We talk about character as if it were eye colour. Your grandmother “had character.” The colleague who padded his expenses “has none.” It’s a tidy way to sort people, and mostly wrong.
What we call character is a pile of repeated choices. Telling the truth when a small lie would be easier. Apologising properly instead of half-heartedly. Waiting without snapping. Saying the awkward thing in the meeting when everyone else has gone quiet. Choices can be practised, and some get much easier once you know how other people actually react, which is often far more kindly than you predicted.
The 20 steps below are built on that idea. Each one comes with the evidence behind it, including where that evidence is solid and where it’s thinner than the headlines suggest. You don’t need all twenty. Start with the ones that make you wince a little.
1. Pick two or three strengths to work on
“Be a better person” is too vague to act on. You need something specific enough to practise on a Tuesday.
A useful starting point is the language of character strengths. Psychologist Robert McGrath of Fairleigh Dickinson University analysed more than a million responses to the VIA Survey from 75 countries, published in the Journal of Positive Psychology (online 2014, print 2015). The strengths people rated highest in themselves were honesty, fairness, kindness, judgment and curiosity. The ones they rated lowest were self-regulation, modesty, prudence and spirituality. That ranking looked surprisingly similar from country to country. One caveat: these were online volunteers describing themselves, so this is how people see themselves, not an objective audit.
Still, notice the pattern. Most of us are quick to call ourselves kind and honest. Fewer of us would claim to be good at self-control or caution.
Does working on strengths matter for how your life feels? Casali and Feraco’s 2025 meta-analysis of 130 studies, published in the European Journal of Personality with 275,007 participants, found that every one of the 24 strengths except humility had a meaningful link with healthy functioning. Hope and zest had the strongest links. The data are correlational and mostly self-reported, so they show strengths and wellbeing travel together, not that one causes the other.
Start small: take the free VIA Survey or simply list the 24 strengths and rank yourself honestly. Choose one strength from near the bottom of your list and one you already lean on. Those two are your focus for the next month.
2. Say what you actually think, kindly
Most people value honesty in theory and dodge it in practice. We tell the friend their business plan sounds great. We say “no worries” when there are clearly worries.
Emma Levine (University of Chicago Booth) and Taya Cohen (Carnegie Mellon) tested what happens when people stop doing that. In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in September 2018, they defined honesty as speaking in line with your own beliefs, thoughts and feelings. In one field experiment, participants committed to being completely honest with everyone in their lives for three days. Across their experiments, people expected honesty to be unpleasant and damaging to relationships. In practice, they found it more enjoyable and more socially connecting than they’d predicted, and it did less harm than they feared. The experiments were short, and participants knew they were in a study, so this isn’t proof that blunt honesty works everywhere.
Honest doesn’t mean brutal. Levine has pointed out that you can deliver hard truths in gentler ways, for instance by making your good intentions clear.
Picture this: a friend sends you a draft of a wedding speech and asks what you think. The middle drags. The kind, honest answer is “The opening made me laugh, and I think the middle section would land harder if it were half as long.” It’s true and it helps, and nobody gets hurt.
Next time, do this: when you catch yourself about to say “it’s fine,” pause and ask what you’d say if you weren’t worried about the reaction. Then say the gentle version of that.
3. Ask “what” instead of “why” when you reflect
Self-awareness is the foundation for almost everything else on this list. You can’t change a pattern you can’t see.
The trouble is that nearly everyone thinks they already see it. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich wrote in Harvard Business Review in January 2018 that her team’s research programme, involving almost 5,000 participants, found about 95% of people believed they were self-aware. Her team estimated that only 10 to 15% actually met their criteria. Eurich herself calls that second figure an estimate, and it depends on how her team defined self-awareness, so treat it as a warning sign, not a census.
Her practical advice is the interesting part. When you reflect on a bad moment, “why” questions tend to send you hunting for flattering explanations. “Why did I snap at Sam?” easily turns into “because Sam was being unreasonable.” “What” questions keep you closer to the facts. What was I feeling right before? What did I want in that moment? What would I do differently? If you want to go deeper into reading your own reactions, these ways to improve emotional intelligence pair well with this habit.
Test it this week: spend five minutes each evening on three “what” questions about one moment that bothered you. Write the answers down. By Friday you’ll likely spot a pattern you hadn’t named before.
4. Make self-control easier by changing the room
We tend to think of self-control as a muscle you flex against temptation. The evidence points somewhere else.
Here’s how the mechanism seems to work. Marina Milyavskaya (Carleton University) and Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto) followed 159 students, who reported on their goals, temptations and self-control six times a day for a week. Their goal progress was then measured at the end of the semester. The study appeared in Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2017. Actively resisting temptation turned out to be unrelated to reaching goals. What mattered was how many temptations people ran into in the first place. More temptations led to feeling more drained, whether or not people resisted them, and that drained feeling predicted less progress. An earlier experience-sampling study by Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues (2012) found something consistent with this: people high in trait self-control reported fewer temptations in daily life, not heroic resistance.
So the chain runs like this: the cue appears, you fight it, the fight wears you down, and a worn-down person lapses. Remove the cue and there’s nothing to fight. These are field studies that track patterns over time, not controlled experiments, so the causal story is the researchers’ best reading of the data.
For self-control, character looks less like constant willpower and more like setting your life up so you rarely need it. If your phone is the main battleground, these ways to stop phone addiction apply the same logic.
Your move: name one temptation that beats you most weeks. Then change the setting so it shows up less often. Leave the phone charging in the hallway, delete the shopping app, stop buying the biscuits.
5. Keep one small promise to yourself every day
Integrity starts with promises you make to yourself. If you keep saying you’ll do something and don’t, part of you stops believing your own word.
The catch is time. A systematic review and meta-analysis led by Ben Singh of the University of South Australia, published in Healthcare in December 2024, pulled together 20 studies with 2,601 participants on forming health habits. Singh’s 2024 review found that among the four studies reporting how long habits took, median times ranged from 59 to 66 days and means from 106 to 154 days. Individual times ranged from 4 to 335 days. Morning routines and habits people chose for themselves tended to grow stronger. Only a handful of studies measured timing directly, and all looked at health behaviours, so read these as rough guides.
| Measure (Singh et al., 2024) | Days |
|---|---|
| Median time to habit formation | 59–66 |
| Mean time to habit formation | 106–154 |
| Individual range | 4–335 |
That’s well beyond the popular “21 days” figure. If a promise hasn’t become automatic after three weeks, you aren’t failing. You’re early. For ideas on which promises are worth keeping, this list of good habits to have is a decent place to look.
Here’s a simple way in: pick a promise so small it feels almost silly, like ten push-ups or writing one line in a journal, attach it to something you already do each morning, and keep it for two months before adding anything else.
6. Decide your lines before the pressure hits
Good intentions tend to bend under pressure. The deadline is tomorrow, the boss is watching, everyone else is cutting the corner.
Taya Cohen, who studies ethics and organisational behaviour at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, has argued for years that unethical behaviour comes from an interaction between personality and situation. In a 2011 university profile she noted that even very moral people can behave badly when circumstances push hard enough. Her own research shows what tends to protect people. With Edward Helzer and colleagues, she studied three parts of moral character: honesty-humility, guilt proneness and how central being moral is to someone’s identity. In a Journal of Business Ethics paper summarised by Carnegie Mellon in January 2022, people high in moral character kept noticing the ethical side of a decision even when they were nudged to ignore it. They also said they’d be more willing to blow the whistle on financial misconduct.
Guilt proneness is a useful idea here. Cohen and her colleagues describe it as feeling bad about a wrong before you commit it, not just afterwards. You can borrow that by thinking through the hard moment in advance. Once you’ve made a decision, the follow-through gets easier with some of these ways to stick to your decision.
Give it a go: write down three lines you won’t cross at work or at home. For each, add an “if… then” plan, such as “If someone asks me to backdate a document, then I’ll say I’m not comfortable and suggest we flag the delay instead.”
7. Own your mistakes with a full apology
Everyone messes up. People judge you less by the mistake than by what you do next.
Roy Lewicki and Robert Lount of Ohio State University and Beth Polin of Eastern Kentucky University tested which parts of an apology actually work. Their study, published in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research in 2016, involved two experiments with 755 people reading apologies built from up to six elements. These were an expression of regret, an explanation of what went wrong, acknowledging responsibility, a declaration of repentance, an offer of repair and a request for forgiveness. More elements made apologies more effective. Acknowledging responsibility mattered most. Offering to repair came second. Asking for forgiveness mattered least. The apologies were written scenarios, so tone of voice and body language weren’t tested.
Say you forgot to send a report your colleague needed for a client call. A weak apology is “Sorry, things have been crazy.” A full one sounds like: “I dropped the ball. I told you it would be there by nine and it wasn’t. I’ll send it now, and I’ll join the call to cover the questions it would have answered.” If the conversation gets heated, these rules for arguing without fighting help keep the repair on track.
A quick experiment: think of one apology you still owe. Write it out with the words “I was wrong” and a concrete offer to fix it. Then deliver it.
8. Train your patience like a skill
Patience gets treated like a fixed trait. You’ve either got it or you haven’t.
Psychologist Sarah Schnitker, who studies patience, has compared it to running. In a 2022 newspaper interview she put it this way: “You want to train, not try, for patience.” The comparison works because patience, like stamina, seems to grow with regular, deliberate practice, and nobody runs a marathon on willpower alone. It breaks down in other ways. There’s no muscle getting bigger, patience depends heavily on context (you might be calm in traffic and furious with your teenager), and setbacks are emotional, not physical. So take it as a way of thinking about practice, not as evidence.
The evidence comes from Schnitker’s own research. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology, she tested a two-week patience training programme. Participants learned to spot their triggers, regulate emotions, empathise with others and meditate. Compared with a control group, they reported more patience, less depression and more positive emotion. It was a small sample of undergraduates, so it shows patience can be changed, not exactly how much. If impatience usually shows up as a flash of irritation, these emotional regulation skills are good training material.
Test it this week: choose one daily irritation, such as a slow queue, a colleague who over-explains or a child who dawdles. Each time it happens, take one slow breath and name the feeling silently (“frustrated”) before you respond.
9. Take the calculated risk you keep postponing
Courage is part of character too, and a lot of us are more cautious than we need to be.
Economist Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago ran an unusual experiment. People stuck on a decision visited a website and flipped a virtual coin, and Levitt followed up two and six months later. His results, published in the Review of Economic Studies in 2021, drew on more than 20,000 coin flips. For big decisions such as quitting a job or ending a relationship, people the coin told to make a change were more likely to do it and reported being happier six months later than those told to stay put. Levitt concluded that people may be too cautious when facing life-changing choices. The participants chose to visit the site, happiness was self-reported, and only a minority actually let the coin sway them, so this applies best to people already on the fence.
“Calculated” still matters. This isn’t permission to quit your job tomorrow. It’s a nudge to stop treating “no change” as automatically safe. If the risk you’re weighing is a bigger reset, this guide on how to start over in life at 30 walks through the practical side.
Your move: write down the change you’ve been circling for months. Underneath, list the worst realistic outcome, how you’d recover from it and one small test you could run in the next 30 days.
10. Write down what went right
Gratitude shows that you notice what other people and circumstances have given you. It’s a character strength, and one of the better studied.
A systematic review and meta-analysis led by Geyze Diniz, published in einstein (São Paulo) in July 2023, included 64 randomised clinical trials of gratitude interventions. People who did them reported more gratitude, better mental health and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. Some of the gains were modest. In one pooled result, nine trials with 1,802 people showed scores 5.7% higher on a 1-to-7 gratitude scale. The authors also judged most of the included studies to be at high risk of bias, so the size of the benefit is uncertain even if the direction looks consistent.
Gratitude builds character only when it’s specific. “I’m grateful for my family” fades fast. “My sister drove forty minutes to drop off soup when I was sick” sticks, and it reminds you who you rely on.
Before bed tonight, write three specific things that went right today and, for each one, who or what made it possible.
11. Say thank you out loud, and be specific
Feeling grateful is private. Expressing it is a choice, and many of us skip it because it feels awkward.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, then both at the University of Chicago, looked at that awkwardness in a study published in Psychological Science in June 2018. Participants wrote gratitude letters to people who had affected their lives, then predicted how the recipients would feel. The writers underestimated how surprised and how positive recipients would feel, and overestimated how awkward the letters would make them. Writers also worried about finding the right words. Recipients mostly responded to the warmth.
So the barrier is mostly in your head. Nobody is grading your phrasing. What lands is the detail: what the person did, and what difference it made.
Next time, do this: send one message this week to someone who helped you, even years ago. Name exactly what they did and what it changed for you. Two or three sentences is plenty.
12. Hold your opinions a little more loosely
People with strong character aren’t the ones who are always sure. They’re often the ones who can change their minds.
Mark Leary, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University who studies humility, described intellectual humility in a May 2025 interview as recognising that what you believe may not be certain or true. He added that admitting this can sting at first but opens up a lot of room to learn. His earlier work (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2017) linked intellectual humility with being better at judging the quality of evidence. A newer study hints that it rubs off on others. In a February 2026 paper in Developmental Psychology, Tenelle Porter, Leary and Andrei Cimpian found that students showed more interest in a class when the teacher modelled intellectual humility, admitting confusion and mistakes, than when the teacher simply told students to be humble. Their longitudinal data linked teachers’ modelling to students’ later grades, through students’ own willingness to admit what they didn’t know. That part is correlational.
This is also where prejudice gets loosened. Most assumptions about people survive because we never test them. Curiosity is the antidote, and these ways to stay curious as an adult make a good companion.
Here’s a simple way in: once a day, when you notice a firm opinion forming about a person or an issue, ask yourself, “What would change my mind?” If you can’t think of anything, that’s worth knowing.
13. Ask people what they think instead of guessing
“Put yourself in their shoes” is classic empathy advice. It turns out to be weaker than it sounds.
Tal Eyal (Ben-Gurion University), Mary Steffel (Northeastern University) and Nicholas Epley ran 25 experiments, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018. They tested whether instructing people to imagine someone else’s perspective helped them read emotions from faces, tell fake smiles from real ones, spot lies or predict a spouse’s preferences. Most people expected it to help. It didn’t consistently improve accuracy, and if anything it made people slightly less accurate while sometimes making them more confident. What did work was “perspective getting”: actually talking to the other person and asking.
Imagining someone’s feelings still has value. It can make you kinder and less self-centred. It just isn’t a reliable way to know what they think. The tasks here were lab exercises, but the lesson carries over easily to everyday life. These tips on having a good conversation help turn the asking into a real exchange.
Give it a go: the next time you catch yourself thinking “she must be annoyed with me,” replace the guess with a question: “I’ve been wondering if that comment bothered you. Did it?”
14. Speak up when something is wrong
Staying quiet feels safe. Sometimes it’s the most expensive choice in the room.
Boeing shows what happens when speaking up feels risky. After two 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 people, the US Federal Aviation Administration appointed a 24-member expert panel to review the company’s safety culture. Its report, published in February 2024, drew on more than 250 interviews and over 4,000 pages of documents. The panel found a disconnect between senior management and other employees on safety culture. It also found that employees hesitated to report safety concerns for fear of retaliation, even though Boeing had launched a “Speak Up” programme in 2019. The report listed 27 findings and 53 recommendations.
This is one organisation, and much of the problem was structural, so it doesn’t prove anything about individual courage on its own. What it does show is that a policy inviting people to raise concerns isn’t enough. Somebody still has to be willing to say the uncomfortable sentence, and somebody has to listen without punishing them.
A quick experiment: keep a ready-made opening line for these moments, such as “I might be missing something, but I’m worried about X because Y.” Having the words ready makes it much easier to say them when it counts.
15. Ask for honest feedback, and give it too
You can’t see your own blind spots, by definition. Other people can, and they’re usually keeping quiet.
Nicole Abi-Esber, then at Harvard Business School, and colleagues published five experiments with 1,984 participants in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in March 2022. In a field study, only 2.6% of people told a research assistant about a visible smudge on her face. Across the experiments, people consistently underestimated how much others wanted constructive feedback, and the gap was biggest when the feedback mattered most, such as a habit of interrupting or a mistake in a report. A simple prompt helped: asking givers to imagine whether they’d want the feedback if they were in the other person’s position.
So two things are true at once. The people around you probably have useful feedback for you and aren’t offering it. And you probably have useful feedback for them that you’re keeping to yourself.
So ask one person you trust, “What’s one thing I do that gets in my own way?” Thank them, whatever they say. Then, this week, give one piece of kind, specific feedback you’ve been holding back.
16. Listen first if you usually talk first
Leadership and character aren’t only about speaking up. If you usually fill the silence, restraint is the stretch.
Good listening changes the other person, and here’s the chain. A study by Guy Itzchakov, Netta Weinstein, Mark Leary and colleagues, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in February 2024, ran four experiments on disagreements. When listeners showed high-quality listening (attention, understanding and good intentions), speakers felt more comfortable and connected. That made them less defensive about their own views, and their attitudes became less extreme. Nobody tried to persuade them. Being listened to was enough to soften their positions. The experiments involved short conversations, so how long the effect lasts is still an open question.
When you’re busy preparing your reply, the other person feels it, gets defensive and digs in. When you actually listen, the conversation has room to move. That’s especially handy when someone is already heated, as these tips on dealing with people who are angry at you explain.
In your next disagreement, try summarising the other person’s view in your own words and asking, “Have I got that right?” before you give your own.
17. Ask for help before you’re drowning
Many people treat asking for help as weakness. Being able to say clearly what you need is closer to the opposite.
Xuan Zhao (now at Stanford) and Nicholas Epley tested how accurate our fears are. In six experiments with more than 2,000 participants, published in Psychological Science in September 2022, people asking for help underestimated how willing others would be to help and how good helpers would feel afterwards. They also overestimated how inconvenienced helpers would feel. In one experiment, people in a public park asked strangers to take their photo, and the strangers were consistently more willing than the askers expected. The samples were from the United States, and the authors note cultural differences may matter.
Epley has said these findings changed his own behaviour, and he now asks for help without hesitating. That’s a lesson in humility as well as efficiency.
Start small: make one clear, specific request this week that you’d normally avoid. “Could you take over the school run on Thursdays this month?” works better than a general “I could use more help.”
18. Track your progress where you can see it
Goals give character something to push against. They also tend to drift unless you check on them.
Monitoring helps for a fairly simple reason: a record turns a vague feeling (“I think I’m doing okay”) into evidence you can’t argue with, and evidence shows you the gap you need to close. Benjamin Harkin of the University of Sheffield and colleagues tested this in a meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin in 2016. Across 138 studies with 19,951 participants, prompting people to monitor their progress made them monitor more often and made them more likely to reach their goals. The average effect on reaching goals was small to medium. Monitoring worked better when progress was physically recorded or reported to someone else. Most of the studies looked at health goals such as diet and weight.
So the order matters: record, look at the gap, adjust, repeat. If your main obstacle is starting at all, these procrastination hacks cover that side.
Choose one goal tied to the strengths you picked in step 1, track it on paper or a calendar you see every day, and tell one person how it’s going every Friday.
19. Point out other people’s strengths
Strong character isn’t only private. It shows in how you treat people whose success doesn’t directly benefit you.
Gallup, working with the recognition software company Workhuman, tracked nearly 3,500 US employees from 2022 to 2024 and reported the results in September 2024. Employees who received high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to have left their jobs two years later. Yet only 22% of employees said they got the right amount of recognition for their work, the same share as in 2022. Workhuman sells recognition tools, and the data show an association, not proof that praise alone keeps people in their jobs. Still, the gap between how much recognition people want and how much they get is striking.
You don’t need to be anyone’s manager to close some of that gap. Specific, honest praise costs nothing. If you do lead a team, these qualities of a good boss build on the same idea.
Once this week, tell someone what you noticed them doing well and why it mattered: “The way you handled that client’s questions calmed the whole meeting down.”
20. Face hard problems early instead of avoiding them
Avoidance is sneaky. It feels like coping, right up until the problem doubles.
The NHS Talking Therapies service in Leeds (Leeds Mental Wellbeing Service) explains the trap in guidance updated in February 2026. Avoiding things that make you anxious brings relief in the moment. Over time, though, avoidance keeps the anxiety going and can lower your confidence and self-esteem. The mechanism is straightforward. Each time you dodge the hard thing, you never get to learn that you could have coped, so it looks even scarier next time.
Say you’ve been ignoring an email from your landlord for a week because you suspect it’s bad news. Every day it sits there, it takes up more space in your head. Opening it might bring bad news, but at least it’s news you can act on. If avoidance is a pattern for you, these strategies on how to stop procrastinating offer more ways in. And if anxiety is stopping you from functioning day to day, it’s worth talking to your GP or a therapist.
Next time you notice yourself steering around something, pick the smallest possible step toward it and do it within 24 hours. Open the email. Book the appointment. Send the first line.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. You’ll tell a white lie, skip the habit, snap at someone, avoid the conversation. That’s normal, and it doesn’t erase your progress.
Two findings are worth keeping in your back pocket. First, a single miss is less damaging than it feels. Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London followed 96 volunteers building a daily habit over 12 weeks, in a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2010. Missing one opportunity didn’t materially affect habit formation. The team noted, though, that people who were very inconsistent didn’t form habits, so the aim is to get back on track quickly, not to treat misses as free.
Second, being kind to yourself after a mistake seems to make you more likely to fix it, not less. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley ran four experiments, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2012. Students who were guided to respond to a recent wrongdoing with self-compassion were more motivated to make amends and avoid repeating it. After failing a difficult test, self-compassionate students spent longer studying for the next one. These were short lab studies with university students, but they push back against the idea that harsh self-criticism keeps you honest. If your inner voice tends to turn cruel after a mistake, this guide on how to stop hating yourself may help.
When it happens, try three steps. Name what you did, plainly, without dressing it up. Repair what you can, using the apology structure from step 7. Then restart at the very next opportunity, not next Monday.
Conclusion
Character isn’t a verdict someone hands you. It’s built from small, repeated decisions: the honest answer, the full apology, the extra second of patience, the question asked instead of the assumption made.
You don’t have to do all twenty steps. Pick the two strengths from step 1, choose the steps that support them, and give them a couple of months. Habits take longer than you think, and so does becoming someone you trust.
Want more practical, research-backed ideas for growing in the right direction? Browse our self-improvement articles and pick your next small experiment.
