If you’re looking for some strategies on how to develop personality, then you’ll love this article.
Most people have a sentence they say about themselves without thinking. “I’m just not a people person.” “I’ve always been a worrier.” “That’s how I’m wired.”
It sounds like a fact. Often it’s a habit.
Wanting to change some part of your personality is extremely common. Research by Erika Baranski and colleagues (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021), which surveyed college students on six continents, found that roughly 60% wanted to change at least some aspect of who they are. The good news is that personality psychology has moved a long way from the old idea that your traits harden like plaster by your late twenties. The less exciting news: wishing isn’t enough. The people who actually change tend to do specific, slightly uncomfortable things, over and over, for months.
So this guide skips the vague “be confident, be kind” advice. Below are 18 practical ways to develop your personality, each tied to a real study or report, each ending with something you can do this week. Pick two or three. Not all eighteen.
1. Drop the “that’s just how I am” story
In a July 2026 study in Communications Psychology, Amanda Wright, Michael Krämer, Peter Haehner, Christopher Hopwood and Wiebke Bleidorn of the University of Zurich first asked a nationally representative sample of 887 Americans how much various characteristics change across a lifetime. People rated the Big Five personality traits as more stable than nearly every one of the 20-plus other characteristics on the list. Then the team checked reality, using eight large longitudinal datasets from the US, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands covering 166,971 people. Measured year by year and across the lifespan, personality traits shifted about as much as life satisfaction, subjective health, income and self-esteem, and often more.
In other words, we treat personality as the one thing about ourselves that can’t move. The data disagree. (One caveat: the paper was released as an accepted, early-access version, so the final text may still be edited.)
That belief matters, because if you’re convinced change is impossible, you won’t try. If you tend to sell yourself short in other areas too, it’s worth reading up on how to stop underestimating yourself.
Start small: write down the one “that’s just me” sentence you use most, then rewrite it as “I haven’t practised being ___ yet.”
2. Want it, believe it, then do it
Personality change has a sequence, and skipping a step is where most people stall.
Psychologists Marie Hennecke, Wiebke Bleidorn, Jaap Denissen and Dustin Wood set out the logic in 2014, and Haehner, Wright and Bleidorn summarised it again in their 2024 review. It runs like this. First, you have to genuinely want a different trait, say, being more organised. Second, you have to believe that change is possible for you. Third, and this is the part people underestimate, your actual behaviour has to change, and those new behaviours have to repeat until they become habits that spread from one situation to the next. Only then does the trait itself shift.
Why the chain matters: each link feeds the next. Desire without belief produces wishful thinking. Belief without behaviour produces a nice self-image that nobody else ever sees. The evidence backs this up, at least partly. In the same 2024 review, simply holding a goal to change was only weakly linked to real change. It’s a theoretical model, though, not a proven causal law, and researchers are still testing which links matter most.
A lot of stalled self-improvement comes down to old patterns getting in the way, which is why it helps to know the things to stop doing to become a better version of yourself.
Your move: rate yourself from 1 to 10 on each link (want, believe, do) for the trait you care about. The lowest number is where to put your effort first.
3. Turn vague wishes into if-then plans
“Be calmer” is a mood. “If my manager criticises my work in a meeting, then I’ll take one slow breath and ask a question before I respond” is a plan.
That second version is called an implementation intention, and it has one of the deepest evidence bases in behaviour change. A meta-analysis by Paschal Sheeran, Olivia Listrom and Peter Gollwitzer, published in the European Review of Social Psychology (2025, first online in 2024), pooled 642 independent tests. If-then plans helped people with thinking, feeling and acting, with effect sizes ranging from d = 0.27 to d = 0.66 depending on the outcome. The effects were larger when the plan was written in a true “if X, then Y” format, when people were already motivated, and when they rehearsed the plan.
Say you want to come across as less defensive. Picture this: a colleague questions your numbers. Without a plan, your old reflex fires before you’ve decided anything. With one, the cue itself triggers the response you chose in advance. That’s the whole point. The decision is already made.
Planning only works if you follow through on what you promise yourself, so it’s worth learning how to keep a promise, including the ones nobody else hears.
Here’s a simple way in: write three if-then sentences for the trait you’re working on, each tied to a specific place, time or person.
4. Pick one or two traits, not five
Spreading yourself thin is the fastest route to changing nothing.
The clearest summary of what actually works comes from Peter Haehner, Amanda Wright and Wiebke Bleidorn’s 2024 systematic review in Communications Psychology, published in November 2024. They gathered 30 longitudinal studies with 7,719 participants. Across seven intervention studies they could pool, programmes designed to help people change a chosen trait produced an average shift of d = 0.22 in the desired direction. In four studies with longer follow-ups, the change held or even grew, to d = 0.37. Interventions lasted about 10.5 weeks on average, usually with weekly contact.
Some traits moved more than others:
| Trait targeted | Average change (d) |
|---|---|
| Extraversion | 0.38 |
| Neuroticism (reducing it) | 0.33 |
| Conscientiousness | 0.31 |
| Openness | 0.21 |
| Agreeableness | 0.15 |
The confidence intervals were wide, because no trait had more than eight effect sizes behind it, so treat the ranking as a hint rather than a rule. One more detail from the review stands out. Hudson and Fraley (2015) found that when people got vague instructions to “act differently”, some changed in the wrong direction. Focus and specificity seem to protect you, so choose the one or two traits that would make the biggest difference to your life right now and leave the rest for later.
5. Think in months, not weeks
Think about learning to play the guitar. Nobody expects to play a song cleanly after three lessons. Your fingers have to repeat the same awkward shapes until, one day, you stop thinking about them. Developing a trait works in a similar way: the new behaviour feels forced long before it feels like you.
The analogy only goes so far. Guitar skills improve fairly predictably with practice, while personality change is lumpier, depends on context, and depends on how you interpret what you’re doing. Still, the timescale is roughly right, and the habit research backs that part up. A systematic review by Ben Singh, Andrew Murphy, Carol Maher and Ashleigh Smith at the University of South Australia (Healthcare, December 2024) covered 20 studies and 2,601 participants. Among the four studies that reported a timeframe, median habit formation took 59 to 66 days, means ran from 106 to 154 days, and individuals ranged from 4 to 335 days. Morning routines and habits people chose themselves tended to be stronger.
Only four studies reported timing, so the numbers are rough. But they flatly contradict the popular “21 days” claim. If you want a few anchors to build around, these good habits to have in life are a useful starting list.
Test it this week: attach your new trait behaviour to something you already do every morning, like making coffee, and mark a date about two months out to judge whether it’s working.
6. Take on small challenges, and actually finish them
Signing up for change is easy. Completing the uncomfortable part is what counts.
Nathan Hudson, Daniel Briley, William Chopik and Jaime Derringer tested this directly (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2019). They had 377 university students choose traits they wanted to change and then offered them weekly “challenges” of varying difficulty. A student aiming for more extraversion might pick an easy one, like saying hello to a cashier, or a hard one, like leading a class project. The key result: actually completing challenges predicted real trait growth over the following months. Accepting a challenge and not doing it didn’t help.
The study is from 2019, so it’s older than most sources here. I kept it because it’s the original test of the idea, and the 2024 review by Haehner and colleagues still cites it as key evidence that following through on new behaviours drives change.
The practical lesson is to choose challenges you’ll realistically complete. If the hard ones keep getting put off, the problem may be procrastination rather than personality, and these strategies to beat procrastination can help.
Give it a go: write a ladder of five challenges for your trait, from “easy” to “hard”, and do the bottom rung twice before you move up.
7. Build connection into ordinary days
Personality doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It develops in conversations, friendships and the small social moments most of us rush past.
The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection published its global report on 30 June 2025, and the numbers are sobering. About 1 in 6 people worldwide are affected by loneliness, and the WHO links it to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year. Among 13 to 29 year olds, 17% to 21% reported feeling lonely. Lonely people were twice as likely to develop depression. Most of these figures are associations across populations, not proof that loneliness alone causes each outcome. The report’s suggestions for individuals are refreshingly ordinary: reach out to a friend who’s struggling, put your phone away during conversations, greet a neighbour, join a local group, volunteer.
Those small acts are also where traits like warmth and sociability get their practice reps. If social situations feel effortful, working on how to improve social skills gives you a set of concrete starting points, and one greeting a day is a reasonable place to begin.
8. Act like the person you want to become
What you do this week shapes how you see yourself next month. That’s the core idea behind a 2025 study from Heidelberg University.
Gabriela Küchler, Kira Borgdorf, Corina Aguilar-Raab, Wiebke Bleidorn, Jenny Wagner and Cornelia Wrzus ran an eight-week, in-person training programme for 165 adults aged 19 to 78 (Communications Psychology, November 2025). Weekly two-hour sessions focused first on stress and emotion regulation, then on social skills, with daily homework. Participants’ weekly behaviour became calmer and more outgoing, and their self-rated emotional stability and extraversion rose too. People whose week-to-week calmness improved most showed the biggest gains in how emotionally stable they rated themselves. Twelve months later, the emotional stability gains had held, while self-rated extraversion had slipped slightly.
There’s a caveat for introverts. A 2025 paper co-authored by Peter Gollwitzer, Gabriele Oettingen and Sonja Lyubomirsky (Social and Personality Psychology Compass, February 2025) notes that earlier research found acting extraverted lifts mood for most people, but some work suggests it can feel draining for those who are more introverted. Push your range, but notice your energy.
Conversation is the easiest place to practise. If you freeze in casual chats, it helps to know how to be good at small talk.
Next time, do this: before a social event, pick one specific outgoing behaviour (ask two people a follow-up question, say) and do it, regardless of how you feel walking in.
9. Protect your sleep before you work on your temper
You can’t regulate emotions well on four hours of sleep. That sounds obvious, but the size of the effect is easy to underestimate.
A meta-analysis led by Cara Palmer and colleagues (Psychological Bulletin, April 2024) brought together 154 experimental studies with 5,717 participants from more than 50 years of research. Every form of sleep loss they looked at, whether a full night of deprivation, shortened sleep or broken sleep, reduced positive emotions. Sleep loss also raised anxiety symptoms and dulled people’s emotional responses. Because these were experiments that manipulated sleep directly, the link to short-term mood is causal. The studies didn’t test long-term personality change, though, so think of sleep as the foundation rather than the change itself.
The paper is just over two years old. I kept it because it’s the most comprehensive synthesis on the topic, and I found nothing newer of the same scope. If you lie awake for ages, these tips on how to get to sleep faster are a practical place to start.
A quick experiment: keep a fixed wake-up time for two weeks and rate your irritability each evening from 1 to 10. Compare the first few days with the last few.
10. Train calm on purpose
Neuroticism, the tendency to feel anxious, tense and emotionally reactive, is one of the traits people most want to dial down. It’s also one of the most responsive to deliberate practice.
Frederick Almenrader, Gerrit Heßmann, Martin Voracek and Ulrich Tran at the University of Vienna pooled 45 intervention studies, 39 of them randomised controlled trials, with 2,913 participants in total (European Journal of Personality, 2025). Mindfulness-based programmes reduced neuroticism by about d = 0.67. Comparison treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy did about as well (d = 0.62), while people on waitlists or in usual care changed much less (d = 0.25). The most telling result: the drop in neuroticism, not a rise in “mindfulness” as such, accounted for the mental health benefits.
There are limits. Smaller studies reported bigger effects, which hints at publication bias, and everything relied on self-report. Still, the message is practical: structured practice that targets anxious reactivity works, and mindfulness is one good route among several. When stress spikes in the moment, these quick resets for how to calm your nervous system are a good complement to slower training, and even ten minutes of guided practice a day for eight weeks is a fair test.
11. Use big transitions as a launchpad
A new job, a move, a graduation, a breakup. These moments feel like disruption, but they’re also when personality is most open to change.
The mechanism goes roughly like this. A new role comes with new expectations: a first job asks you to turn up on time, follow through and handle feedback. You repeat those behaviours daily because the situation demands them. Other people respond to the new version of you, and over time you start to see yourself that way too. The evidence fits, with qualifications. A meta-analysis by Janina Bühler, Ulrich Orth, Wiebke Bleidorn and colleagues (European Journal of Personality, 2024) combined 44 studies with 121,187 participants. Life events produced reliable but fairly small personality changes, with stronger effects at work than in love. Graduation, first jobs, new relationships, marriage and divorce showed the biggest shifts.
These are longitudinal, observational studies, so the life event and the change go together, but the data can’t fully prove which drives which. The paper is also slightly over two years old. I kept it because it’s the largest synthesis of its kind.
Your move: if you’re heading into a transition, decide in advance which one or two habits you want the “new you” in that role to have, and start them from day one, before old patterns settle in.
12. Curate the feed that feeds comparison
It’s hard to feel settled in who you are when you spend hours watching edited versions of everyone else.
A study by Calvert and colleagues (JAMA Network Open, November 2025) followed 373 young adults aged 18 to 24 and tracked their actual social media use. Then 295 of them opted into a one-week detox. Afterwards, depression symptoms fell by 24.8%, anxiety by 16.1% and insomnia by 14.5%, though loneliness didn’t improve. The big limitation is design: there was no control group, and participants chose to take part, so expectation could explain some of the gain. A small randomised trial by Matthias Maerevoet and colleagues (Frontiers in Public Health, 2025), with 67 participants, found no benefit from temporary restrictions, so the picture is mixed.
What seems clear is that comparison is the real issue, more than screen time itself. These 16 tips to stop comparing yourself to others tackle that directly.
Start small: unfollow or mute five accounts that reliably leave you feeling worse about yourself, and see how the next week feels.
13. Expect more kindness from people, and give some back
Agreeableness and warmth are easier to develop when you don’t see other people as threats. Most of us are more cynical than the evidence justifies.
The World Happiness Report 2025, published in March 2025 by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, focused on caring and sharing. (The newest edition, from March 2026, turned to social media, so the 2025 report is still the latest on this topic.) One of its headline findings: when researchers dropped wallets in public places, far more were returned than people predicted, about twice as many. The report also found that believing others are kind is closely tied to how happy people are. Giving matters too. An earlier meta-analysis by Curry and colleagues (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018), covering 27 studies, found a small-to-medium boost to wellbeing from doing acts of kindness (δ = 0.28). That review is older, so treat it as background support.
Warmth is a learnable set of behaviours, and this 19-step guide on how to be friendly and kind breaks it down well. A single deliberate act of kindness each day, logged in a note, is enough to start retraining both your habits and your expectations of others.
14. Write down what went right
Gratitude practice gets oversold online. The actual evidence is real but modest, which is exactly why it’s worth knowing the numbers.
A systematic review led by Geyze Diniz (einstein, São Paulo, July 2023) included 64 randomised clinical trials of gratitude interventions, with 33 in the meta-analysis. People who did gratitude exercises reported more gratitude, better mental health and fewer anxiety and depression symptoms. The sizes were small. In nine studies with 1,802 people, gratitude scores rose by about 5.7%, and in three studies with 483 people, mental health scores rose by about 5.8%. The authors rated their certainty as low to very low.
The review is a bit over two years old. I kept it because it’s the broadest synthesis of randomised trials I could find. For personality, the value is less about the feeling of gratitude and more about the habit of noticing what’s working, which makes the other changes on this list easier to sustain.
Give it a go: each night for two weeks, write three specific things that went well and one thing you did that matched the person you’re trying to become.
15. Don’t let your age talk you out of it
“I’m too old to change” is one of the most common reasons people give up before they start. Recent research says it’s mostly wrong.
Professor Cornelia Wrzus, who studies personality development in adulthood and old age at Heidelberg University, led the eight-week study described in item 8. In a university press release from February 2026, she said older participants changed about as much as younger ones. She described the result as a genuine surprise, given how much harder some skills, like a new language, seem to get with age. Her conclusion: “When people are sufficiently motivated, they maintain the ability to change” (Wrzus, 2026). The published study backs her up, with one revealing detail. The older adults engaged more deeply with the weekly tasks than the younger ones did, which may explain why they kept pace (Küchler and colleagues, Communications Psychology, 2025).
So effort may matter more than age. That’s encouraging, but it also means older learners shouldn’t expect results from a half-hearted try.
Test it this week: if you’re over 50, pick the trait you’ve told yourself is “too late” to change and do the full practice for seven days, every assignment, no skipping.
16. Let someone who knows you keep score
Self-reports have an obvious weakness: if you want to change, you’ll probably believe you have. Other people’s views are a useful reality check.
Mirjam Stieger and colleagues tested a smartphone coaching app called PEACH (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021). Over the programme, people who wanted to increase a trait increased it more than a waitlist group, and people who wanted to decrease one decreased it more. Crucially, friends and family also noticed the changes, although the changes they reported were smaller than what participants reported about themselves. A follow-up by Stieger, Christoph Flückiger and Mathias Allemand (Journal of Personality, 2023) found the effects held a year later.
Both papers are older than my usual cut-off. I kept them because they remain the key evidence that intentional change shows up in other people’s eyes too, and the 2024 review by Haehner and colleagues confirms that finding. Asking for honest input is a skill in itself, and the approach in how to ask for feedback from your manager works just as well with friends.
Next time, do this: ask one person you trust to tell you, in a month, whether they’ve noticed any difference in the trait you’re working on. Give them permission to say no.
17. Notice your new behaviour, then name it
Doing something new once rarely changes how you see yourself. The shift happens when you notice the pattern and fold it into your story.
Personality researchers describe this with a framework called TESSERA, developed by Cornelia Wrzus and Brent Roberts in 2017 and used in the 2025 Heidelberg study. It runs in stages. A situation triggers a new behaviour, say staying calm when a deadline moves. That calm state produces a reaction, from you and from other people. Then reflection does the crucial work: you interpret the experience (“I handled that well, maybe I’m steadier than I thought”), and repeated interpretations gradually update your self-concept. Küchler and colleagues (2025) note that behaviour changes on their own explain relatively little of how traits change, which is why reflection matters. This part of the model is still being tested, so treat it as a well-grounded theory rather than settled fact.
Reflection depends on emotional self-awareness, which you can deliberately improve with these strategies to improve emotional intelligence.
Here’s a simple way in: every Sunday, write one sentence starting with “This week I was the kind of person who…” and fill it in with an example of the trait you’re developing.
18. Widen your range instead of swapping yourself out
Think of your personality like a wardrobe rather than a single outfit. Developing yourself is more like adding a few pieces than throwing everything out. A quiet person can learn to lead a meeting and still enjoy a solitary evening. The comparison breaks down in one way: clothes are separate from you, while traits are woven into how you think and feel, so the new pieces take practice before they fit.
That framing matches where the research is heading. A 2026 review by Eva Asselmann and more than 20 co-authors in Social and Personality Psychology Compass argues that personality change efforts should be more personalised and should look beyond trait levels to skills and behavioural flexibility. In plain terms, the aim isn’t to become a different person. It’s to have more responses available when a situation calls for them.
A quick experiment: list two situations this month where your usual style doesn’t serve you, and plan the alternative response you’ll try in each, while keeping everything else about how you operate.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. Everyone does. A week of old habits, a blow-up you thought you’d moved past, a social event where you hid in the kitchen. What matters is the next step.
First, be kind to yourself about it, and not just because it feels better. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley ran four experiments (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012). People who responded to a failure with self-compassion were more motivated to improve and studied longer after failing a test than people who focused on boosting their self-esteem. That study is older, but it’s the foundational test of the idea and is still widely cited.
Second, expect some fading. In the 2025 Heidelberg study, gains in emotional stability held for a year, but self-rated extraversion dipped a little after the programme ended (Küchler and colleagues, 2025). That’s not failure. It’s a sign that some traits need maintenance once the structure is gone, so put a monthly check-in in your calendar.
Third, remember the timescale. Singh and colleagues (2024) found that habit formation ranged from 4 to 335 days between people. A bad week tells you very little about whether you’re on track.
If a slip turns into a rough day, these steps on how to turn a bad day around can help you reset, and then you go back to the smallest rung on your challenge ladder.
Conclusion
Your personality isn’t fixed, but it doesn’t change on wishes either. The research points to a fairly plain recipe. Pick one or two traits. Make specific if-then plans. Take on small challenges and finish them. Give it months. Look after the basics, like sleep and real connection. Ask someone you trust whether they’ve noticed a difference.
None of that is dramatic, which is probably why it works. Choose one item from this list today and do the action at the end of it before the week is out.
Want more practical, research-backed guides like this one? Browse the Self Improvement section on Perfect 24 Hours and pick your next small experiment.
