You Can Shape Your Personality by Pushing Yourself, Even a Little

New study shows sense of purpose can drive you to new and uncharted directions.

Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

Key points

• Personality is often viewed as fixed and inflexible, especially late in life.
• New research shows how tinkering with sense of purpose can stimulate more adaptive personality functioning.
• By starting small, you can work your way to a bigger feeling that you can achieve your goals.

Despite being disproven, a common belief is that the personality you develop by your 20s is the one you’ll have your whole life. If you’re extroverted, you’ll stay that way forever, and if you tend to worry, you’ll never get out of that mental trap. The growing body of research showing that change is not only possible but probable as people go through the decades from early to later adulthood tends to be overlooked in this set of beliefs.

If you’re happy with the personality you have, the idea of personality stability doesn’t seem like a terrible fate. However, if you would like to turn up some elements of your psychological makeup and tone down others, is there a way to take solace in the personality change side of the question?

Sense of Purpose as a Way to Provoke Change

According to Keimyung University’s Mohsen Joshanloo (2024), “Personality theories have increasingly acknowledged and emphasized the dynamic aspect of personality traits.” What’s more, “personality traits are viewed as malleable qualities that can be actively shaped and cultivated through intentional efforts, tailored interventions, and personal growth strategies.” In other words, if you don’t like your personality, maybe it is possible to rework it into a more satisfying combination of qualities.

To engage your personality change mechanism, Joshanloo argues, you need to dig down deep into your “sense of purpose.” The ultimate motivational instigator, sense of purpose involves a desire to direct your energy and behavior in ways that allow you to feel your past has made sense and your future will as well. What’s more, “it’s a flagship indicator of well-being and health.” When your sense of purpose goes, so does the light that shines its way on your path as you head from that past into the future.

It follows from this set of ideas that if you’re ever to shift your personality trajectory into a more fulfilling direction, you’ll need to tie it into your sense of purpose. Personality change won’t happen on its own; it will respond to the actions you take to become either more or less of what you’d like to be.

Perhaps you’ve felt an increasing discomfort about your tendency to complain about other people. Rather than accept the quirkiness of your best friend’s romantic partner, you become irritated by their comments and somewhat angry at your best friend for associating with this person. Your irritation doesn’t exactly endear you to this couple, but you don’t know how to stop yourself. Could a small mental intervention get you back on the nice person track?

Wanting and Getting Change

Turning the idea that purpose can provoke change into testable hypotheses, Joshanloo used data from the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study (HRS) that spanned four waves of data collection (2010 to 2022) from more than 11,000 adults, whose average age in 2010 was 64 years.

Participants completed a 31-item personality trait questionnaire based on the Five Factor Model (FFM), assessing conscientiousness, openness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness to experience. To assess sense of purpose, the HRS team administered a seven-item standard questionnaire with items such as “I enjoy making plans for the future and working to make them a reality.”

The general framework of the statistical analysis was to use earlier personality scores to predict purpose scores, and vice versa, across the four waves of testing. The key test of the study’s hypothesis was whether lagged correlations from sense of purpose to personality would be larger than the across-time correlations of each set of measures or the lagged correlations going the other way.

Supporting the purpose→personality predictions, on all five factors, higher purpose at one time predicted increases in personality trait scores at subsequent times (for neuroticism, the scores were lower). At any one time, people with higher purpose scores also had higher favorable trait scores, but the lagged effects were stronger.

Engaging Your Sense of Purpose

This comprehensive investigation suggests that, even in later life when change seems impossible, you can turn the course of your personality development in a more favorable direction. How, though, can you get started if you feel that your sense of purpose is in need of revamping?

In interpreting the findings, the Keimyung U. researcher suggested using the lens of a recent theory known as “Purpose As Trait, Habit, and State (PATHS).” At the trait level, sense of purpose can be viewed as an overall life goal. Habit includes your patterns of purposeful behavior and your moment-to-moment sense that what you’re doing has meaning. By taking a “bottom-up” approach, Joshanloo maintains, you can start with the simple incorporation of meaningful activities into your daily routines.

Rather than think about whether each action you take is contributing to your life’s overall meaning, find a new hobby or interest that you enjoy and look forward to continuing. Maybe you’ve always wondered about what it would be like to draw a portrait of your pet. Why not pick up a pencil and start it now? You probably won’t finish it in one sitting, but it could be an activity you look forward to returning to tomorrow.

Thinking back on that experience with your friend’s romantic partner, you might start to correct your course from irritation to acceptance by deciding not to be so quick to judge. Why not try it out and see what happens? Not only might this lead to more amicable relationships, but you might find it to be more fun than you realized to engage in some playful back-and-forth teasing. As Joshanloo concludes, “cultivating a sense of purpose can set us on the path of self-development and personality optimization.”

To sum up, it may be easier to engage your sense of purpose than you realize. With that “bottom-up” approach, start with small adjustments and watch your personality help you gain the fulfillment of the path toward personal growth.