Can you become more intelligent? How easy is it to change your personality? Which role does coaching take in all of this?

Business and life are all about change. Any motivational speaker will tell you to embrace change.

But can we humans actually change or are we just predisposed to our genetics and early upbringing?

In the book “The Talent Delusion” PH.D. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic gives some well-researched and insightful facts about intelligence, our chances of making significant behavioral changes and which coaching interventions help us to become more successful. I am citing relevant passages from his book.

Does change come natural to us?

“To be sure, change interventions, such as coaching and training programmes, are by definition unnatural: they involve deliberate attempts to break habits and replace them with some new, presumably more effective, behavioural patterns. For example, some people may want to be more creative, productive or charismatic; others may want to be less volatile, impulsive or anxious. As such, developmental interventions attempt to produce changes that would otherwise not take place if people were left to their own devices or continued to behave as they normally do.” (P.114f)

Can humans learn to be more intelligent?

"After adolescence, there is virtually no change in the position of a person on a bell curve of IQ scores. Even during childhood, when one would expect prominent changes in intellectual abilities due to the impact of schooling which is focused precisely on developing children′s intellectual capabilities, there is almost no rank-order change in children′s IQ scores." (P.115)

“People′s scores rarely shift, and when they do it is probably as a result of measurement errors rather than changes in actual abilities." (P.115)

“Human intelligence resembles a personal computer. On the one hand, it gets wiser with age – because it keeps storing more information, files and knowledge. On the other hand, it also gets slower – because its capacity to handle operations and multitask declines.” (P.116)

Basically, we all can learn and develop but we are still limited to our genetically given level of intelligence. Someone with a comparably high IQ level might learn faster, but mostly it is not so much about how fast we can learn something, but whether we learn the right things.

There are millions of books out there and billions of articles, but only a small percent of them can really add a lot of value to our lives. It might take some of us longer to understand a concept than others. Thus, it is fundamentally more important to learn the right concept from the best sources at the time it is needed.

To sum up, we cannot really influence our level of intelligence in terms of IQ

but..

Can we change our personality?

First, what is personality? I like to use the metaphor of the “sum of all our experiences which we carry every single moment of the day with us, like a heavy bag pack”.

“Personality represents the essence of our character and all attributes that make us systematically different from other people. There is a well-known cliché in coaching that states that, though you cannot change someone’s personality, you can change their behaviours. Yet, if personality is the sum of a person’s behaviours, then changing their behaviours should eventually produce a “new” personality. (P. 117)

The standard promise of a coaching intervention is positive change for our lives. Total revenue generated worldwide from coaching in 2015 was $2.356 billion.

At least the coaching industry profits financially from the willingness and hopes of the coachees to change. But..

What is the real reason why everyone is changing (or not)?

“Scientific studies show that personality is neither very malleable (flexible), nor set in stone. Although some changes do occur over a person′s life, most of these changes are age-related transitions that happen to most people, so they imply more rank-order stability than change. For example, between the ages of 20 and 40 years, people tend to become more socially dominant, conscientious and emotionally stable. Furthermore, most people become more extraverted and open to new experiences during adolescence but decline in both domains later on in adulthood. During adulthood people tend to become more agreeable, too.

In essence, we tend to become more boring – the psychological euphemism for this is “mature” – as we grow older.

And from the age of 30 onwards there is very little change in personality, with substantial stability after the age of 50. (P.118)

Astonishingly, even extreme life events fail to produce major changes in personality (P.118).

You probably already read about studies in which people won the lottery or lost a leg. In both situations, most people bounce back to their original level of happiness. If you are a grumpy and hateful person, the million dollars might not make you permanently happy. The same if you are an optimist and loose a leg, you will most likely bounce back to being a positive person.

The author sums up,

“Evidence suggests that laypeople tend to overestimate the degree to which people change. Sure, people can change, but when people are left to their own devices, they mostly don′t.

This is why when you meet you meet old school friends at those dreaded school reunions, the changes you observe in them are mostly physical rather than mental or behavioural

Yes, they will tend to look older, fatter and balder, but from a personality, values and intelligence perspective, it will seem as if time hasn′t passed at all. (P.120)

Which role can coaching take in personal change?

Yet, the coaching industry is growing steadily. There is a huge variability of coaching practices.

In general, a good coach with a mediocre method will always be better than a bad coach with the most effective method.

“Unsurprisingly, the world of coaching has been described as the Wild West, and for every competent coach there are probably dozens of unqualified practitioners who escape scientific scrutiny and survive in business merely thanks to the naivety of their clients.” (P.121)

In my opinion, the most successful coaches have at least one thing in common: They are good salespeople!

Which coaching interventions are most successful?

“Many coaching interventions try to enhance some aspect of emotional intelligence (EQ), such as social, intrapersonal, interpersonal, or soft skills. In that sense, they try to make people more rewarding to deal with, which should generally improve their career success and employability.

For example, if you have been told to keep your temper under control, show more empathy for others, or be a better listener, what are the odds that coaching can help you achieve this?

While no intervention can take a person from 0 to 100 per cent on any of these behaviours, well-designed coaching programmes can easily achieve improvements of 25 percent." (P.122)

This means that if you would be scored 30 of 100 in terms of empathy. You could at least improve to a score of 55.

A review of 46 independent studies suggests that 70 percent of coaching recipients can be expected to outperform the average person in a control group” (P.122)

"Only a few academic studies have evaluated what methods or approaches work best. The most successful sessions follow a cognitive behavioural framework"

According to this paradigm, problematic behaviours are primarily driven by irrational or counterproductive beliefs, which coaches can help clients reframe. This leads to more effective behaviours being put in place, and subsequent reinterpretations of reality that are less counterproductive and inaccurate. In addition, attempts to enhance psychological flexibility - the capacity to accept and deal with (as opposed to avoid) unpleasant situations are also highly flexible" (P.124).

Should you stop caring what other people think of you?

A good coaching intervention is that they enhance clients’ self-awareness. Counter-intuitively, it is not what we think of ourselves that determines our success, mostly it is about how others perceive you!

“As David Bowie once noted: I am only the person the greatest number of people think I am. What others think of us is much more consequential than what we think of ourselves. Even when other′s view of us are inaccurate, they are still critical: We all get hired, promoted and fired based on what others make of us.

In other words, it does not matter so much how you think of yourself, what matters most is how other people see you.

…Reputation predicts academic achievement and job performance much better than people′s self-views do. “ (P. 140)

Thus, know yourself, accept your limitations, learn from what others think of you and don′t expect from others to change too much over time.

If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people.

- Chinese Proverb