We’ve had an interesting week experiencing different kinds of workshops and planning some new ones to help support clients through change. One of the challenges in psychology is the eternal conundrum of what is fixed versus what is changeable. Is our approach to change partly governed by innate, deep seated personality characteristics? Or is it something we can learn to adapt to and develop skills to deal with? A couple of things struck us this week.
One of the workshops was on personality type theory. At Lucent you won’t be surprised to learn, there are long debates about this subject and I, for one, am resistant to the idea of having my personality sorted into categories. Apart from anything else, it encourages us to feel that we’re fixed, and at its worst provides an excuse for poor behaviour. So the first minor revelation of the week was observing the contrast between people with different personality types and the distinct ways they deal with change. Some of us deal with change through the lens of the outcome – the big picture if you like – and work back from there, while others really do have to have a proper grasp of the detail before they can contemplate it. This stark dichotomy is helpful in understanding how different people react to the same circumstances - we find it much easier to manage change in our own style.
Then second revelation was Michael Mosley’s Horizon programme on BBC2. It’s probably still available on iPlayer if you didn’t watch it. Mosley was interested to explore how his own anxious, pessimistic mindset had developed and whether it could be altered. Many of us, including those of the psychologist variety, have tended to think that seeing the glass as half empty or half full is a thinking style that is more or less fixed and unchangeable, at least in adults. Yet recent research, as Mosley demonstrated on himself, shows that such patterns are surprisingly mutable. They are ingrained habits that can be reversed. Increasingly, neuroscientists and psychologists are showing that the brain is exceptionally malleable and can change in all kinds of ways, even in mid life.
There’s no doubt that it helps us to explain and describe behaviour by categorising it. This gives us a perspective and language to share, discuss, negotiate and change our behaviour and create a genuine basis for mutual understanding. But perhaps we shouldn’t so quick to assume that our habits are who we really are.
