TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Don't Like Your Personality? So Change It.
Date: 03/01/25 Length: 00:40:30
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings, Happy Warriors, and welcome to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show, where I your rabbi, reveal how the world really works. Thanks for being part of the show, and thanks for all you do in promoting the show and getting the word around. Much appreciated, because this is the show in which I remind you that the more that things change, the more we need to depend on those things that never change. And one of the things that never changes is that there are always two different incompatible ways of looking at the human being. One of them is that the human being is unique in all of creation, created by a a an all powerful and loving God in His image and being the only creature on the planet that is God like in the sense that this creature can grow and develop powers and that each one of them is unique. That's one view of the human being. The other one is that, essentially, we are the current iteration of a long line of evolution, a long line of a process of natural selection that in an unaided, materialistic way, transformed primitive protoplasm into ballerinas and bookkeepers. And this viewpoint is one that is held almost without exception, by certainly the overwhelming majority of therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists. And so these two views are incompatible. There is no way to reconcile them either. You and I are the results of a God who created us in His image and put us here, or we are here as the result of a long, lengthy process of an aided materialistic evolution. We are, in essence, part of a continuum that has single cell amoebas at one end and truck drivers at the other. And along the way are seals and Dobermans and racehorses and crocodiles and armadillos and warthogs, and here we are. That is the only other approach. And now the important thing to understand is, as I say, that if you step inside the academic system, if you step inside the world that universities have created over the last 80 years. Shall we say, certainly 60 and maybe more, you will be seeing only the materialistic view of the human being the other is not only absent, but it is actively banished. And this is something that we do have to understand, because when we read in the papers, or we see on a video, or we see on television, somebody saying scientists say, or studies reveal, or experts tell us, then you have to know that in almost all those cases, I say almost just not A sound dogmatic, but I'm not aware of exceptions. The perspective of human beings is that we are literally nothing but a bunch of common chemicals, cunningly assembled by chance, by natural selection, and as a result of that, we are able to compose music and start businesses and build cathedrals and send rocket ships to the moon. Now you have to know the difference. You know, for instance, if you've got some eggs in front of you and you think they're hard boiled eggs, but. In reality, they are totally uncooked, raw eggs. You know, I can think of several ways in which you're going to make a mess. You've kind of got to know the reality of what you're dealing with, and so you may be among those who receive advice, but advice that is based on human beings being materialistic collections of chemicals, rather than unique creatures touched by the finger of God. And as a result, there will be a mess, there will be a mistake, and I want to give you an example. But first of all, I want to thank those of you who have already become members of our wonderful happy warrior community. You really are adding to the vitality of the community. The level of the conversation and the chat on the site is terrific both Susan, I enjoy very much being part of that conversation, and so thank you very much indeed. And for those of you who are members, as you know, there will be a special podcast available only for Happy Warrior community members, and this week, it's called a few funny facts about laughter. And again, these are things I haven't presented on the general podcast, but they will be and are there specifically for members. So if you're not yet, please join us at Rabbi Daniel lapin.com that's right, you go to the website, Rabbi Daniel lapin.com and you join us. And secondly, what something? Okay, some of you already know that I coach a small number of people on an ongoing basis. I mean, I don't mean ongoing. I like it very much when people have achieved the goals that they wanted to achieve, and stop on it. You know, I'm not a therapist that tries to work with people for years and years and years. I try and make sure that goals are achieved within months, not years, and that means that new slots open up, and that's how it works. But a number of people over the last year or two have been asking about, could they learn to become coaches in the five act 5f technique? And indeed, yes, we do have a program for that. And there is a free session coming up very soon that if you'd like to participate, just go to the website, we happy warriors.com forward slash 5f coaching, that's F as in finance, family, faith, fitness and friendship. So you got a we happy warriors.com forward slash five number 5f coaching, and you'll be able to get more information on exactly how you might be able to create a coaching business yourself that is accredited in our 5f system based on the book the holistic you. So, okay, that's all the housekeeping business for today. And I want to now give you an example of ways in which you or someone you know, somebody you love, might have been misled simply because the person whose advice they were seeking sees human beings as materialistic collections of chemicals, you know, smarter than some animals, slower than others, with less hair than others in more hair than some, basically just, you know, in other words, I don't know if any of you have seen it. I haven't been there for a couple of years, but when I was last at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, in the primate enclosure, where they had the gorillas and the baboons and the chimpanzees, they had a famous poster on the wall that shows it's got about five or six little diagrams, illustrations. And the first one is a baboon loping along the ground, and the next one, the bamboo is sort of half up, and the third one, the bamboo is almost on his feet. And the fifth one, the bamboo is upright, and the sixth one is a fully recognizable human being. And the idea is that to show all the impressionable kids at the zoo how it is that people are the result of baboons. Now I'm not going to talk about
Daniel Lapin 9:59
natural selection. Question. Now I'm not going to be talking about the emergence of life from inorganic material, but for the moment, I merely want to present to you these two viewpoints of human beings. Either human beings are the apex of creation, unique, unique creatures touched by the finger of God. Alternatively, we're just sophisticated primates. And you know, I'm not going to waste any of your time by talking about which one is right and which one is wrong, because I think you're perfectly capable of doing that entirely on your own, and all you have to do is just bear them both in mind and then test them in your interactions with people as you go through the normal day to day life you live. And you just ask yourself, as you see people doing things, just one example, by the way, and I'll be talking about that in the bonus program for happy warrior. Members of the community think of laughter. You know, why? Why do you see laughter on the faces of people, but not on the faces of goldfish or, you know, why don't crocodiles laugh? Why don't elephants laugh? And you know, talk about looking at that and and that suggests something, in other words, ways in which human beings do not appear to merely be another example of animal life. So those are things you know. You look at your study and and it makes a very big difference, because the judgments you make in trying to understand other people, whether it's socially or romantically or financially, in terms of transactions, all the decisions you make, and you make these decisions very quickly and intuitively, because in the course of a conversation or a transaction or a negotiation, you don't really have time to sit and calculate your response. Your response is drawn organically from the state the mental state you have been in regarding the fundamental nature of human beings. And so if you're absolutely sure that human beings are the result of evolutionary biology, then you're likely to make one kind of decision or one kind of reaction. If you say to yourself, no human beings are spiritual creatures wrapped up in a body touched by the finger of God, and then you'll make another intuitive one. And I can tell you that you will discover for yourself. I'm not going to give you any answers. You've got to figure this out for yourself on the basis of your own experience, but you will eventually come to see which is more correct and which more accurately accounts for the reality in which we all live. And one example of where this so often goes badly is when psychologists talk about our in built traits. And this, this is something that became it became very popular in the 21st century, from about roughly 2000 all the way to the present in in I'm recording this in 2025 but particularly over the last 10 years, you hear about it more and more and more as more and more psychologists and therapists pick up on This as as the as the latest sloganeering of their professions. And what is this about? I'm going to tell you now exactly what the belief system is. There are five personality traits. Psychologists sometimes call it FFM, the five factor model, and it's widely accepted as a psychological framework that defines five broad dimensions of personality. And the mnemonic is usually given as ocean. Here are the five, openness, conscientiousness, that's C, extraversion is E, agreeableness is a, and neuroticism is N Okay. So just to give you a quick insight, and again, just a reminder, I believe this to be utterly and completely nonsensical, but I'm first of all explaining what the problem is. So let's, let's identify and clarify what these five personality traits are openness, that refers to somebody's tendency to be curious and open to new experiences, and and being you know, and being creative and curious and and have wide interests. That sort of openness. And that's not me defining it. That's how the profession of psychology defines it. Conscientiousness, that pretty much as it sounds, right? It's someone's tendency to be well organized and have good time management and be responsible and hard working and dependable. Okay, that's conscientiousness, extraversion. What's extraversion? Ocean, right? O, C, E, A, N, O, C, E is extroversion. It's if somebody is more of an extrovert than an introvert. They seek outside experiences for social stimulation. They like meeting new people. They're outgoing, they're talkative, they have a sense of humor. They like being around other people, right? Extroversion. Now, while I'm talking this, I know you're saying to yourself, Wait a sec, what's Lapin going on about here? This sounds pretty right to me, that, yes, I think there are people who are more extrovert than introvert, and so they're high on extroversion. You know, I think they're probably right. I can't wait to see how Lapin is gonna debunk this while Lapin is on his way to debunking that ocean O, C, E, A, agreeableness. Agreeableness is the way, the extent to which you or I would be cooperative and empathetic and easy to get along with, and kind and caring in general. Obviously, women are much more agreeable than men are in general. Yeah, obviously they are the Hillary Clintons of the world and the well, let's leave it at that. And there are our guys who are very agreeable, okay, ocean, O, C, E, A, N, neuroticism. Neuroticism is the extent, or the tendency we have to sort of be overwhelmed by negative emotions, a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress, emotional, easily stressed, feeling depressed, all of those things come under the cattle and these are called the five fundamental traits, or the five big personality traits. And psychologists today almost all universally bind to the idea that you can sort of draw up a chart showing the score that each and every one of us has on each of those five areas. And that is the the idea. Now, let me tell you, fundamentally what's wrong with this. What's wrong with this is that it joins many other aspects of modern psychology and psychiatry, in in removing agency, in helping to persuade us. And again, there are times when each and every one of us is vulnerable. Right on the special bonus program last week, I shared a period of huge vulnerability that my wife and I experienced seven months ago. So yeah, of course, there are times when we're vulnerable, but, but, but by and large, by and large, we retain the awareness of our own agency, and we teach our children that from the youngest age, children, almost intuitively Will when you castigate a child or scold a child for doing something wrong. Very often, they'll point to a sibling and say, he made me do it, or sometimes in a school right point to a friend, they made me do it. And one of the things that wise parents do from day one is Nobody made you do it, you decided to do it because to be cowardly is a completely natural default for people, because fear and cowardice is so much easier than strength and courage and bravery, it takes huge effort to drag oneself up the ladder on the scale of bravery and courage. And so a natural condition is, hey, he made me do it. And so this whole idea of developing a disease to account for all human behavior is hazardous function,
Daniel Lapin 19:46
dispensing with individual agency, you're not to blame for developing an addiction, you know, whatever it is to alcohol or gown. Bling or pornography, whatever it is. And it's not your fault. You're wired for that. You have an addiction disease. That's that's what it is. There was a, I remember when this first started. It was a cover story a Newsweek magazine, maybe 30 years ago, where, guess what? Is very big news item. Men who cheat in their marriage do so because they have a cheating gene hardwired into their sister. Okay, it's not my fault at all. My brain made me do it, honey, you got to understand, I'm not wicked, I'm not a cheat, I'm not treacherous, I'm sick. And as long ago as I think it was two 2000 and no, it wasn't, was 1999 Fortune Magazine did a cover story on sexual misbehavior in corporations and how they sprang up in New Mexico and in Arizona and a few other places. Cure farms, where companies could send executives who'd misbehave sexually to be cured. And, you know, why am I laughing? Because until yesterday, these sorts of things were recognized as we were being you know, I was wrong. I was naughty. I I'm sorry, and, and I have a character defect, which I have to work on repairing. And you know, you say that to a child all the time. If you have a boy who is you have a son who behaves in a in a cowardly and unmanly fashion, you work on it with him, and you train him to overcome that and to acquire agency. The point I'm making is that everything in the mental health professions, everything in the culture over the last few decades, has been geared towards excusing us from any form of bad behavior. It's not our fault. It's always an external agent that makes us do it, and this is just part of the same thing. Hey, what can I do? You know, I'm very low in conscientiousness, Boss, I'm really sorry I dropped the ball. Like, three weeks in a row, I've dropped the ball on something. I'm not organized, I'm not reliable, I'm not responsible. Hey, boss, you know, I hope you understand. But my conscientious goodness score is 1.7 out of 10. So you understand it's not this is built into my personality. Is hardwired, and so we have to work around this. Maybe you have to, you know, I'm a union employee, so you're not getting rid of me, but maybe you have to hire somebody to double check my work. That's all. It's on my fault. This is how I am, that. That is how this stuff works. You know, your wife speaks to you about, I always think of it in that way. Maybe it's your husband's beast, you lady, whatever it is, but let's say your spouse speaks to you and says, Look, you come across as angry and aggressive, and you seem to have absolutely no empathy. When people talk to you about a problem, you're not interested, you don't want to help. And you say, Look, I'm really sorry, but you know, my therapist told me that my agreeable score is point seven on a scale of 10. And so, you know, what do you want? I mean, that's the sort of person I am. I'm really sorry. I'm just depressed all the time. I can't get out of bed. Well, you know, sorry, you score lower, you score high on neuroticism, or you have anxiety, no, not nothing to be done about it. And that's it. It's it's an excuse to avoid the hard work of self development. It's saving you any difficulty at all in life and and so I always want to stress. I recommend when you hear the sort of stuff, these are personality traits. It's nonsense. And again, I don't expect you to take my word for it, but I want to present the alternative viewpoint, and then I want you to keep both of them in mind. Maybe people do have largely immutable now, psychologists say that to some extent, some of these can be improved a little bit, but by and large, your personality traits are fixed. Or I would like it also bear in mind the approach I'm. Going to give you now and then, over time, you will for yourself decide which one is a more accurate depiction of how the world really works. So I would say, forget when I say, I would say it's from ancient Jewish wisdom. Obviously, I'm just telling you, forget this idea of personality traits, everything I've told you now up till now, forget and now we look not at personality traits, but we're looking at behavior, not in built traits, nothing fixed in your personalities, but behavior and behavior can and must be changed. And so now you know, are you open to new ideas? Are you curious? No, I'm just none of those. Well you ought to be. And so start reading, right? Quit watching screens and start reading books. Fauci it's going to come very hard at first. It's going to be very draining. It's going to take a lot of your energy. But don't you want to embark on one of life's most exciting adventures, making more of yourself, improving yourself, building up your life, fighting resistance, fighting the natural gravity that attempts to tether you to your lowest form of self. Come on, work on this and and become ACT. ACT curious. Act interested, conscientious. I'm just not conscious now. We don't, don't buy that. Behave differently. And here we come to a very simple but complex rule at the same time, simple, simple to understand, hard to do and and that is, you change the way you think and feel by the way you behave. It's really important, important, you know, for psychologists who, who agree with me on this, would say you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. So I'm not saying sort of change your personality. You change your being. You become a different person. And so, you know, if you want to be less inhibited and less isolated and less introverted, then you now must start doing something that'll take you way out of your comfort zone. You've got to start socializing, and you've got to be start getting involved in different organizations, all the things you really, really, really don't want to do. Yeah, of course, that isn't that is spiritual gravity that is trying to keep you tomorrow exactly the same as the way you were yesterday. And that is no way, my dear happy warriors, that is no way to build a better tomorrow, and so let's imagine that there's somebody you don't feel good. Let's say you're in it. You've been having an argument with your spouse. You haven't resolved it. You've committed the cardinal sin of of letting a night go by on your anger without straightening it out, and you've been Surly and and distant and cold towards each other for three days. Okay, here's what you do. You buy your spouse a gift, something that he or she would really like. Now I know what you're gonna say to me. I'm not a hypocrite. I don't want to, yeah, hypocrisy is really, really not a terrible trait. Excuse me, you're not. Pardon me, let me put it a better way. Hypocrisy isn't nice, but you're not being hypocritical. Hypocritical has to do with lecturing other people to do something we're not talking about other people talking about how you treat yourself and to make yourself act in a way that is not in accordance with the way you feel is the height of civilized behavior. There's nothing wrong with being inconsistent, and that's all you're saying. Yesterday, I wasn't talking to you yesterday. I was surly. Yesterday was cold and distant and his today, I'm giving you a gift. Do I naturally feel different? Not yet, but when you do this kind of thing and you behave nicely towards somebody, you start feeling better towards them.
Daniel Lapin 29:34
You know, it's the old song from many, many years ago, when your whistle, a happy song when you're feeling frightened and afraid, that there is a great deal of wisdom in that old song, and that is the idea if, if you don't like the way you are feeling, then start acting the way you would act if you felt the way you. You felt, got that you don't like the way you you feel, then start acting the way you would act if you already felt the way you wish you felt. And well, that's all you got to do. And everything changes in your life. The there was a wonderful, wonderful, really important guy called Wild Penfield. I've read quite a lot of his stuff, and hard going, by the way, I had to force myself to read it. But he was born in Spokane, Washington, just 100 miles or so east of where we used to live. And he was an American, Canadian. He was born in America, but he then became a neurosurgeon at McGill University and to run in monetary or Canada. And in brief while, why he interested me is that he began studying epileptic seizures, and he developed something called the Montreal procedure, in which he treated patients who suffered from bad epilepsy by destroying certain nerve cells in the brain where the seizures originated. And before operating, he stimulated the brain with electrical probes while the patients were conscious on the operating table, just under local anesthesia, and observed their responses. And this way, he mapped the brain absolutely incredibly. And by the way, this is something that can be done. Wonder, you know, if you don't know this, this thing, you it said it's an incredible thing. I think there may be some videos available of it. I haven't seen them, and probably be a little bit gruesome. But anyway, there was a woman who was a very accomplished violinist in an orchestra in the south of England on a place called the Isle of Wight, and she developed a very problematic brain tumor, and they decided to operate her five years ago, was January 2020, in London. And the the problem was they wanted to make sure you know, you operating on the brain, and she's a violinist. You know how delicate I mean playing the violin is, is the same delicacy as doing brain surgery. And so interestingly enough, they wanted to do brain surgery on her. They had to to get rid of the tumor, but they wanted to make sure that they didn't hurt her ability to play the violin. And so what they did was absolutely extraordinary. They put her only under local anesthesia as they opened up her brain her head, and they had her play the violin on the operating table, and she plays away. She plays all kinds of pieces. And the idea is that before the surgeon touched, before he cut anything, he first of all touched to make sure that if he worked in that area of the brain, it wouldn't diminish her ability to play the violin. And so he worked around, and he took different routes until he could finally do everything he had to do, but making sure that she could keep playing, she never stopped playing. And the only time, like when he touched something that if affected the violin playing, he backed off, and then she played again. Anyways, two or three days after the surgery was done, she was back playing the violin in her orchestra on the Isle of white. The surgeons name was Keo Mars ashcan. I don't know anything more about him, but what a piece of surgery that must have been quite extraordinary. It was done at King's College Hospital in London, but that's the this idea of mapping the brain. And so Dr Wilder Penfield, the neuroscientist born in America, but made his career in Canada. But he died recently, or relatively recently? Well, I guess it's 50 years ago already. 1976 he died. He was born at the end of the 19th century. Yep, time has gone by and but here's the fascinating thing, he did quite a lot of work together with another neuroscientist called John Eccles. I think I was looking through my library trying to find my book, but I've reorganized libraries recently, and I wasn't able to find just what I was looking for. But at any rate, one of the fascinating things about Wilder Penfield, this neuroscientist that I'm intrigued by, is that once he and he done so many 1000s of these operations and so much mapping, he got to the point he really knew where every motor function was low. Located in the brain, and then he realized that he could not find he could find the place that the part of the brain that makes you lift your hand. He had the part of the brain that makes you rotate your wrist or move your fingers, but what he couldn't find was the place in the brain that made you decide to lift your arm or rotate your wrist or move your fingers, and that is fascinating. And so he spent quite a lot of time looking for the location in the brain of the will, where do I will the action? And that he couldn't find and and so he did quite a lot of writing on the the the the initiation of mental processes, and whether or not he could locate the human soul, because that's what he decided It was. This was really the the higher soul and and he couldn't find it. He couldn't find the soul or the will located anywhere in the brain. And so he speculated, I believe, on whether or not, perhaps the soul is somehow mysteriously found as a part of every cell in the body. And here, here, we're moving out of the realm of knowable science into speculation, but it's it's important to what we're talking about, because if you have a soul, then you do not have immutable traits that eliminate your agency and turn you into a victim and that turn you into somebody who says, I can't help it. That's who I am, dangerous, dangerous and destructive words in terms of the most exciting adventure in life, building yourself up, making more of yourself, developing yourself into a bigger and better human being, it's pretty amazing, but really, really important. Really, really exciting. So, so here are two viewpoints. Human beings are nothing but materialistic, predictable. There's nothing in the life of a human being that cannot be understood from the arrangements of the neurons in the brain. And when that's all mapped out and figured out, we'll understand exactly how Beethoven conducted music and and somebody else steals hubcaps in the city. So yeah, that's one view, but the other one is that we are souls wrapped up in bodies, and the soul is a mysterious connection with our spiritual reality and with God, and therefore there is no limit to us. We are created in His image. And therefore I, today can be a loser, and tomorrow, I can be a winner. Today I can be a klutz, who every time I try to dance, look like I'm trying to stamp on cockroaches, and tomorrow, at the hands of a good teacher, I may not be a wonderful dancer, but I can be a fairly graceful one. I'll move a lot better than I move today.
Daniel Lapin 38:36
Today, I can be ignorant in a topic tomorrow, after reading many, many books on the topic and thinking about them and working on them, I can become knowledgeable on that topic. I am not an immutable human being. There's nothing about me that's immutable. I can make myself better and better and better in every single area, but it means moving out of my comfort zone. It's very challenging. If you think running a 10 meter, a 10 second 100 meter race, is hard, if you think running a four minute mile is hard, just try losing a bad habit, gaining a good habit, making more of oneself. It's an incredible challenge, and in exactly the same way as somebody who runs a couple of miles in a good time feels elevated and exuberant and exhilarated, in the same way as way as we work on these traits. Right? I used to be an introvert, but I'm now good with people. You the achievement, the sense of wonder, is so limitless that when I speak about it as the greatest human adventure, that's really exactly what it is. So go for it. Happy Warriors, don't hesitate for a moment. Yes, you can. Absolutely embark on the adventure of making yourself a better human being. You are not restricted by your personality type in any way whatsoever. So a wonderful week to you, a week of growth in your five F's in your families, your finances, your faith, your friendships and your fitness. I'm Rabbi Daniel Lapin, God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
