334 — Change Is Great. But So Is Everything About You That Never Changed.

I’ve spent my whole career helping people change. Someone walks into my therapy office stuck in a pattern they don’t want, and together we figure out how to get them unstuck. I’ve written books about it. This whole podcast is about it.
 
But after almost 25 years as a therapist, here’s what strikes me: how much we actually stay the same. The things that made you light up at 5 are probably the same things that light you up at 55. The impulses you had at 7 are still there at 47. We change in real ways—but underneath, something steady keeps us being us.
 
Today’s episode is a little different. Instead of a mental strength play to change your life, I want to talk about the parts of you that were never going to change—and why that might be one of the more beautiful things about being a person. We live in a world constantly telling you to become a new version of yourself. But sometimes there’s no problem to fix. Sometimes it just means there’s a reliable part of you that’s been there all along.
 
Some of the things I talk about are:
 

• The daily habit I’ve kept for years—and the moment I realized I’ve been playing the exact same game since I was five years old.
• What happened when I asked my Instagram audience what they loved as a kid and still love today (the list is oddly comforting).
• Why so much of the self-improvement world gets this wrong—and why “always upgrade yourself” isn’t the whole story.
• The crucial difference between an impulse and a response—and why you don’t have to fix the impulse to change your life.
• What I still do when a speaker asks for a volunteer from the audience, almost 40 years after I was the shy kid dreading book report day.
• The question I ask therapy clients who feel like they’ve lost themselves—and why no one has ever failed to answer it.
• Why recognizing what’s stayed the same can be one of the most healing moments in a whole stretch of therapy.
• The question I want you to sit with this week—and why you don’t have to fix the answer.

Key Takeaways:

• Embracing the things that haven’t changed about you are just as important as embracing change when it comes to building mental strength.
• Our core impulses might remain unchanged, but we have the power to choose our responses to them.
• Acknowledging how you’ve stayed the same can be a powerful way to cope when life throws you challenges. 
• Self-improvement doesn’t always entail altering our intrinsic characteristics. Acceptance is equally important.
• The journey to mental strength includes understanding what aspects of ourselves are fixed versus moldable.