Essential Ways to Improve Your Personality

Think of your personality as a pattern, the recurring way you feel, think, and act. No two people share the same one, and the one you carry shapes a lot of how satisfied and successful you end up feeling. Here's what tends to get overlooked: it isn't fixed. You can adjust it, refine it, and point it in a better direction. That kind of growth is worth the effort at any stage of life, and the methods for getting there are more ordinary than people expect.

Start with listening. The people others find magnetic usually aren't the loudest in the room. They're the ones who make whoever is speaking feel heard and taken seriously. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had this reputation. Friends and acquaintances described how she would fix her eyes on you and seem to absorb every word, and it left them feeling singled out as the only person worth her attention. Real listening goes past the words themselves. It picks up on posture, tone, the things someone shows but doesn't say.

Conversation is the channel your personality travels through, so it pays to get better at it. Reading helps more than most people realize, because it stocks your mind with things to say and references to draw on. Joining a local group built around something you care about does double duty: you meet new people and you practice talking about a subject you already enjoy. Nobody arrives knowing everything. The point is to keep adding to what you know and widening the range of what you can talk about.

Opinions are welcome, within reason. People genuinely want to know where you stand, whether or not they end up agreeing. The trick is avoiding the role of the person who has to be right about everything. Timing matters, and so does delivery. Say you're in the middle of a political disagreement. Stay open to the other side while you make your own case, and offer your view to add something rather than to make the other person feel small. On sensitive subjects especially, go in gently, aiming to spark thought instead of shutting it down.

A sour outlook pushes people away, so leaning positive is worth the work. This doesn't require pretending problems don't exist or dropping your realism. When something bothers you, there's a difference between naming it and simply complaining about it, and that difference can be learned, even if negativity is your default. The honest route works best: feel what you feel and express it in a way that means something. If a topic sets off the complainer in you, turn that into a question and ask what other people make of it. Now you've aired your own reaction and picked up a few new angles at the same time.

Keep a sense of humor handy. Life hands you one curveball after another, and some days laughing them off feels impossible. Still, almost nobody enjoys the company of someone who can't take a joke or find the lighter angle. You don't have to crack jokes constantly or chuckle at everything. What matters is sensing the moment when a bit of humor can ease a conversation that's gone heavy. People drift toward that quality, because being near someone who lifts the mood during the gloomy stretches is a relief.

So there are your starting tools. Pick one and work it before moving to the next. Because these habits feed into each other, taking them one at a time makes the whole thing less daunting and lets each technique actually sink in. After you've gotten comfortable with them, circle back and check that the changes are holding. That's how you keep growing into a steadier, happier version of yourself.

Rosemary Kitchen. Resource: Tracy, B. (2012). Be the Best You: 7 Keys to a Positive Personality. Retrieved on February 10, 2015 from briantracy.com.