SECOND NATURE
Character need not be permanent. A little experimentation, it turns out, lets people remake their temperaments and pour fresh courage, optimism, passion and joy into how they live.
A
AFor a long time the profession assumed the opposite: that no one's character truly shifts, and that the key traits of a personality are fixed in early childhood. Lately, though, how we might change has drawn closer scrutiny. Positive psychologists have drawn up two dozen admired qualities — loyalty and kindness among them — and asked why a lucky few possess them effortlessly. Their finding is that many such qualities are really habitual behaviour, and this behaviour shapes how we answer the world. Encouragingly, all of it can be learned. Optimism is among the handful that come more readily than the rest. Building any quality, though, means picking up a range of skills — wide-ranging and, now and then, unexpected. Greater joy and passion in your days, for example, are within reach only if you are willing to sit with negative emotions instead of dodging them. Tend to your qualities like this, and your full potential comes closer.
B
BAnders Holt, a psychology professor at Rennwick University, points to his own case. Most personality traits, he argues, really can be altered — "the case for that is strong," he says. Shy by nature, Holt recognised early in academic life that reticence would be fatal at the lecture podium, so he trained himself into someone more outgoing, able to hold a room. What began as effort is now automatic: "my outgoing manner these days is entirely spontaneous."
C
CBram Kessler went through much the same shift. While getting ready for university, he was injured in an accident that ended his sporting career. Once there, he found that, beyond routine counselling, his university offered nothing for students who were recovering physically while battling depression. So he set up a support group for others in the same predicament. That he acted at all while still in pain is just how an optimist responds.
D
DOptimism, in the view of Marisa Delgado — a psychology professor at the University of Haldane — is a product of optimistic conduct, not of positive thought. Her advice: train yourself to notice good fortune by setting down, day by day, three things that turned out well. Keep it up, and the belief slowly takes hold that favourable outcomes are simply how life runs — at which point acting becomes much easier.
E
EThe mark of a real passion is how deeply its owner is drawn into it. Freediving is Ingrid Solheim's — a sport whose competitors sink far beneath the surface with no tanks or breathing gear at all. Seven world records have fallen to her since 2002, and a single breath lasts her five minutes. Hard as the sport is on the body, it presses harder still on the mind. Her breakthrough was to prise apart two things — her fears, and a truthful reckoning of what body and mind could manage. "There was a ceiling on my freediving," she says, "but it stood nowhere near where I'd pictured it."
F
FDiscovering a pursuit that fires you up can enrich any life. The snag with an all-consuming passion, observes Brenmark University psychologist Lorcan Vey, is that "it takes discipline, effort and skill — which is exactly why it repays you so well." And for the raw beginner, Devon Rask, another psychologist, has a caution: "Your own ignorance is something you will have to tolerate, even laugh at. Brace yourself, too, to welcome feelings you would rather not have."
G
GNiko Varga, a physician-scientist, was deeply unhappy when he took up his PhD at Kestrel Medical School in 2003: the research he was doing pulled against his curiosity about healing. So he broke off, and a seven-month stay in Taos introduced him to healing approaches Kestrel had never covered. Back on campus, he changed laboratories, turning to the way cerebrospinal fluid feeds a developing nervous system; and he made himself a promise to seek joy in everything, failure among it, since even that might teach him about his work and his character. What can hold joy back, more than anything, is a mind trained on dodging failure instead of on the satisfaction of a job done well. As Rask puts it, "the path to your goals can be blocked by an obsession with playing safe." At a business lunch, say: are you simply praying to escape without embarrassment, or savouring in advance how absorbing the conversation could be?
H
HWe tend to picture courage as physical, yet everyday life asks for a different sort. For Emil Feld, a marketing executive, it meant objecting to conduct he judged unethical. A newly appointed manager had taken to intimidating the staff, so Feld kept a careful log of every act of bullying and, aware his own position might suffer for it, in time carried the record to a senior director. In the end it was the manager who left. To Petra Nowak, a psychologist at Calderon University, what Feld did bears out a claim: that courage springs not from an absence of fear but from a sense of moral duty. Nowak holds, too, that courage can be acquired. Many of her students have told her that, faced with a risky moment, they first calmed themselves and then looked for a way to lessen the danger, just as Feld did in setting down his allegations. Adopt a fresh character trait and, over time, you edge nearer to the self you hope to be. Even briefly, though, the attempt can repay you in ways you would not expect — an adventure that runs inward rather than out.
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Question 1 - 5
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
For many years, psychologists assumed that the key 1. that make up someone's personality are laid down early in life and stay fixed. Positive psychologists take a different view. They regard the qualities people prize not as inborn gifts but as a form of 2. that governs how we react to the world, and they hold that these can be trained. Whatever the quality, its development calls for an unexpectedly varied set of 3. . The effort pays off, since it can help a person fulfil their whole 4. . It may even call for discomfort: to feel greater 5. and passion in daily life, for example, you must be ready to accept unpleasant emotions.