Hi, my name's Andy and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning.

I wonder if there's any part of you that you struggle with.

I think most of us have parts of our, whether you think about it as personality or character,

that we're not altogether comfortable with, I was chatting to a close friend the other day

and they were talking to me about the aspects of themselves that they struggled with

and it was interesting as they described it as some of the things I actually thought were really beautiful,

but for them it was a struggle.

And we got into this conversation around what's personality and what's character and what's kind of part of our nature

and maybe one of those things that we learn and that evolve over time as part of our conditioned existence

and as human beings, it's easy to get caught up in semantics around personality and character,

but by character I mean the nature that we're born with.

If you look at a young child, even a baby, you can see it has a character.

If you line babies up, not that I've ever done this, but if you line babies up next to each other

and look at them, you can see they're different somehow and they haven't really had time to take on any conditioning

and yet their character, their essential character is different.

Some lie there very quietly, some are very noisy, some laugh a lot, some cry a lot.

There's just a difference in character.

In terms of personality, I think over time, all of the environment around us is constantly feeding into the personality that's created

and the personality there's a lot of movement in.

We can change that, we can adapt it, we can perhaps point it in a particular direction at times.

And I think it's really helpful to think about these two different things

because otherwise we can be sort of fighting against our innate nature.

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