Personality traits you can deliberately change to improve your life

Executive overview

Most people assume personality is fixed. It isn't. Research shows personality shifts significantly at key life events — graduation, marriage, new peer groups — whether people intend it or not.

The goal is to make that change deliberate. Psychologists measure personality using the OCEAN framework: five traits that sit on spectrums and are all trainable.

You can purposely change your personality, and doing so determines your health, income, and relationships.

The OCEAN big five traits

1. Openness — curiosity and appetite for new ideas and experiences. Declines after marriage; rebounds after divorce. The entire growth mindset rests on it. If you're closed, you have a fixed mindset.

2. Conscientiousness — discipline, attention to detail, follow-through, organisation. The number one personality trait linked to longevity. People who take post-surgery medication consistently live four times longer on average. Strongly tied to wealth and impact.

3. Extroversion — enjoyment of adventure and social connection. Not binary; everyone sits on a spectrum. Strongly tied to income, alongside conscientiousness. Low extroversion in many people traces back to broken trust, not hardwiring.

4. Agreeableness — the ability to get along with people by honouring their position, not by complying with it. Predicts whether marriages last. Critical in negotiation and leadership. Creates a sense of togetherness in relationships.

5. Neuroticism — inverse of emotional stability. Low neuroticism means owning your emotions and responding steadily. Mindfulness and resilience training exist specifically to improve this score. Emotional regulation training produces measurably different outcomes in school, sport, and early earnings.

When and why personality shifts

• Graduation, first job, marriage, divorce, and entry into new peer groups all produce measurable personality changes — often without conscious choice.
• New peer groups can shift openness dramatically; people behave differently than those who knew them before.
• Tragedy can increase openness: people turn to new faith, new beliefs, new networks in grief.
• Cynicism is the residue of attempted change that failed — not evidence that people can't change.

Making change strategic

• Accidental change happens constantly. Strategic change is the goal.
• Conscientiousness is learnable: organising your time is what makes you feel the day, not just survive it.
• Extroversion can be developed by learning to trust people and to genuinely delight in them.
• Agreeableness is a communication skill: taking turns, listening, allowing differences — not compliance.
• Emotional regulation (neuroticism) is trainable through mindfulness practice and deliberate self-regulation work.
• The traits most tied to wealth: conscientiousness and extroversion.
• Your personal changes feel enormous to you. They don't need to impress anyone else.