This is an ABC podcast.

Have you ever wanted to change your personality?

Maybe you want to be more hardworking or open to new experiences or more assertive.

You might think that our character traits are

fairly fixed. Perhaps there's some change in your younger years, but after that, things are

pretty much set. Most people, or not researchers, believe that personality is the most difficult

thing to change in their psychological makeup. But that's not what the evidence is saying.

I think the research over the last 10, 20 years,

has really started to challenge that a little bit,

because there is accumulative evidence that we are perhaps not as fixed as we had imagined.

The changes that we found have been much more dramatic than we expected.

You're listening to All In The Mind. I'm Sana Khadar.

Today, we unpack the growing body of research on personality and whether you can change it.

Here's producer James Bullen.

Erin is a substance abuse therapist and counselor from Dallas, Texas.

These days, she's fairly extroverted.

When she feels like she's around the right people, she's outgoing, social, and friendly.

But it wasn't always this way. I was raised fundamentalist Baptist Christian homeschooled.

So basically as I was growing up, I was introverted by environment or introverted by necessity,

but it also, the environment I grew up in was, I mean, it wasn't the worst, but it did have,

there were some issues and I've been working through some of the trauma responses I still have from growing up in that restricted of an environment.

But I also learned early on that being alone was when I was safe, because if I could sort of get away what was going on in the home environment

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