Most of us can name the person we’d like to be. Honest even when it’s awkward. Patient with the slow colleague. The friend who says thank you and means it. The gap between that person and the one who actually shows up on a Tuesday afternoon is where character lives.
For a long time, psychology treated personality as something close to fixed by adulthood. That view has softened. Researchers now study “volitional personality change”, the idea that you can deliberately nudge your traits in a direction you choose, and the early results are encouraging, if modest. Character turns out to behave less like eye colour and more like fitness: it responds to what you repeatedly do.
That’s good news and slightly inconvenient news at the same time. Good, because you’re not stuck. Inconvenient, because reading about honesty or gratitude does very little on its own. You have to practise.
Below are 20 ways to do that, each backed by research, data or a real-world example, plus a short plan for the days when you slip. If you’ve already worked through the things to stop doing to become a better version of yourself, this is the “what to start doing” half.
1. Pick one trait and turn it into small weekly challenges
“I want to be a better person” is a lovely sentence. It’s also almost useless as a plan.
In November 2024, Peter Haehner, Amanda Jo Wright and Wiebke Bleidorn published a systematic review in Communications Psychology covering 30 longitudinal studies and 7,719 people. Simply wanting to change your personality was only weakly linked to actually changing. Structured interventions did better: they produced small but real shifts toward people’s desired traits (d = 0.22), and in the four studies with follow-ups, those shifts held or even grew afterwards (d = 0.37). Many of these programmes, including Nathan Hudson’s line of work, ask people to complete concrete behavioural challenges rather than just reflect. The authors are careful to call the evidence base limited, with only seven intervention studies in the pooled estimate, so treat the numbers as promising, not settled.
The practical lesson is that traits change through behaviour, one rep at a time. Choose a single trait, then translate it into actions you could tick off.
Start small: write down one trait for the next month and three tiny behaviours that express it, such as “speak first in one meeting” for assertiveness. Do at least one every day.
2. Choose honesty, then deliver it kindly
Most people aren’t big liars. They’re small, frequent ones.
A diary study co-authored by Tony Docan-Morgan of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, published in Communication Monographs and summarised by the university in June 2024, tracked 632 participants for 91 consecutive days. Together they reported 116,366 lies. About 75% of people told zero to two lies a day, and 88.6% of all lies were classed as “little white lies”, like praising a gift you don’t like. A tiny group did the heavy lifting: the top 1% averaged 17 lies a day. Self-reported lying has obvious limits, of course.
So the honesty most of us need to build lives in those small moments. And we tend to overestimate what it’ll cost us. In a 2018 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Emma Levine and Taya Cohen asked people to be completely honest with everyone for three days. Participants expected it to be unpleasant. It turned out to be more enjoyable and more socially connecting than they predicted, and the people on the receiving end reacted less negatively than feared.
Next time, do this: when you feel a white lie forming, swap it for a kind truth. “It’s not quite my style, but I love that you thought of me” is honest and gentle at once.
3. Ask “what” questions instead of “why” questions
Self-awareness sounds like it should come from looking inward. Often it does. Sometimes, though, introspection just digs a deeper hole.
Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich, author of Insight and a January 2018 Harvard Business Review article on self-awareness, argues that “why” is a surprisingly poor question to ask yourself. “Why did I snap at Sue?” invites you to invent tidy explanations, and it can pull you into rumination. A summary of her work in The Art of Manliness (updated February 2026) points to the alternative she recommends: questions that start with “what”. What was going on for me right before I snapped? What do I want to do differently next time? These are less emotionally loaded, and they point you toward an action instead of a verdict on yourself.
That makes self-reflection a skill closely tied to improving your emotional intelligence, because both depend on spotting patterns without drowning in them. Tonight, spend five minutes on two questions: “What went well today?” and “What would I handle differently?” Skip the why.
4. Change your surroundings before you test your willpower
Self-control has a timing problem, and once you see it, you’ll stop blaming your willpower so much.
Temptations tend to grow stronger the longer you’re exposed to them. The biscuit tin on the counter starts as a passing thought, becomes a pull, then becomes a fight. Angela Duckworth, Tamar Gendler and James Gross laid this out in a 2016 review in Perspectives on Psychological Science: because impulses build over time, the strategies that act early (choosing or changing your situation) can stop the struggle before it starts, while gritting your teeth only kicks in once the impulse is at full strength. Step by step: fewer cues, weaker urges, less need for raw willpower.
Daily-life data point the same way. Laverl Williamson and Benjamin Wilkowski at the University of Wyoming (2019, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) found that students who used upstream strategies such as avoiding tempting situations, modifying them or reappraising the temptation made more progress on long-term goals than those who relied on resisting in the moment. That evidence is correlational, so it shows a link rather than proof of cause. Still, it fits the reasoning, and it explains why people who seem “disciplined” often just have better-designed environments.
A quick experiment: pick your most predictable temptation and add friction. Charge your phone in another room, move snacks to a high shelf, log out of the shopping app.
5. Give a new habit about two months, not three weeks
The “21 days to form a habit” rule is everywhere. The data don’t back it.
A systematic review by Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, pooled 20 studies with 2,601 participants. Among the studies that measured how long habits took to form, median times were 59 to 66 days, and individual times ranged anywhere from 4 to 335 days.
| What was measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Median time to habit formation | 59–66 days |
| Mean time to habit formation | 106–154 days |
| Individual range | 4–335 days |
Source: Singh et al., Healthcare, December 2024. Only four of the 20 studies reported formation time directly.
The review also found that morning practices and habits people chose for themselves tended to grow stronger, and that enjoying the behaviour helped. Character traits are, in large part, habits of response. Patience is pausing a thousand times. Gratitude is noticing a thousand small things.
Your move: pick one character habit from our list of good habits to have, attach it to your morning, and mark a date roughly ten weeks out. Judge progress then, not after week three.
6. Name your values and steer by them
Think of the difference between a compass and a weathervane. A weathervane points wherever the wind blows. A compass keeps pointing the same way, whatever the weather. Integrity works more like the compass: your values hold their direction when peer pressure gusts in.
The analogy holds well for consistency. It breaks down in two places. A compass needle points at a fixed spot, while your values can and should be revisited as you learn. And a compass shows direction without showing the path; you still have to choose each step.
There is a sound reason to bother. In August 2025, Nicole Casali and Tommaso Feraco published a meta-analysis in the European Journal of Personality covering 130 papers and over 275,000 participants. Almost every one of the 24 classic character strengths, such as honesty, kindness and perseverance, was meaningfully linked with healthier functioning, with most correlations between .10 and .30. Humility was the exception. The links were stronger for well-being than for mental health problems, and since the data are correlational, they can’t say which comes first.
Here’s a simple way in: write down your three most important values. Then look at last week’s calendar and bank statement. Where did your time and money line up with them, and where didn’t they? Change one thing this week.
7. Own your mistakes with a real apology
Everyone messes up. How you handle it is where character becomes visible.
Beth Polin, a professor of management at Eastern Kentucky University who studies trust and apologies, described the elements of a strong apology on Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast in May 2025, as reported by CNBC that June. Her list: regret, a brief rationale, responsibility, repentance (a commitment not to repeat it) and repair. If you only include three, she says responsibility has to be one of them.
That echoes her earlier experimental work with Roy Lewicki and Robert Lount at Ohio State University (2016, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research). Across two experiments with 755 people, acknowledging responsibility was rated the most important element, an offer of repair came second, and asking for forgiveness mattered least. Participants read written apologies, though, so tone and eye contact weren’t tested.
If you’re prone to defensive arguments, learning to argue without fighting makes this much easier. The next time you get something wrong, try saying “I was wrong, and here’s what I’ll do to fix it” before you say anything about why it happened.
8. Choose empathy on purpose
We like to think empathy just happens to us. Often it’s a decision, and often we decide against it.
In a May 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology, Hajdi Moche and colleagues at Linköping University gave 296 American participants repeated choices: either try to feel what a pictured stranger was feeling, or simply describe their appearance. When the picture showed a single person, participants chose empathy only about a third of the time (34% of trials). They rated feeling as more effortful and more distressing than describing. This builds on a 2019 series of experiments by Daryl Cameron and colleagues, in which people who were told they were good at empathy chose it more often and found it less draining.
So empathy has a cost, and your brain is constantly asking whether it’s worth paying. Lowering that cost helps. Being kind becomes easier when you’ve practised it, as in our guide to being friendly and kind.
Test it this week: once a day, pick someone you’d normally just observe, such as a cashier or a stressed colleague, and ask yourself one question: “What might this feel like for them right now?” Then act on the answer if you can.
9. Assume people are kinder than you think
Your view of other people shapes how you treat them. And most of us are too pessimistic.
The World Happiness Report 2025, published by the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre with Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, focused on caring and sharing. Its headline finding on kindness: people underestimate how benevolent their communities are. In lost-wallet experiments, actual return rates were around twice as high as people expected. The report also found that benevolent acts such as donating, volunteering and helping strangers were still 10% more frequent in 2024 than in 2017–19, and that believing others are kind was linked with higher happiness.
A cynical default makes generosity feel naive. A more accurate default makes it feel normal.
Give it a go: the next time someone cuts you off, forgets to reply or seems rude, write down two generous explanations before you settle on the worst one.
10. Catch your assumptions about groups
Most people carry assumptions about others, whether about education, politics or background. Some are conscious. Many aren’t.
A large experiment shows that these attitudes can move, and fast. In October 2024, Jan Voelkel, Robb Willer and a big team published a megastudy in Science that tested 25 short interventions on 32,059 American partisans. Twenty-three of the 25 significantly reduced hostility toward the other political party. The strongest approaches highlighted relatable, sympathetic individuals who held different beliefs, or emphasised identities the two sides share. Each intervention took under eight minutes. The limits matter: the study focused on US politics, follow-ups were short, and reducing hostility didn’t automatically change other undemocratic attitudes.
The underlying recipe is worth borrowing for any group you tend to judge. Notice the assumption, then look for a specific, relatable person who breaks it, plus something you share. Dealing calmly with people who always think they are right is good training ground for this.
When you catch yourself thinking “people like that are…”, finish the sentence differently: “…like that one person I know who…”
11. Ask for honest feedback, and give it too
It’s hard to see your own character clearly. Other people can help, but only if someone says something.
Nicole Abi-Esber, Jennifer Abel, Juliana Schroeder and Francesca Gino tested this in a 2022 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In a pilot field study, a research assistant handed out surveys with a visible smudge on her face. Only 2.6% of people told her. Across five experiments with 1,984 participants, would-be feedback-givers consistently underestimated how much others wanted to hear it. In one study with friends, roommates and partners, 86% of receivers wanted the feedback, while only 48% of givers wanted to give it. A quick prompt (“If you were this person, would you want feedback?”) helped close that gap.
The same blind spot runs the other way. People around you probably have useful observations about you and assume you don’t want them. Good managers know this, which is why it shows up again and again in the best qualities of a great boss.
Next time, do this: ask one trusted person a narrow question, such as “What’s one thing I do that makes me harder to work with?” Then say thank you and nothing else for at least ten seconds.
12. Listen fully before you speak
If you’re naturally talkative, one of the most character-building things you can do is let others go first. And when they talk, really listen.
A registered report published in Royal Society Open Science in December 2024 by Tia Moin, Netta Weinstein, Guy Itzchakov and colleagues paired people up and trained one partner in high-quality listening (focused attention, real effort to understand, no judgment) while the other partner talked about their character strengths. Compared with everyday listening, high-quality listening led to greater “positivity resonance”, a shared sense of warmth felt by both speaker and listener. It didn’t change speakers’ anxiety or sense of authenticity, and the authors describe the results as early findings. Interestingly, the trained listeners said they wanted to keep listening that way.
So listening isn’t only a gift to the speaker. Both sides feel it. Our guide on how to have a good conversation with anyone goes deeper on the mechanics. In your next conversation, count to two after the other person stops before you reply, and ask one follow-up question before sharing your own view.
13. Speak up when you have something to add
The opposite problem is just as common. Plenty of people have good ideas and keep them to themselves.
Gallup’s January 2026 report on U.S. employee engagement, based on 78,945 workers surveyed in 2025, found that only 31% were engaged at work, unchanged from 2024 and down from a 2020 peak of 36%. Among older millennials, just 26% strongly agreed that “at work, my opinions seem to count”, down from 34% in 2020. These are workplace survey figures, so they describe how people feel rather than how often they actually speak. Still, when so few feel heard, a clear, constructive voice is rare, and it gets noticed.
Speaking up is a form of courage, and courage grows with practice. If fear tends to win, our piece on how to be more courageous in life covers ways to act despite it.
Start small: before your next meeting, prepare one sentence that starts with “I think we should…” and commit to saying it within the first ten minutes.
14. Take calculated risks
People are oddly reluctant to change course, even when they’re unhappy. Economists call this status quo bias: the current situation feels safe simply because it’s familiar, so the costs of staying put get underweighted and the risks of change get overweighted. The result is that we stay in situations longer than is good for us.
Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago tested this with a creative field experiment, published in the Review of Economic Studies in 2021. People stuck on a decision, such as quitting a job, visited a website and flipped a coin; over 20,000 coins were flipped in the first year. For important decisions, those whom the coin told to make a change were more likely to do it, and six months later they reported being happier than those told to keep the status quo. Levitt’s conclusion was that people may be excessively cautious about life-changing choices. One caveat: these were people already on the fence, so the result doesn’t mean every risk pays off.
“Calculated” is the key word. Weigh the downside, then test the change at a small scale before betting everything on it. Starting over in life at 30 shows how that can look in practice.
A quick experiment: name one change you keep postponing. Write the worst realistic outcome, then design a two-week trial version of it, like a weekend gig before quitting the day job.
15. Say “I might be wrong” more often
Open-mindedness sounds easy until someone disagrees with you.
Intellectual humility, the ability to recognise the limits of your own knowledge, seems to help you think better. In a 2025 study in Personality and Individual Differences, Rosa Angela Fabio and Rossella Suriano compared students who scored in the top and bottom 10% for intellectual humility on a critical reasoning test that mixed relevant and misleading information. The more humble group performed better overall, with the biggest gaps in evaluating evidence, drawing inferences and monitoring their own reasoning. It’s a correlational study with an extreme-groups design in a student sample, so it can’t show that humility causes better thinking, but it fits a wider pattern of research linking humility with sharper judgment.
The useful part is that humility has a script. “I might be wrong about this” is short, true more often than we’d like, and it opens the door for someone to teach you something.
Your move: use that sentence once a day for a week, ideally in a disagreement. Notice how the conversation changes.
16. Learn like a “learn-it-all”
Microsoft offers a well-documented example of what openness to learning looks like at scale.
When Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014, he inherited a company widely seen as stuck, with fierce internal rivalries. According to a London Business School case study by Herminia Ibarra and Aneeta Rattan, he drew on Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research and pushed the company to move from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” one. Rather than imposing a definition, Nadella and HR chief Kathleen Hogan brought 180 executives together in 17 teams to work out what a growth mindset should mean in daily practice. A decade later, Fortune (May 2024) reported that the learn-it-all idea still sits at the centre of how Nadella describes Microsoft’s culture.
A company isn’t a person, and culture change involves a lot more than one slogan. Still, the shift in the question you ask yourself, from “How do I prove I’m smart?” to “What can I learn here?”, translates directly.
Ask to sit in on one meeting outside your area this month, or block thirty minutes a week for a topic you know nothing about. If you’re early in your career, it’s one of the best ways to invest in yourself in your 20s.
17. Keep a gratitude practice that mixes methods
Gratitude is a character strength that shows awareness of the people and things around you. It also responds well to practice, though less dramatically than some headlines suggest.
In a 2025 PNAS meta-analysis led by Hyewon Choi, researchers pooled 145 papers with 24,804 participants from 28 countries. Gratitude interventions produced a small overall boost to well-being (Hedges’ g = 0.19). Effects were larger for positive feelings, and combining several types of gratitude practice worked better (g = 0.26) than most single methods. Results varied a lot between countries. A follow-up megastudy published in PNAS in May 2026 by Nicholas Coles, Michael McCullough and colleagues tested six brief gratitude practices on 10,696 people in 34 countries. Right after the exercises, positive mood rose noticeably (d = 0.37), with smaller shifts in optimism and life satisfaction, and again the size of the effect depended on the country.
| Study | Participants | Countries | Key result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Choi et al., PNAS, July 2025 | 24,804 | 28 | Small overall effect (g = 0.19); combined methods g = 0.26 |
| Coles et al., PNAS, May 2026 | 10,696 | 34 | Positive affect d = 0.37 immediately after practice |
Here’s a simple way in: alternate methods. Three nights a week, note three specific things you’re grateful for as part of your evening wind-down routine. Once a week, send a short thank-you message to someone who helped you.
18. Ask for help with a specific request
Some people treat asking for help as weakness. In practice, it takes self-knowledge and nerve.
The trap works like this. You imagine the other person is busy, assume they’d find it easy to say no and picture helping as a burden. So you don’t ask. And because you don’t ask, you never collect evidence that your prediction was wrong. The belief survives untested.
Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley broke that loop experimentally. In a 2022 paper in Psychological Science (N = 2,118 across studies), people who needed help consistently underestimated how willing others would be to help, underestimated how good helpers would feel, and overestimated how inconvenienced helpers would be. Specific requests make it easier still, because the helper knows exactly what success looks like.
Give it a go: turn one vague complaint into a clear ask. “I need more help around the house” becomes “Could you take over the laundry and the evening dog walk from now on?”
19. Point out other people’s strengths
Strong characters build others up. It’s also a practical habit with measurable effects at work.
Gallup and Workhuman tracked more than 3,400 employees from 2022 to 2024 and published the results in September 2024. Employees who received high-quality recognition in 2022 were 45% less likely to have left their job by 2024. The same report found that 46% of employees didn’t get feedback from their manager as often as they wanted, and only 14% said learning a new skill was a common reason they got recognised. Worth knowing: Workhuman sells recognition software, so it has a commercial interest in the topic, even though the data come from Gallup’s research.
“High-quality” matters here. Vague praise (“great job!”) lands softly. Specific praise (“the way you handled that client’s objection was calm and clear”) tells someone exactly what to keep doing. Test it this week: give three pieces of specific recognition, each naming a strength and a concrete example, and offer one person a chance to use that strength, such as leading the next presentation.
20. Help someone regularly, not just occasionally
Character shows up most clearly in what you do for others when nobody’s keeping score.
In August 2025, Sae Hwang Han at the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues published a study in Social Science & Medicine using Health and Retirement Study data on more than 30,000 Americans aged 51 and over, followed from 1998. Regular helping, whether formal volunteering or informal help like driving a neighbour to an appointment, was associated with 15–20% slower age-related cognitive decline. The benefit appeared consistently at around two to four hours a week, and informal helping counted as much as formal volunteering. Because this is observational data, it shows an association. People in better health may simply help more.
Even so, the direction of the evidence is clear enough to act on, and helping is good for the people you help regardless. It’s also one of the simplest ways to keep family relationships strong. Choose one person or cause and put a recurring hour in your calendar, the same way you’d book a meeting you can’t miss.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll tell a white lie, lose your patience or skip the gratitude notes for two weeks. That’s part of the process, not proof that you’re failing.
How you respond to the lapse matters more than the lapse itself. Charlotte Hagerman, Evan Forman and colleagues at Drexel University’s WELL Center studied this in 140 people in a weight-loss programme, published in Appetite (2023). Participants answered smartphone surveys several times a day about lapses and how they treated themselves afterwards. When people responded to a lapse with more self-compassion, they reported better mood and a stronger sense of self-control in the hours that followed. Self-compassion didn’t significantly reduce further lapses that same day, so it’s a recovery tool rather than a guarantee.
A simple reset:
- Name it plainly. “I snapped at my colleague.” No drama, no character verdict.
- Ask a “what” question. What was happening right before? What would help next time?
- Talk to yourself like a friend. If self-criticism tends to spiral, our guide on how to stop hating yourself can help.
- Repair if someone was affected. Use the apology elements from step 7.
- Restart at the next cue, not next Monday. Habits take about two months to settle, and one bad day doesn’t erase the progress you’ve already made.
Building a stronger character, one rep at a time
Character isn’t something you either have or lack. It’s a collection of habits: telling the truth when a small lie would be easier, listening a beat longer, saying thank you, owning the mistake. Each of the 20 strategies above is backed by real evidence, but none of them works by being read.
So don’t try all 20. Pick one trait, choose two or three behaviours from this list, and practise them for the next ten weeks. Then pick the next one.
Want more science-backed ways to grow? Explore our self-improvement articles and choose your next small experiment.
