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.