It Is Not Your Personality, It Is a Pattern
“I’m just direct.”
I’ve heard some version of that sentence from more leaders than I can count (including myself!). Sometimes it comes with a shrug. Sometimes with a little pride. It’s usually offered as an explanation, and it’s almost always offered as a closed door.
This is who I am. People can adjust.
The Leader Who Was “Just Direct”
I worked with a leader who said it often. She was sharp, fast, and right more often than not. She also had a team that had quietly stopped telling her the truth. Not in a dramatic way. In the small ways that matter. People agreed in meetings and did something else afterward. Bad news arrived late, softened, or through someone else. When she gave feedback, she watched faces close before she was halfway through the second sentence.
She thought she had a team problem. What she had was a delivery problem, and underneath the delivery problem was a nervous system doing exactly what it had learned to do.
Here is what she believed about herself: I’m just direct. I don’t sugarcoat. If people can’t handle honesty, that’s on them.
Here is what was actually true: she was honest at full volume, every time, because somewhere along the way she learned that anything less than full volume didn’t get heard.
That’s not personality. That’s a pattern. And the difference matters more than almost anything else I teach.
When we went underneath it, the story wasn’t complicated. Early in her life, and again early in her career, the rooms she was in didn’t reward measured honesty. They rewarded whoever was loudest and most certain. If you said something at 70 percent, you got talked over, dismissed, or steamrolled. So her body built a rule: if it’s true and it matters, say it hard. The rule worked. It got her heard. It got her promoted. Unfortunately, it also got her a team that flinched.
Her brain never got the memo that she was now the one with the power in the room. She was still delivering every hard truth like someone fighting to be heard, to people who were already listening.
What the Research Actually Shows
I want to be careful here, because “your personality can change” is the kind of claim that gets overstated. So let me say only what the research actually supports.
For a long time, personality was treated as fixed by early adulthood. Set like plaster. But in 2017, Brent Roberts and his colleagues reviewed more than two hundred studies and found that personality traits measurably shift through intervention, and that the shifts hold on follow-up months later. The trait that moved most was emotional stability, which is close to what I would call regulation. In plain language: the thing you call “just how I am” is more responsive to experience than you were told.
And the brain itself keeps reshaping in response to what we practice. Eleanor Maguire’s well-known studies of London taxi drivers found structural differences in the hippocampus tied to years of navigating the city. A later study found measurable brain changes in ordinary adults after a few months of learning to juggle. None of that is about leadership. I’m not going to pretend it is. But it settles one question clearly: the adult brain is still being shaped by what it repeatedly does. If a pattern was learned, it can be revised.
That last part is the game-changer. If it was learned, it can be “unlearned.”
Revising the Pattern, Not Managing It
This doesn’t happen by deciding to be different. This leader had decided to soften plenty of times, usually right after a meeting went badly. The decision lasted until the next time something was true and mattered, and then the old rule sabotaged her best intentions.
So we didn’t work on her delivery at all. Not at first. Coaching her to lower her volume would have handed her a script, and a script is exactly what falls apart when something is true and matters. Her harshness wasn’t a bad habit. It was a reenactment. Every time she delivered a hard truth at full force, she was back in the rooms where full force was the only thing that worked.
What her brain needed wasn’t a better technique. It needed an experience it had never had: being seen and heard without having to fight for it.
So that’s where we went. We looked for the moments, the specific ones, when she needed someone to hear her and no one did. When she said it once, at normal volume, and it went nowhere. When getting loud was the only thing that made anyone turn around. She had never thought of those moments as losses. She thought of them as training.
They were losses. Somewhere in there was a younger version of her who needed to be cared for and wasn’t, and who solved that problem the only way available to her. We let her grieve that. Not analyze it. Grieve it. The sadness and the anger that had been converted into volume for years finally got to be sadness and anger.
And then I did the thing that no book can do for you. I offered her the care she hadn’t gotten. I listened. I stayed. I heard her at 70 percent, at 50 percent, at a whisper, and I didn’t need her to be louder or more certain for me to take her seriously.
Here’s what I think happened, and it’s what Bruce Ecker’s work on memory reconsolidation would predict. An old emotional learning doesn’t update because you argue with it. It updates when it’s active, when the old fear is actually in the room, and it meets an experience that directly contradicts what it expects. Her old rule said: you will not be heard unless you fight. In our work, the rule was awake, and she was heard without fighting. Not once. Over and over, until her nervous system stopped bracing for the old ending. The memory got revised. What it says now is closer to this: I can ask for what I need, and I can receive it.
Then something happened that she didn’t plan. A direct report missed something important, and she told him. Clearly. Without the edge. She didn’t decide to hold back. She told me afterward that there was simply nothing to hold back. The volume wasn’t there because the fight wasn’t there. He asked a question. Then another. They worked the problem together, which had never once happened after one of her full-force conversations. Everything she said landed. It just didn’t land as a blow.
That’s the difference between managing a pattern and revising it. She wasn’t practicing being softer. She no longer needed to be loud.
If You’re the One Who Goes Quiet
I’ll say one more thing, because half of you reading this are not the direct one. You’re the one who says, “I’m just not confrontational.” Same sentence, opposite pattern, same root. Somewhere you learned that saying the hard thing cost too much, that being honest got you punished or abandoned, so your body built a rule to hold it. Underneath your silence is the same unmet need: to be heard without it costing you the relationship. The work is the same. Not a script for speaking up. An experience of speaking and being received.
What to Practice This Week
I can’t give you the full experience in a newsletter. Reconsolidation needs another person. But you can start the first step, and you can borrow the second.
First, find one memory. A time you needed to be heard and weren’t. The moment you learned that you had to get loud, or the moment you learned to go quiet. Don’t rush past it. Let yourself feel what it cost, and let it be a loss instead of a lesson.
Then take it to someone. Not a colleague, and not the person you’re in conflict with. Someone who doesn’t need you to be okay. Tell them the memory at normal volume. No case-building, no performance. And then let them respond.
Notice what it’s like to be heard without raising your voice, or without having to swallow it. That is the experience your nervous system has been waiting for, and it can’t be read. It has to be received.
This is the kind of work we do in my six week cohorts. We don’t hand you communication scripts. We find the pattern underneath the sentence you’ve been calling your personality, trace it back to the need that was never met, grieve what it cost you, and give your nervous system the experience of being cared for well enough that the old rule finally lets go. The goal isn’t to become someone else. It’s to stop spending so much energy defending a rule that stopped serving you years ago.
If you’ve read this far and a sentence came to mind, “I’m just direct” or “I’m just not confrontational” or some version that’s yours, I’d love to hear it. Reply to this email and tell me. And if you want to find out what’s underneath it, you can reach me at julia@braverestoration.org or visit braverestoration.org to learn about the next cohort.
Sources
- Brent W. Roberts, Jing Luo, Daniel A. Briley, Philip I. Chow, Rong Su, and Patrick L. Hill, “A Systematic Review of Personality Trait Change Through Intervention,” Psychological Bulletin, 2017. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Eleanor A. Maguire et al., “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000. doi.org
- Bogdan Draganski et al., “Changes in grey matter induced by training,” Nature, 2004. doi.org
- Bruce Ecker, Robin Ticic, and Laurel Hulley, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Memory Reconsolidation and the Psychotherapy of Transformational Change. coherencetherapy.org