Dr. Benjamin Hardy; Personality Isn’t Permanent
Though he is a kind, lovable man about whom nobody has a bad word to say, Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s newest book, Personality Isn’t Permanent, is making a lot of people very angry.
Speaking to Steve Sims for The Art of Making Things Happen podcast, Dr. Hardy explains what all the controversy is about. “When I was getting my PhD in organizational psychology, one of the things that surprised me was when I learned all of my professors over and over would tell me that type-based personality tests like the Myers-Briggs, Enneagram test, all of those are essentially junk science. And that surprised me because they were such popular tests… It became really obvious to me that putting people into categories and labels like that is a really inaccurate way of viewing people,” says Dr. Hardy.
Unfortunately, this insight significantly negates a lot of popular corporate practices, making it a very inconvenient truth. Yet truth it is. Dr. Hardy explains, “I can say definitively that those types of personality tests are junk because no real scientists or psychologists would use those for hiring. They don’t predict success. They’re very ineffective ways for hiring or predicting performance… If you’re wanting to predict performance, then giving people a type-based categorical test that gives people a label has gotta be the stupidest way to hire a person.”
But it’s not just corporate human resources and hiring managers that find it difficult to swallow the findings of Dr. Hardy’s new book. It’s also challenging for individuals, especially those who like to label themselves and hold personality test results as a sacred part of their identity.
Yet, explains Dr. Hardy, over-identifying with personality tests can be seriously harmful. He says, “Context is a lot more important than content when it comes to psychology. Those tests just overly simplify people, they put them into a category, but then when you take a label on, it actually becomes a part of your identity… Your identity shapes your behavior and your behavior over time becomes your personality. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy… Labels create tunnel vision and they ultimately stop you from imagining a future self that’s different than who you are today.”
The implications of this are significant to our growth. “Most people honestly think that who they are right now is who they’re always going to be. Even if they can look back to the past and say, ‘hell no, I’m not the same guy I was 10 years ago.’ Because for some reason we just think that who we are right now [is] who we’re always going to be. It really stunts our potential for the future,” Dr. Hardy explains.
While it may be a challenge to have released such an iconoclastic book during a pandemic, Dr. Hardy’s response to this difficult situation is a lesson to us all about how to respond to unpredictable obstacles. He says, “Life is basically about the meaning you give to things. It’s not about the things that happen. It’s about the meaning you give… So I’m choosing to believe that [this] all happened perfect for me and that I can ultimately use this to move my career forward.”
In addition to choosing to assign events a meaning that will serve you instead of hurt you, Hardy offers one more key takeaway for listeners. He says, “Don’t worry so much about how you currently see yourself because who you are in the present is very temporary… The future that you’re seeking is actually more important than where you’re at right now… Rather than focusing on who you are right now, you want to really focus on where you want to be in the future.”
To learn more about Dr. Benjamin Hardy:
Website https://benjaminhardy.com/
Podcast: The Art of Making Things Happen
