Is It Possible to Change Our Personality?
- Jul 2
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 5
An AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™ Perspective
Principal Consultant and Creator, AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™
I'm frequently asked questions about emotional wellness and how we can achieve it. Recently, someone asked me a provocative question: "Is it possible to change our personality?”
My first thought was a television program that began airing during the early 2000s called Extreme Makeover. The reality TV series focused on people undergoing plastic surgery, following intensive exercise regimens, and changing their hairstyles and wardrobes to transform their appearance and presentation. In other words, it changed how they looked—not necessarily who they were.
That memory led me to wonder: Is it possible to give our personality an "extreme makeover”?
The mechanism I've relied upon for four decades in helping people pursue meaningful personal and professional change through the greatest career has been psychotherapy. Unlike counseling, which is often associated with more acute, immediate concerns, psychotherapy typically addresses longstanding patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Over time, those patterns can change—and with them, aspects of our personality.
If we define personality as "the totality of an individual's behavioral and emotional characteristics" (Merriam-Webster), it becomes reasonable to ask whether personality itself can change. Research increasingly suggests that it can. Among the most effective approaches is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Supported by decades of empirical research, CBT teaches us that our thoughts profoundly influence our feelings and actions—our emotions and behavior. As our patterns of thinking change, so too can the way we experience ourselves and interact with the world. In many respects, that's personality change.
Today, we have something previous generations never had: the opportunity to combine these evidence-based principles with artificial intelligence through AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™—the ethical and responsible interface between the cognitive abilities of artificial intelligence and the depth, uniqueness, and complexity of human emotion.
Artificial intelligence can provide accessible evidence-based techniques, strategies, tools, and support to promote emotional well-being. But AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™ goes a step further. It recognizes something profoundly important: authentic, face-to-face human presence remains irreplaceable—and essential—for emotional wellness.
There’s a growing body of evidence-based knowledge that artificial intelligence can make easily accessible. It can inform us, coach us, encourage us, and help us practice new ways of thinking.
Yet information alone rarely transforms a life.
Lasting change most often occurs within our relationships. It comes through empathy, warmth, genuineness, compassion, trust, intimacy, nonverbal communication, shared experiences, accountability, forgiveness, hope, psychological safety, and the simple but profound experience of feeling deeply understood by another human being. Those qualities remain far beyond the reach of technology.
AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™ reflects the future of emotional wellness. Artificial intelligence can help us learn new ways of thinking—but it's authentic human presence that can help us change our personalities.
What do you think about this?