How many times have you heard someone say: “I am too old to change that”?
How many times have you said it yourself?
Well, I know I have said it several time times until now. It is interesting – the sentence that bothers me when I hear it, crossed my mouth quickly more than once, without even being noticed. So, why do we keep saying it? How old can you be to claim the impossibility to change with full right?
Scientifically observing, most people want to increase the so-called Big Five personality factors: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience.
Some of these traits evolve through time and are a part of maturing. One of the most common personality changes with age is that we become more responsible, more caring, and more comfortable with ourselves.
We are unstoppable in saying out loud things that inhibit us – and that is where we do harm to ourselves. It is much easier to accept that we cannot change, isn’t it? If we simply cannot change, we don’t have to do anything. We do not have to try, to get out of our comfort zones, to put an effort – we accept our flaws and continue living with them. It is easier to just surrender.
Change is a rough path. But no matter how hard it is, it leads uphill.
Changing a part of our character, habits, our way of thinking means changing something that is rooted in ourselves since our adolescence or even childhood. And that often seems to us as losing one part of our essence – no matter how much we want to change a certain trait, we usually don’t want to lose a part of ourselves.
According to research, people who believe that personality traits are impossible to change have harsher reactions to differences in their adjustment in different areas of life. People who trust that their personality traits are not fixed but have the potential to change have better reactions to social adversity, go through less stress and therefore have fewer health issues.
This means that we first have to change our way of thinking and truly understand that it is possible to work on our personality; it is not enough to know that on a conscious level – it is essential that we feel and believe it to our core.
Some studies showed that changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, if maintained for a longer period, can lead to a permanent personality trait change.
In other words, if you want a certain trait to be permanently changed, you really have to actively work on your thoughts, feelings, and acts. If you’ve ever tried it, then you must know how hard it can get. To me, the least difficult one among these is changing the behaviour, perhaps because of its practical side. Although it is hard to, for example, laugh and jump when you are down, to me it is much harder to change sorrow into happiness, truly switch the feelings inside of me. But, as hard as it is, it brings unspeakable pride and joy when you start noticing the progress.
The only thing that can stand in your way is the thought “I cannot change myself” or “I am too old to change that”.
With getting older, we lose the need to overcome our limits and because of that, our personal growth decreases with age. As if we become lazy through the years, we give ourselves more and more excuses for why we do not have – or “cannot” – change to better.
There is no reason for us to stop growing,
changing to better,
getting to know ourselves, our flaws and virtues,
there is no reason for us to stop making this world better,
making our close ones happier,
making ourselves more filled with joy;
the age, the character, nothing matters. These are just our excuses for being passive, for not giving our best, for pretending we did everything we could when really, we haven’t even tried.
“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.” Jim Rohn
Why does this matter when speaking about the environment?
Most of the problems in our environment, in our nature, on our planet, exist because of us – more precisely, because we do not like to change our habits and some parts of ourselves that collide with the well-being of nature. The problems in our nature serve as a mirror that points to our mistakes, our flaws and imperfections.
It seems to me as if nature tried each and every possible way of showing us all how we have to change, to evolve, so we could continue to live well on this planet. As if nature tried to surprise, even scare us with events like climate change, coral bleaching, forest fires, hurricanes, floods, in order to show us who is in charge, because we certainly are not, whatever we might think of it.
But it has been shown that people are too hard to be frightened, maybe because they are more scared to put any effort into changing the perspective and working on certain personality traits.
Opposed to us, nature never stops changing. Each of its components constantly evolves so nature, as a whole, could reach the balance.
We change our environment accordant to our needs, when really, we should learn from it, change our habits and way of thinking accordant to the needs of nature.
We have to work on ourselves for nature to be well.
Nature is incredibly tough, but despite its strength, it does not make a sound. It does not yell, or ask, or demand. We first have to learn the true meaning of being humble, to be able to hear its quiet voice.
“What are men to rocks and mountains?” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Hudson N. W., Fraley R. C. (2015): Volitional Personality Trait Change: Can People Choose to Change Their Personality Traits?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
Josefsson K., Jokela M., Cloninger C. R., Hintsanen M., Salo J., Hintsa, T., Pulkki-Råback L., Keltikangas-Järvinen L. (2013): Maturity and change in personality: Developmental trends of temperament and character in adulthood. Development and Psychopathology 25, 713-727.
Yeager D. S., Johnson R., Spitzer B. J., Trzesniewski K. H., Powers J., Dweck C. S. (2014): The far-reaching effects of believing people can change: Implicit theories of personality shape stress, health, and achievement during adolescence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(6), 867–884.
Pingback: Source of the river Una - Ritosaurus