I caught up this week with a longtime friend, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, an organizational psychologist whose newest book, “Personality Isn’t Permanent” will be appearing in June.
Hardy is young — a thirty-something husband and the father of five. He and his wife Lauren adopted three children (with great difficulty) from the foster system, and also have year-old twins. He’s very accomplished as a scholar, speaker, organizational psychologist and author, but is surprisingly low-key in conversation.
In the five or so years I’ve known him we’ve had fascinating exchanges on a number of topics: habits, self-discipline, communication — and most recently, personality.
Unlike traditional experts, Hardy maintains our personalities are not fixed. He maintains and demonstrates through research that our lifestyles, preferences, attitudes and character traits are surprisingly fluid. At every stage, our personalities are the result of the decisions and pivotal experiences along with non-decisions and habits we accumulate on the way.
