The recent season premiere of the Showtime seriesBillionsbegins with two hedge fund guys doing ayahuasca with a shaman in the middle of nowhere. We see them run out of the tent to purge, then look at the sky and take in the majesty of Planet Earth and the Universe it spins through. These guys who normally behave like the human offspring of a Hammerhead Shark and a Bloomberg Terminal have grown scraggly beards. Theyre openly weeping and talking about the meaning of things like life.

Five minutes of screen time later, theyre clean shaven and back in New York, doing insider trading and plotting to destroy people simply for being more popular than they are.

For a glimmer, it looked like these two aggressive, egomaniacal characters were on the brink of personal growth. Whatever experience they had in the mountains with the shaman had altered their perspective on things. It looked like they were ready to turn over a new leaf.

And then they didnt.

They went home, right back to who they had been before.

Billionsis fictional. But its writers are known to do their homeworkand do it well by television standards. What happened to those hedge fund guys isnt only a common occurrence when it comes to ayahuasca. Its also a dramatized version of what happens to most human beings in a small way all the time.

Research is clear that humans have the capacity to grow and change, no matter how old we are. Studies on post-traumatic growth show us that most of the time, we have the capacity to grow stronger and wiser as a result of even the worst experiences.

But we often DONT grow and change much after we become adults. Or at least not deliberately.

Why is that?

In a fascinating new self-help book by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, an organizational psychologist, we learn that one reason we dont grow when we have the chance to is because of the LABELS we place on ourselves.

Labeling is problematic because we think the label we give ourselves is predictive of the future, Hardy told me in an interview. "But we usually underpredict how different we'll be in the future.

This is why Dr. Hary says to beware of personality tests. Understanding yourself is great, but fixing a personality label on yourself can prevent you from growing. To use one of the most common examples of personality traits we talk about: if a test labels you an introvert, youre going to be likely to make decisions that reinforce that. You'll be less likely to do activities that grow your ability to perform in front of a group of peoplesay, to practice public speaking. You'll actually be more likely to avoid extroversion experiences because you come to believe introversion as part of your unchangeable core.

Personality Isn't Permanent

But research is clear that peoples personalities do evolve. Even levels of introversion change over the years. Perhaps more importantly, they vary from situation to situation. Many an outgoing public speaker is shy in personal conversations with strangers.

Even though humans can and do change, we often change slowly, or we dont take charge of our growth because we mistakenly believe our traits are fixed.

The Billions hedge fund guy doesnt change as a result of his "transformative" experience not because he cant, but because he sees himself as fixed. He's a shark. Thats just who he is. So, oh well.

Same with us. When we have experiences that change our perspectives, instead of changing things in our lives, our subconscious brains often mistakenly say, tigers dont change their stripes. And so we go back to our old behaviorsno matter how bad they are.

The problem with this is right in the title of Dr. Hardys excellent new book:Personality Isnt Permanent.

Had the fictional billionaires inBillionsdone one thing, however, things might have actually changed in that story.

The difference between people who go on, say, an ayahuasca journey and then change their life and those who dont comes down to whats called integration.

This is the time you take after the experience to reflect on your life and to incorporate any new perspectives into it. Its figuring out practical daily applications to profound life experiences. Plant medicine workers often say that this step is just as important as the experience itself.

For those of us that arent regularly using psychedelic substances, were still having regular experiences that we can be learning from.

The difference between personal growth in either casewhether were talking about the aftermath of ayahuasca or a documentary, or even a conversation with someoneis whether you integrate what youve learned into your life, and are able to apply it.

The kinds of people who consistently have personal growth are the ones who take the time to continually re-assess things in their lives based on the experiences theyre having all the time.

It takes intellectual humility to realize that we could be behaving differently and living better as a result of what weve learned. But thats why intellectual humility is so powerful.

All progress starts by telling the truth, Hardy says, quoting Dan Sullivan, And thats a big aspect ofpsychological flexbility, or being able to look at something from a different anglea willingness to actually handle emotion and to face hard truths.

The reason we don't do proper integration in our lives often boils down to the labels thing. We don't take time for integration because we don't think we can change. But knowing that even traits we view asfundamentalcan and do change gives us a reason to do what Bobby Axelrod didn't.

And it turns out that theres a very easy way to incorporate regular integration into our everyday lives: Write in a journal.

Journaling is the ultimate integration tool, Hardy explains. Theres something magical about giving yourself the time to think about your past in light of what you now know, and to write it down.

Now, wehuman beings are good at deception. And were good at lying to ourselves. But were much more likely to be honest with ourselves when we put our thoughts into words in a journal meant for only ourselves than we are with our friends, or sometimes even with a therapist.

And for journaling to be effective, you dont even have to do it every day. Just whenever you have a potentially meaningful experience.

Journaling is a form of clarifying thoughts and emotions, Hardy told me. Its a place where you can have healthy conversations with yourself where you can be vulnerable and honest about what youre actually going through. Its a place for self-analysis about whats generally going on in your life.

(I can attest personally to the power of journaling for my own personal growth. If you want to read about the time I started keeping a lie journal about my white lies and how that changed my relationships, as an example of a specific outcome from journaling,I wrote about that in my personal newsletter a bit ago here.)

When you force yourself to think about your life, and put into words how your recent experiences might help you to change, the concept of personality starts to become less interesting than the concept of strengths. Taking self-inventory in terms of strengths and weaknesses is a lot more useful and actionable than taking inventory of yourself like a tiger taking inventory of its stripes.

Journaling and self-analysis can help us to reframe fixed labels as current strengths and weaknesses. Instead of stopping at Im an introvert or extrovert we can ask, How good am I at going deep into introspection? How good am I at conversations with strangers? At public performance? At asserting myself? At being alone? This way, we start to see introversion and extroversion as categories of strengths we can work on, not either/or labels that dont change.

The takeaway from Dr. Hardys research on self-development is not to replace the study of human behavior with journaling, or to throw out decades of research on personality with the bathwater of labels and bad tests.

Anyone whos had more than one kid will tell you how useful it is to know how what gets one kid to clean their room is different for the other.

Indeed, understanding personality diversity is incredibly important to communicating effectively with people, to resolving problems, to persuasion, to building coalitions. As Dr. Hardy told me, My book is not really tailored to the question of how to deal with other people based on their personalities.

But, as Hardy rightly points out, even the most scientifically sound personality tests cant really tell us what will motivate someone in a given situation, what triggers a person will have due to past experiences, or how someone will tend to react to bad news. All of those will depend on much more than what we can measure with a test. (I dare you to find a parent who has used a one-time personality test to actually figure out the nuances of their kids.)

So while understanding the dimensions of human personality is useful for understanding human behavior, and can make us better equipped to notice people and show empathy, the best way to understand an individuals personality is not a multiple-choice quiz. Its to get to know their individual story.

And in a way, this brings us back to journaling. Because what better way to understand your own story than to take time to honestly think about it and put it into words?

The more you get to know someone, the more nuance there is, the less theyll be consistent with tight and tidy personality profiles, Hardy told me. I prefer the simplicity of looking at the individual level. And thats why I think empathy is so importantnot judging people based on who they were in the past.

The key, in other words, is to not conflate our observations of how people tend to behave with who they areand to remember that people change all the time.

In fact, if we treat people as if they can change for the better, people will often do so. Ourselves included.

Shane Snow is author ofDream Teamsand creator ofSnow Academy.

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The Thing Thats More Effective For Personal Growth Than Any Personality Test - Forbes