This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - How To Be You, But Better with Olga Khazan | 288

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Ever caught yourself thinking, Why am I like this? Maybe you wish you were more outgoing, less anxious, better at setting boundaries, or just less awkward at small talk (or maybe that’s just me). But this episode isn’t about forcing you to become someone you’re not. It’s about understanding how personality works, what’s actually within our control, and whether we can tweak the internal settings to become a version of ourselves we actually like being. And that’s exactly what our guest set out to prove—through science and a little self-experimentation. Olga Hazan is an award-winning journalist, staff writer for The Atlantic, and the author of Me, But Better, where she explores the science of personality change. But she didn’t just research it—she spent a year experimenting on herself, testing whether she could intentionally reshape key aspects of her personality. Because why just write about something when you can live it? The truth is, whether you like it or not, you are changing. The question is: do you want to have a say in how? Connect with Olga Khazan:  Website: https://olgakhazan.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/olganator/ Book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Me-But-Better/Olga-Khazan/9781668012543 Substack: https://olgakhazan.substack.com/ X: https://x.com/olgakhazan  Related Podcast Episodes: All The Ways We Get In Our Own Way with Thais Gibson | 235 Leading From The Inside Out with Dana Maor | 278 VI4P - Know Who You Are (Chapter 4) Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Hi, I'm Nicole Kahlil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. And I wonder, do you believe that people can change? Like for the better? Do you believe that you can change? I mean, have you ever caught yourself thinking, why am I like this? Maybe you wish you were more outgoing, less anxious, better at saying no, or just less awkward at small talk, or maybe all of that is just me.

It seems that people like to tell us that people can't or don't change, usually at the tail end of a bad relationship. We seem to believe that personality is fixed, that you're either naturally confident or you're not, that you're either an introvert or an extrovert, good with money or a financial train wreck, or a go with the flow type,

or the kind of person who raged texts when somebody shows up five minutes late to a meeting. We act like personality is permanent, something locked in by the age of eight that we just have to learn to live with. But what if that's not true? What if our personality is actually way more flexible than we've been led to believe? That who you are right now is just one version of you, but not necessarily the one you're stuck with for life. That science actually proves that we can change fundamental aspects of our personality.

I know, I know, this might sound like one of those new year new me scams, like the personality equivalent of a juice cleanse, uncomfortable gimmicky and ultimately leaving you right back where you started. But this isn't about forcing yourself to become someone that you're not. It's about understanding how personality works, what is actually within our control, and whether we can tweak the internal settings to become, well, better, a version of ourself that we actually like being.

And that's exactly what today's guest is set out to prove through science and a little self-experimentation. Olga Hazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic, an award-winning journalist, and the author of Me But Better, where she dives into the science of personality change. And she didn't just research the topic, she actually conducted a year-long experiment on herself

to see if she could intentionally alter key aspects of her personality. Because why just write about something when you can actually live it too? Olga, welcome to the show. And I want to start by asking, in your book, Me But Better, you explore the science of personality change. So my question is, what prompted you to take on this year long experiment? And the bigger question is, can we actually change our personalities?

Great questions. So, the answer to the first thing is that I just realized that a lot of the time what was making me unhappy was not so much the things that were happening to me, but my reactions to them. Many of our reactions to events in our lives are controlled by our personalities. So if you're someone who's really open to experiences and something new happens to you, you're going to be like, yay, I'm so happy this happened and this is so exciting. But if you're someone who's not very open to experiences and something unexpected happens,

you might be kind of freaked out by it and not want to go there really. So what I found was happening was that I was often finding the bad or the stressful in the good. In the introduction of the book, I really explained this day that if I just describe it out the way it happened, it is not going to seem that bad. That's kind of the point. What happened is I'm in Miami on kind of like a work cation, like I'm working, but I'm on vacation. I have to get professional photos taken for my job. Again, most people will be

thrilled. Not me, by the way. So I go, I have to get a haircut before this photo session. The haircut is bad, but it is an hour in which I'm basically having a spa day, right? I'm having my hair cut. It's very nice. But my hair looks bad at the end. So then I go to the photo studio.

He takes the photos. To me, the photos look bad. Then I go and I get stuck in traffic. I have to get to the grocery store to buy this list of specific things for my mom who is coming in that night on a flight. She's on this special diet. I buy all this stuff, but then my grocery cart gets stuck. It won't move because it locks if it's outside of a certain range. I have to drag it across the grocery store parking lot to my car, which for some reason after the injustices of that morning, further enrages and dispirits me.

I get my stuff in the car. I get to the Airbnb. Everything is too heavy. There's no parking anywhere. It's just this stressful day. If you're thinking, that doesn't sound that bad. I've had worse days than that. It's like, I have too. But I was so upset by this day. I was crying. I was screaming to my partner. I was chugging wine, I was just having this total meltdown. I realized that I kind of do this a lot. I take things that are mediocre or kind of good even, and I tend to kind of get the dissatisfaction

out of them or just kind of find the bad in them. I wanted to stop that tendency. I came across this research, getting to the second part of your question, by this... Well, it's more than one psychologist now, but the main researcher that I spoke with was Nathan Hudson at SMU, who has found that people actually can change their personalities by consistently behaving in the way that they'd like to be. So that is what I set out to do. Okay, so incredible. And I genuinely believe that most of us can relate to that.

I mean, I have an incident that ended with me leaving all of my groceries in the grocery store, other than one tub of ice cream that I purchased, walked out, and ate in my car using a key as a spoon. Same thing, not a bad day if I had to tell you just the facts, but by the end of the day, I'd completely had it. So, all of that to say, I think we can relate.

And fascinating. So I would imagine there needs to be some purposeful strategy because if the answer is to behave differently, we all have our default behaviors as we just talked about. So how do we practice or convince ourselves to behave in the way that we want when probably everything inside our being is screaming at us to behave the way we always

do. Yeah, exactly. And it is difficult, right? So I think introversion and extroversion are a good example of this. So one thing that I wanted to change on, I identify as an introvert, and I still do actually, but I wanted to become slightly more extroverted or at least behave in an extroverted way sometimes because I found that my introversion was not really serving me very well. It was kind of like turning into like a social isolation type thing that was actually not making me very happy.

So what I had to do is I had to sign up for a bunch of activities that would actually force me to get out of my house. Because what I found was happening is that I would have the opportunity to socialize or to do something, and I would find an excuse at the last minute because I didn't really want to do it. And there was a great book I read called Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come, and that was my motto, basically. So I signed up for improv. I signed up for sailing club. I signed up for all these meetup groups. I had to like commit to doing a lot of things so that I would actually do them or else I would

basically lose a lot of money on the signups. And yeah, and it was hard every single time I drove to the improv class. I basically did not wanna do it. So again, I feel like you're in my head. There's a meme out there that says, I'm the friend that you can cancel on because I wasn't going anyway. Like that's sort of my theme, but similarly, I am an introvert who chooses to show up in the world

in a lot of very extroverted ways. And yes, it takes practice. who chooses to show up in the world in a lot of very extroverted ways. And yes, it takes practice. I don't think that's necessarily changed my preference, but I definitely do a lot more today than I would have five years ago if I hadn't forced myself. So again, I can relate. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about personality in general. Can you explain the big five personality traits? Are these ones that we can change?

Yeah. So scientists have generally agreed that there's five traits that make up personality, as you said. And so I'll just go through them and what they are briefly. So the first is openness to experiences. This is very amorphous, but it's sort of like creativity, imaginativeness, kind of like being down for whatever, if that makes sense. Then it's conscientiousness, which is sort of like getting places on time, being motivated, kind of getting things done, eating healthy, exercising, things like that.

You're type A kind of people. Extraversion, which we just covered. Agreeableness, which is like empathy and niceness and warmth. And then neuroticism, which is a bad thing. It's associated with depression and anxiety. And the flip side of that is emotional stability. So that's the one that you do want. So you

can remember them with the acronym OCEAN with the caveat that the N is neuroticism, which is not good, unlike the other ones, which are good. Gotcha. Okay. So I would imagine all of us have a little bit of some of this and maybe we are more one than the other, but it's not like very many of us are just one and none of the others. Is that fair? That's right. Yeah. So a lot of people have asked me about like the Myers-Briggs or similar tests and what researchers tend not to like about those is that they put people in kind of a category, but really most of us are, they're all spectrums, all of these traits.

And most of us fall somewhere on that spectrum. So like, you're probably not a total introvert or a total extrovert. You're probably somewhere like, maybe you're on the 70th percentile or the 30th percentile. And so it's generally thought that it's like sort of healthier and people who are kind of healthier and happier tend to be toward the higher end of all of those things with neuroticism being the exception. You want to be higher in emotional stability, but you kind of don't want to be too high if that makes sense. So like it's not like just because you sometimes feel introverted or sometimes feel disagreeable doesn't mean there's like something wrong with you. So that's not like just because you sometimes feel introverted or sometimes feel disagreeable

doesn't mean there's like something wrong with you. So that's not what I'm trying to say that like any amount of the opposite of these traits is a bad thing. You do want to occasionally behave disagreeably or it's even okay to have a little bit of anxiety about things. That's how we get things done. But, you know, it's generally thought that it's better to be toward the higher end of all these traits.

Okay, so when we talk about changing our personality, we might not necessarily mean becoming our opposite or being at the highest level of any, it might just be moving along the spectrum a little bit more. So like if I'm on the extraversion scale at 30%, I can get myself to maybe 60% and that would constitute a change in personality, but not necessarily what I think sometimes people think as being a completely different version of yourself. Exactly. Yeah, you put it very well,

which is that this is, you should think of this as like sliding along the scale. And some people even, some researchers don't even see it that way. They see it as like a situational thing. So it's sort of like slipping on these traits when the situation calls for it. So a good example is Brian Little,

who's this like very introverted professor. His theory is called free trait theory, which is sort of like you try on these traits when the situation calls for it. His example is that he's very introverted, but he really likes to give very persuasive lectures to his students. So whenever he's lecturing, he really brings out the extraversion and he tries really hard to be an extrovert. And he just like, totally commits to the bit, you know, but then he like has to go hide off in a room by himself

somewhere because he's like actually really introverted and that's super hard for him. That is still like, technically considered personality change, like, because you are kind of changing the way you are, quote-unquote, naturally. Mm-hmm. Okay. So, based on your research, what are some of the reasons people choose to make these changes? Because it's not comfortable, not easy.

So, what are the compelling reasons, and I have to imagine that in order to change, you have to want to, to a certain extent? Yes. For most of the traits, in order to actually change in any significant way, you have to actually want to change, especially for things like neuroticism, where it's literally all in your head. Your anxiety, if you've ever yelled at someone, like, stop worrying about it, that's not going

to work. The person has to like, stop worrying about it, like, that's not going to work. Like the person has to want to stop worrying about it. So, yes, typically people want to change. But some of them are a little bit more all about like the daily habits and rituals that you do. So a good example of this is conscientiousness, which is sort of like the organized kind of go getter trait. For that one, I talked to several people who really wanted to become more conscientious because they realized they needed conscientiousness to achieve their goals. So one of them was this woman named Julia, who really wanted to have her own business doing copywriting and website design. She kind of realized that like left to her own devices, she kind of didn't know how to

go about her goals. She would like watch a lot of Game of Thrones and like not really get a lot done. So she started getting really organized. She bought a huge bulletin board and she wrote all of her goals and her plans on it. She wrote like positive affirmations, any appointments she had. She would make a to-do list and she would set reminders and things like that. She kind of had to increase her level of conscientiousness because that was the only way that she was going to get this business off the ground.

Several of the people that I talked to for that chapter in particular, they were like, okay, I'm not very conscientious. If nobody's watching me, I will just watch TV or go play golf or whatever else. But I really need to buckle down. I really need to study or be super motivated in order to achieve this bigger goal that I have. So that's a pattern that I noticed a lot is that it was in pursuit of some larger thing that the people wanted to attain. Again, I think it just goes back to this, you gotta wanna, right? There's gotta be something that's bigger,

more important that matters more than the discomfort that you're gonna feel in doing something that's totally different or that feels outside of your personality, right? Exactly. Okay, so we hear that our personalities, and I'm going to just put in air quotes, are fixed by the time we're eight years old.

How much truth is there to that? Are our personalities inherited or created via our parents at a very young age? What are your thoughts or what does the research say about that? Yeah. So you do get some of your personality from your parents, right? Like I struggle with anxiety. Only the bad parts. Yeah, exactly. As your therapist can attest. I mean, I struggle with anxiety. Both my parents are very anxious, so it's very clear like where I got that, right? But you only get

about 40 to 60% of your personality from your parents. And if you think about either of your parents, you're not exactly like either of them, right? So it's sort of like you get these elements of traits from them. It's like you get, you know, like these little pieces or like impulses to do things genetically. But when you actually look at your life and look at the choices you've made or the way you respond to situations, you don't act exactly like either of your parents. That other 40 to 60% of your personality comes from things that you yourself do. It's things

like whether you go to college, what kind of friends you have, what kind of experiences you pursue, do you travel, what kind of job do you have? Do you get married? Do you have kids? All of these things have tiny, tiny influences on your personality, but they all add up to contribute that other part of your personality that's not genetic. Just because you might have a certain predisposition towards something doesn't mean that you're trapped being your eight your eight year old self for the rest of your life, which is a good thing, I think. Yeah. I would think so for most of us.

I also, I don't know, my experience is we do change and it kind of, I guess, feels paradoxical or contradictory to what I said earlier that I believe, which is that we have to want to. But the reality is, aren't we changing and evolving just because of life anyway? Like, doesn't our personality flex and ebb and flow because of all of the things you just listed out, like friends and environment and whether or not we get married or whether or not we have kids

or I don't know. I think having my daughter changed me in certain ways, not all of them conscious. Is there any evidence of that? Absolutely. Yeah. So this is both uplifting and kind of frustrating. So yes, everyone changes throughout their life. There used to be this theory that personality is set like plaster by age 30. That is kind of not really true.

That's not considered really accurate anymore. Most people over the course of their life do change on at least one personality trait. Among other things, people tend to become a lot less neurotic as they get older, so that's something to look forward to. But yeah, so people do change and life events do change us. However, we don't totally know exactly how a life event will change us. So the studies that they've done, they've looked at a bunch of people who had kids and some of them got more extroverted, some of them got more introverted, some of them got more agreeable. It just kind of was all over the place.

So you can't totally predict like, I will do this and then I will become a different person based on this life experience. It's really more about the kind of the things that you do every day and the broader goals that you have. Okay, so then let's talk about how we can influence the ways in which we change. Like I actually have some choice over the matter.

Let me start first by asking, how might we uncover or discover where our best opportunities for change are? Yeah, so one way to do that is to look at your values. And so this comes from acceptance and commitment therapy. And it's actually, most people will have like similar lists of values. So you can look at things like,

who do you admire in your life? Or what do you want your obituary to say, which is kind of morbid, but whatever. You kind of list out, what are some of the things that are important to you? Then you look at, what am I not really doing right now to get me closer to those values? If one of your values is having a big values. So if one of your values is having a big support network of lots of friends, but you have declined the past five invitations to have brunch, or you haven't reached out to anyone in months, you probably are not getting yourself any closer to those values. So that's an opportunity to take a look at your life and think, hey, what could I be doing differently to actually change a little bit how I approach the world, change my personality as it were,

and get me closer to those values that I wanna live by? So that's one way to actually see what you wanna change about yourself. The more straightforward way, there's a test online called the PersonalityAssessor.com, which was designed by Nathan Hudson, that researcher I mentioned earlier. And you can actually take a test,

which will tell you your personality traits, where you fall along all the traits. And you can decide that way whether you'd like to change any of them. OK. I'm going to throw out one other potential way. and you tell me if I'm way off base. One of the things I've uncovered for myself is when I fall into the comparison trap, when I compare myself to someone else or what someone else has or someone else accomplished and like envy or any of that kicks in, I try to take a step

back and from as neutral of a place as I can, ask myself, what is this telling me about a desire or something that I want? It might not be the exact same thing. It might not be, so for example, if I'm comparing somebody who's on vacation in Bali, it might not be the vacation in Bali, though I would never say no. It might be, I'm seeking more freedom in my life or something along those lines. Could that be some indicator of, you know, sometimes I think we see in others things that we don't see in ourselves, Or does that just take us down a

trap that we don't want to fall in? No, I mean, that's like a healthy, I mean, we're all going to experience envy, right? And so that's actually a healthy way to think about envy. So Stephen Hayes, the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, that's one of the prisms that he recommends looking at to find your values is actually it's called heroes. And this isn't like literal like CNN heroes, you know, this could be people in your own life who have qualities that you really admire. So for me, I in the book, I write about my friend Kathy who makes friends really easily.

She has a huge network of friends and just everyone seems to like her and I do get jealous of that. I do, I am like, wow, I wish I was like that and that came so naturally to me. But then what that jealousy is really telling me, like obviously I still want that for Cathy. There's like enough people out there to be friends with both of us,

is that I maybe want more friends in my life. Like I would like to have some of that, you know, that fun and socializing and kind of connection that she has in her life. So that is a way to kind of spin your envy or your jealousy, I guess, as it were, in a more positive direction. Okay. So once we've identified something

that we want to change about our personality or move, you know, slide a little on the scale or situationally try on, what are some how-to tips of like, where do we start? What do we do? Yeah. So this is tricky because the things that

I used are not going to work for everyone. So I will just list out some of the strategies that I used and then people can kind of choose their own adventure. But so I talked about extraversion, extraversion, very straightforward, just go out and talk to people. The one that I found for neuroticism that over and over again is just recommended to reduce depression and anxiety is meditation. And as soon as like people are going to skip forward on the podcast, as soon as I say that, because like I find that people really hate meditation. I also- We're hearing it so often.

And it's like, I know, I know, but it's so hard. But yes. It is really hard. I found it really hard. I still find it really hard. I took an intensive meditation class called MBSR, which anyone can take. It is scientifically vetted and tested, but you do have to meditate a lot for it. I meditated for 45 minutes a day, but it did work. My neuroticism did go down at the end of this MBSR class. That's one thing for openness. Travel really helps increase openness to experience. There's something about just being in a new place, having those new experiences literally that makes you think, huh, this is, this is pretty cool. Um, agreeableness. I did a lot of like, um, conversation training, like learning how to

have deeper and better conversations with people, how to be more empathetic. I feel like curiosity would play well there too, practicing curiosity. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So it's the conversation training that I went to is all about like how to ask like better questions and conversations. So not like, what do you do for living? Like, where do you live? But like, you know, what's the most interesting thing that happened to you this week? It doesn't have to be quite so scripted, but yeah. And then conscientiousness is really all about the atomic habits, you know, the to-do lists and the calendar reminders and, you know, bullet journals and things like that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, great starting points on all of them. And again, I think that's something,

as you said, it's going to be our own journey. But starting with the baseline, asking ourselves, what do we want to change? And then it sounds like it's about what you choose to do day by day, week by week. Yeah, and most of the studies find that you have to sort of keep up these changes. So I think a lot of times when people, when I say personality change, people think it's like, suddenly you're different and then you're permanently different. You kind of have to keep this stuff up in order to be a truly different person. If you're still consistently being kind of a hermit, like you're not gonna keep up that new

like extraversion level, you know, or if you kind of regress back from meditating or whatever your kind of like relaxing practice is, your neuroticism is gonna go back up. So that's an important thing to keep in mind. So my last question is around the me but better. And what I liked about your title is me. There is an element of authenticity

that I think is important but better, right? So this isn't about changing for the sake of change or being inauthentic, but sort of, again, flexing on that scale. So any, I don't know, tips or things to watch out for, is it possible that we over-rotate too far or that we lose authenticity in doing some of these things if we're not careful?

Anything that you can say about being true to ourselves, being authentic, and better. Yeah, I mean, and that's, I do address that in one of the chapters. So I eventually found myself doing an activity that I really wanted to quit. It was leading a meetup group, and I really just didn't enjoy it. Like I was like, this is extraroversion, but I'm not really having a good time. This is really stressful. I was not really a subject matter expert in the thing that I was leading the group in. The advice that I got from the experts that I talked to was, once again, is this bringing you closer to your values? My value was ext extraversion and social connection and having a community. It wasn't like leading a meetup group.

So I kind of gave myself the freedom to stop running that meeting because I wasn't enjoying it. This is supposed to be fun. And it wasn't really bringing me closer to my values. I wasn't really building a community for myself. It was sort of, I was bringing people together in a way, and that was a good thing, but I wasn't kind of creating the connections

that I was hoping to. So it's really just about try something out. If you really are miserable and it's having no benefits for you, I wouldn't suggest continuing to do it just because you already signed up. Yeah, I think what I'm hearing is checking in with yourself too and I like the,

is this getting me closer to what I want? Yeah. And there's a difference between discomfort and I fucking hate this and I wanna die, right? Like so, yeah, yeah to die, right? Yes. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah. And pay attention too to how you feel afterward.

If afterward you have a happy afterglow, even if you were dreading it, that's maybe a good thing. If you feel kind of more frazzled and unhappy after, that's not a good sign. Great advice because there are so many things that I force myself to do that the minute I'm done, I'm like, oh, I should do more of this. I will say in my case, you know, like a day later, the feeling wears off. It's the same as working out. Every time I work out when I'm done, I'm like, oh, God, I feel so good. I feel so strong. And then like the next day, I'm like, ah, crap, I got to do this again. So anyway, but I like that as a benchmark.

How do you feel after? What is your internal knowing telling you about that activity? So fascinating stuff, Olga. Thank you for being on the show. I know our listeners are going to want to learn more. So Olga has a sub stack. Just look for Olga Hassan and we'll also

put the link in show notes. And of course, get your hands on the book, Me But Better, available on Amazon or your local bookstores. Let's keep them in business. Olga, thank you. Thank you so much. My pleasure. All right. The truth is, whether you like it or not, you are changing.

The question is, do you want to have a say in how? Personality isn't some immovable preset script that you're forced to follow forever. It shifts with time, with experience, with intention. And while some changes happen naturally, through life, through hardship, through growth, the most powerful changes happen when you decide they will. And here's what I know to be true.

People change when they really want to, when it matters, when staying the same no longer feels like an option. And if there is one thing I hope that you take away from this conversation, it's that change isn't just possible. It's worth it because you're worth it. And I'll leave you with this quote from C.S. Lewis. You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change

the ending. And that, my friend, is woman's work.