This roundtable on the third personality podast, Building Character, traversed quite complex and nuanced terrain: the scientific basis for morality beyond the effects of culture and politics; the difficulties of navigating moral disagreement; the problem of in-groups and out-groups; the imperative to grow one's moral thinking; how good character bestows high status and respect, but that status can also be accrued via pseudo-esteem for bad moral characters; the problem of lies and lying becomeing normalised, even respected; the important insight that evolution is not about flourishing or moral good, but about passing on genes; and that moral wisdom is an emegent possibility of our success as a species.

The podcast Building Personality begins with a distinction between personality and character: the former you are born with, and the latter you build. Character is a a moral stance to the world and good character seeks flourishing for self and others. Character is examined through the lenses of moral realism and evolutionary adaptation. I then provide examples of character development starting with recalibrating our extreme personality traits. There is also a discussion of the Dark Triad personality disorders and how they are so shocking given our moral wiring. I end on the observation that cultivating relationships is the key not only to a viable morality, but a life of satisfaction and wellbeing.

In this Music, Creativity and Mental Health roundtable we discuss the podcast with singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Max Frost. THat conversation was full of Max's deep reflections and insights and this prompted an equally deep and significant discussion with my friends from Nettwerk Music. Topics covered included: the music industry as a 'rat-race' in which the prospect of the loss of status is worse than never attaining it; the 'cycle of torture' that increasing one's audience can subject artists to; managing one's ego, especially managing social media comparison; that although social media has amped up concern with metrics, this has always been there in the industry; that there are 'many doors to the room of creativity'; the chaos of overwhelming commoditisation of music; and the seductive and perverting nature of fame.

In this roundtable discussion of Personality & Developing Character Part2: Can You Change Your Personality?, we explored a wide range of issues: How ageing and declining neuroplasticity may make personality recalibration more difficult; how we really need to be motivated for change to be possible; how becoming more comfortable with who we are allows us to better curate our environment; how it is harder for younger people to change due to lack of experience; how humility is a part of self-acceptance; how understanding personality's hereditary nature may help us be less prone to the fundmental attribution error; do certain personality profiles make it harder to garner self-insight?; ageing and the dropping away of filters to the real self; how an introvert may learn to do public speaking by making it a more introverted style; and how self acceptance needs to be paired with caring for others.

This podcast, Can You Change Your Personality, is part 2 of a series on personality and the building of character. It begins with a brief summary of what personality is and then focuses on the deeply debated question of whether you can substantially change your personality. Recent research suggests by mindfully practising alternative approaches you can somewhat recalibrate the expression of your underlying personality. It is not wholesale change. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly helpful. Typically, we seek to chang personality where our natural preferences lead to trouble, especially where our egocentric bias leads us astray. Moderating these mismatches between personality and the world is a great idea. This then leads to an introduction to the idea that character is what results from this kind of intentional , mindful practice. An analogy is made with computing: that personality is akin to the computer’s operating system and recalibration is like software patch applied to fix glitches. Finally, I discuss how this recalibration can have deep moral implications, a topic I’ll take up in the third podcast.

In this Music, Wellbeing & Mental Health podcast I talk with singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Max Frost. We had a wonderful conversation and we touched on many topics including: the role of anxiety in the creative process; learning to drop expectations that ‘this matters’ and learning not to care so much; technology and the evolution of art, especially the speed of music production; the myth of the tortured artist; tthe relationship between great art and psychological pain and suffering; the relationship between the imposter syndrome and career success; being transported by music as a meditative-like experience; the unconscious, non-literal and poetic elements of creative production; the mystery of why and how music effects human beings so powerfully. All in all, it was a great conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

This roundtable discussion of the podcast 'Personality and Developing Character Part 1' was very lively and filled with insights from the participants:. Topics discussed included: the surprising virtue of being average on personality dimensions; the understanding of a wider range of people when you are centrally located on the traits; some fantastic examples of the egocentric basa!; a live personality assesmmet of one of the participants; the importance of reciprocal altruism in business deals; how an understanding of the Big 5 can really help us better navigate relationships and not take things quite so personally; how understanding the Big 5 breeds tolerance and empathy. All in all a fantastic discussion!

This is the first in a podcast series on personality and the building of character. I’ve called it ‘Being the Best You Can Be’ because, in my opinion, this is the best way to fulfill our most important of desires: to maximise wellbeing for ourselves and for those around us.
An important way to maximise wellbeing is to understand one’s own personality and to have the skills to recalibrate it to function more wisely in everyday life. This is what I mean by the development of character.
1. This first podcast will address the questions: ‘What is personality?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’
2. Podcast 2 will suggest practical strategies for adaptive change. This naturally raises the highly debated and important question of whether you can change personality, including how we can recalibrate our natural preferences when needed.
3. Podcast three will then apply all this to the development of character and a practical moral outlook.
In the first podcast describe the general features of personality:
• that it is a preference system and thus motivates us emotionally
• that this deep motivational system is largely unconscious, that is before we reflect on it consciously, we are already predisposed to situations in predictable ways
• that personality it is crucial to understand as it influences everything we do and knowledge of that is of utmost importance in living a happy and successful life
• that personality is largely genetic and for most people doesn’t change much across the lifespan, so accepting, working with it, it is absolutely necessary
• that each dimension of personality is distributed on bell curves and the further we are apart from each other on each dimension, the harder it is to understand that person
• that this is a part of the egocentric bias, whereby we project our worldview onto others and become upset when they are not like us… but they of course do the same towards us!
• that re-calibration is the answer when we find ourselves in environments that don’t naturally suit us.
I then give brief summaries of the Big 5 : Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. Finally, we explore a number of combinations of these 5 traits, indicating how they help us ‘cut through’ and understand people and their behaviour more clearly.