G&F Book Club: Chapter 4
Updated: Jan 24, 2022
G&F's book club covered Personality Isn't Permanent by Benjamin Hardy, PhD, in our 4th meeting. The book suggestion and discussion were led by Suzie.
Why Personality Isn't Permanent?
Personality Isn’t Permanent is about rethinking our past and using goals to fashion our present. The premise of the book is that behavior is driven by past experiences and past trauma and our view of the past can set the tone for our personality. In essence, the author is saying that if you think you can’t do it, then you can’t, particularly if you give a reason why you can’t (known as a self-limiting belief). Benjamin Hardy, PhD, describes self-limiting beliefs and possible reasons why we have them as well as insightful information on how to change and rewrite our thinking. Benjamin shares many stories of people who overcame great obstacles to completely change the direction of their lives.
"The only thing 'special' about those who transform themselves and their lives is their view of their own future. They refuse to be defined by the past. They see something different and more meaningful and they never stop fueling that vision." - Benjamin Hardy, PhD
This book talks about five myths of personality that keep you from being your best self:
You can categorize personality into “types.”
Your personality is ingrained and unchangeable.
What happened to you in the past determines your personality.
You need to discover your personality.
Your personality test results describe who you really are.
The Takeaways
As a group we found the book to be empowering and it left us with the feeling that we are capable of making our idea of our future self a reality. The book helps uncover why these self limiting beliefs are there in the first place and how we can break free from them so that we can live our fullest and most potential lives. It is never too late to transform ourselves.
Some of the key takeaways included:
Your personality isn’t set in stone.
You don’t discover the future, you create it.
You create the future from the future, not the past.
How you interpret your past trauma determines your current behaviors
How you see yourself determines how you act and the results you get.
Your environment shapes your behaviors.
We felt that the book dealt heavily with positive habit formation. It went into a lot of depth discussing the merits of going to sleep and waking up early, meditation, fasting, journaling, and visualization of your future and how this helps to begin to change the day-to-day of our lives. Hardy provided useful techniques and exercises throughout the book to help guide us through the process. This book covered all aspects of life from personal to professional and showed how changing one's self-limiting beliefs can change not just one’s outlook, but also their entire life.
G&F Book Club: Chapter 5
The next book we will be reading will be The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle. Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? These are both questions that we hope to dive into in our discussions, which will be led by Corey.