About Personality Isn’t Permanent (from Amazon):
In Personality Isn’t Permanent, Dr. Benjamin Hardy draws on psychological research to demolish the popular misconception that personality—a person’s consistent attitudes and behaviors—is innate and unchanging. Hardy liberates us from the limiting belief that our “true selves” are to be discovered, and shows how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals instead. He offers practical, science-based advice to for personal-reinvention, including:
• Why personality tests such as Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are not only psychologically destructive but are no more scientific than horoscopes
• Why you should never be the “former” anything–because defining yourself by your past successes is just as damaging to growth as being haunted by past failures
• How to design your current identity based on your desired future self and make decisions here-and-now through your new identity
• How to reframe traumatic and painful experiences into a fresh narrative supporting your future success
• How to become confident enough to define your own life’s purpose
• How to create a network of “empathetic witnesses” who actively encourage you through the highs and lows of extreme growth
• How to enhance your subconscious to overcome addictions and limiting patterns
• How redesign your environment to pull you toward your future, rather than keep you stuck in the past
• How to tap into what psychologists call “pull motivation” by narrowing your focus on a single, definable, and compelling outcome
The book includes true stories of intentional self-transformation—such as Vanessa O’Brien, who quit her corporate job and set the Guinness World Record for a woman climbing the highest peak on every continent in the fastest time; Andre Norman, who became a Harvard fellow after serving a fourteen-year prison sentence; Ken Arlen, who instantly quit smoking by changing his identity narrative; and Hardy himself, who transcended his childhood in a broken home, surrounded by issues of addiction and mental illness, to earn his PhD and build a happy family.
Filled with strategies for reframing your past and designing your future, Personality Isn’t Permanent is a guide to breaking free from the past and becoming the person you want to be.
My Video Book Review:
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
If you’re following me on LinkedIn, you’ve probably seen some quotes that I posted recently from this book Personality Isn’t Permanent by Benjamin Hardy.
I read this book in January and thought I would just share my book review with you here. I thought it was a… I highly recommend it, so I’ll start with that.
I love personality tests actually. I’ll admit it. At work we do the DiSC assessment and the Kolbe assessment and, I find them, I think that my team really enjoys them. We, we enjoy getting to know ourselves better knowing, how we work with other people, and just like learning how to work, better with other people.
But Benjamin Hardy definitely makes you think differently about those types of assessments. He, you know, really helps you see how limiting they could be. If you think that you are a certain way and that’s just how you are and it can’t, you can’t change it , then you limit yourself from creating the life that you were meant to live for you, you know, from, growing.
Personally, professionally and becoming better in certain ways that, you know, you may just think that you’re limited and can’t ever pursue that type of thing. He, one of the examples he gives in the book is a woman who , you know, when she was young, her teacher walked around the room, they had a drawing assignment and, you know, everyone was drawing something and her teacher picked hers up and corrected it.
And she had that memory forever that, she wanted to illustrate children’s books, but she just felt like that memory just stuck in her mind that her teacher, critiqued her work, and that she wasn’t good at drawing, and it wasn’t something that she should pursue. So that’s an example he gives.
He talks a lot about trauma and that was something that , it was just kind of hard for me to get my head around because I think of trauma as like these major incidents. And he talks about that, you know, something that causes PTSD. But he, you know, he talks about trauma really in a sense of failed, uh, failures or missed opportunities. So, so things that can be much smaller, like that example of the woman with the teacher, the teacher who impacted her in some way.
So I had to really think about that and just, you know, what kind of trauma or what kind of limitations have I put on myself? And the one thing is, was throughout the book, I kept thinking about that. And then one thing that really came up for me was public speaking. I don’t, I don’t have any, you know, trauma that I can remember. I don’t have any like critiques that somebody gave me when I was young that made me feel like I was bad at that, but just… it’s fear. And so it’s something that I , really have avoided in my life. And if that were something that could help advance my career or, you know, bring me new opportunities , that would be a really self-limiting behavior that I’m telling myself I’m just not good at. It’s just something I can’t do , and not pursue those types of opportunities.
And the author really talks about, you know, pushing yourself, through those types of things and pushing yourself to try new things, pushing the limits of what you think that you can accomplish. He talks a lot about journaling, and there’s a lot of opportunities throughout the book to journal answering questions kind of through the chapters and what you’re learning.
So, all in all, fantastic book. I really recommend it for anyone who wants to grow professionally or personally.
This post contains affiliate links which means, at no cost to you,
I’ll receive a small commission if you purchase using those links.