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Personality determines tendencies.

Character determines choices.

Some of us hide behind personality to avoid the hard work of character-building.

“That’s just how I am,” she said.

To which I politely asked: “Are you describing your personality – or are you excusing your behavior?”

So was the start of some of the most challenging, albeit enlightening, coaching sessions that I’ve ever facilitated.

You see, that question immediately forced a “self-awareness moment” for my client (for privacy purposes, let’s call her “Marti”).

Of course, defensiveness and deflection followed as she wrestled through the internal dialogue that arises when one’s comfort of identity is disturbed. It always takes time to process new realizations that we discover about our temperament. After all, these kinds of revelations inevitably cut to questions about our character, too.

Before I share the results of my time with Marti, let’s explore this point for a moment. It is a significant one.

Personality Changes Are Really Hard

We can think of our personalities as our pre-programmed default settings. Our energy levels, emotional reactivity tendencies and cognitive processing styles are pretty much set early in life. We don’t tend to reengineer our nervous systems in mid-career.

As a consequence, making personality changes is sometimes nearly impossible. However, that doesn’t give us permission to be an all-out terror to those around us.

Much of my work with Marti was focused on helping her to recognize that her natural tendencies do not prescribe character. For example, being impatient doesn’t allow her to be disrespectful; being emotionally reactive doesn’t forgive explosive volatility when things don’t go her way.

Being disrespectful and emotionally volatile are character traits, not personality presets – and character traits can be improved through training and a commitment to doing the work required to make change happen.

Character Changes Are Much Easier to Realize

Marti had to accept that when she exploded, belittled subordinates or shifted blame to others was not because “That’s just how I am,” it was because she had not learned and practiced better responses to taxing situations enough to actually “own” them.

When Marti realized that she did not need to be a victim of her personality, our work shifted to helping her learn new behaviors for managing stress at work.

Our efforts centered on:

Developing better emotional regulation skills

Practicing response scenarios

Designing accountability structures

Like most everything else in our bodies, character also transforms through repetition.

Keys to Marti’s Transformation

Among the first things that I taught Marti to use was the “90-second rule.” I suggested that she deploy it whenever she felt compelled to explode. She needed to be on the lookout, at work, for the physical indications that she was feeling stressed, like holding her breath and clenching of her jaw, then give herself a 90-second time-out where she said nothing, took three deep, deliberate breaths, while reminding herself that leadership was about enabling others, not making herself feel good about being in charge.

This helped Marti to retrain her stress reactions.

Next, we shifted focus to practicing response scenarios. Marti had a tendency to get defensive and over-explain whenever her boss asked her a question. We worked on rehearsing new responses. Instead of defaulting to defensiveness, Marti learned the power that comes from asking questions of her boss, like: “What would good look like to you, boss?”

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This helped Marti flip her script from needing to be flawless to being open to learning. We can’t be defensive when we are in learning mode.

Our last set of coaching sessions centered on building a solid accountability structure for Marti. I had her do two things:

Make a Public Commitment to Change

In her diary, I asked her to choose one behavior that she wanted to change and track it daily. She chose to work on being less dismissive of her colleagues.

This strategy works because we place importance on what we measure. By measuring her progress on being less dismissive of others, Marti was able to improve her awareness of when she was flippant and gave herself the opportunity to choose to change those interactions in the future. Over time, the practice helped her to lessen her dismissiveness.

Additionally, I asked Marti to make a Public Commitment to working on realizing a related change.

So, at her next team meeting, Marti made this announcement:

“I am working on NOT interrupting people when they are speaking. If you catch me doing it, please call it out immediately. There will be no repercussions to you when you do except I may become easier to deal with! Thanks, in advance, for helping me make some needed changes.”

This suggestion proved to be wonderfully effective because the change Marti was trying to make was now tied to her identity – and, as implied earlier in this piece, that’s a powerful motivator.

As we close, let me offer this bit of advice that I discovered while working through this transformation with Marti:

“Personality defines our starting point and character determines the impact we achieve when we choose to transform. Work on learning new skills to enhance your character.”

© Psychology Today