1042: Self-Improvement through Personality Change with Olga Khazan


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Mar 19 2025 38 mins   56 2 0

Olga Khazan discusses the surprising findings on how personality change can be possible and beneficial. 


— YOU’LL LEARN — 

1) The problem with “authenticity” 

2) The surprisingly simple secret to changing your personality 

3) The simple interventions that make us less neurotic 


Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1042 for clickable versions of the links below. 


— ABOUT OLGA — 

Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vox, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing. She lives with her husband and son in Northern Virginia. 

• Book: Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change 

• Substack: OlgaKhazan.substack.com 

• Writer Profile: Olga Khazan, The Atlantic 


— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW — 

• App: TapeACall 

• Website: PersonalityAssessor.com 

• Term: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)  

• Course: 8-week MBSR courses 

• Study: “Is Personality Fixed? Personality Changes as Much as ‘Variable’ Economic Factors and More Strongly Predicts Changes to Life Satisfaction” by Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, and Nattavudh Powdthavee 

• Researcher: Nathan Hudson 

• Author: Jon Kabat-Zinn 

• Book: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair 

• Book: The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are by Michael Slepian 


— THANK YOU SPONSORS! — 

Earth Breeze. See all that BambooHR can do at bamboohr.com/freedemo 

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