. Over time it'll start to feel wrong when you're about to talk about an aside and you should find you need less planning to keep to the main line. You may also find that this will carry over into social conversations too.

BTW if it helps you for a class context, you can always caveat the lecture up front. Something like "although what I'm about to go over is generally true there are a few corner cases that I won't cover. If you have any questions please ask".

Something else that can work is asking people to give you honest feedback about your communication style. Ask them to be completely honest and don't lead them. The key to making this work is to accept what they say at face value i.e. don't argue it, question it or offer mitigations. Just use it as feedback.

However, for this to work you do need to be able to ask for feedback without leading and accept criticism. If you're not completely sure you can do that then it's best not to try.

On the part of actually changing those traits, one could attempt to use a very precise radiotherapy machine combined with FMRI to find and kill the parts of your brain that bother you.

I'm not really sure I'd want to try to literally hack my brain this way. I have a lot of traits I don't like (hey, I'm posting this here while I should be working... Look! Shiny!) I understand they are what makes me the person my family loves (although some may say it's an acquired taste)

I don't think personality can change. What can change is the situation and the people you interact with, and depending on them, discover aspects of your personality you weren't aware of before. Maybe that counts as a change, but it's just better self knowledge and world knowledge.

I also think personality is not unique - we have a whole range of "personalities" we employ depending on who we talk with and what the situation is. Thus, personality is a function of self-values and external situation - we have many masks, one for each occasion.

The most interesting table in all of personality research: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/asch...

This is taken from correlations with facebook likes. There's a lot of interesting observations here. For instance, introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd culture" stuff. Openness seems to strongly correlate with left or right politics. Emotionally stable people seem to like sports and outdoor activities (adding to a weird theory that lack of sunlight and exercise causes depression.)

If you condition yourself to more regularly exhibit a certain behavior, how is that different from changing your predisposition towards that behavior? Certainly, new habits can be formed and over time people come to exhibit new behaviors reflexively if they've made a habit out of them. Some habits may be harder to form than others, and one's environment will always have a major impact on which habits they're able to form, but there doesn't appear to be a strict limit on one's ability to alter their own behavior (even if there may be a healthy limit).