Should Coaches Ever Try to Change a Client’s Personality?
Trait, state, survival strategy - and the thin ethical line between supporting someone to make changes and messing with identity.
Let’s begin where we usually do: the client is in the driving seat. They choose the destination. We travel alongside.
And yet, anyone who has coached for more than five minutes knows this is not the whole story. We notice patterns. We sense constrictions. We sometimes see capacity that the client cannot yet see in themselves. We are not neutral observers.
When we offer these observations, challenges or lines of enquiry: what kind of change are we inviting?
Trait or State?
In our recent Psychology for Coaches session, we revisited the distinction between state and trait. A trait is a relatively stable characteristic - something that tends to show up across situations. A state is temporary and context-dependent.
Feeling nervous before a presentation? A state.
Experiencing high anxiety across many domains of life? Potentially a trait.
Differentiating between these is important because coaching someone through a state is very different from attempting to shift a trait (hence why I so often ask if a particular pattern shows up anywhere else).
Differential psychology reminds us that “personality refers to a dynamic organisation of psychophysical systems that shape characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving” (Allport, 1961, as quoted in Maltby, Day, & Macaskill, 2013). It is not a superficial layer. It is woven through biology, experience, narrative and culture.
But “relatively stable” does not mean fixed.
Research suggests that personality can shift across life events, changing social contexts, therapy - and indeed coaching.
The question is should we try and change a trait and for what reason?
The Introversion Example
A client describes themselves as deeply introverted. “That’s just the way I am.”
Should we help them become less introverted?
Yes and no.
If introversion reflects a natural preference for depth over breadth, reflection over stimulation, one-to-one over one-to-many, then there may be nothing to change. There is strength here: listening, thoughtfulness, steadiness.
But what if what looks like introversion is, at least in part, armour?
What if beneath it lives a deep narrative:
If I speak up, I’ll be judged.
If I put myself forward, I’ll be rejected.
If I am fully seen, I won’t belong.
Now we are no longer in trait territory alone. We are in survival behaviour shaped by millennia of evolution. The need to belong is not trivial; it is protective. Fear of exclusion once meant death.
So perhaps the real coaching question is not “How do we make this person more extraverted?”
It is: Is this behaviour an authentic preference or a strategy designed to avoid threat?
Those are not the same thing. - and knowing the answer gets us some way to answering the question of whether or not to try and change anything.
Personality vs Protective Pattern
If we assume, “They’re shy, that’s their personality,” we may prematurely close down possibility.
If we assume, “They must change who they are,” we risk imposing our values.
If the client assumes, “I must change who I am,” it’s possible that they are imposing society’s values on themselves rather than following their own path.
But, if we gently explore:
When does this pattern serve you?
When does it cost you?
What happens in your body when you consider speaking up?
What are you protecting yourself from?
We move from changing personality to increasing awareness.
And awareness opens the door for greater responsiveness - where we proactively choose to either lean in to our dominant “preference” or challenge the narratives that may drive our unwanted behaviours.
The Ethical Line
So where is the line?
I would suggest three gateway questions:
1. Whose Agenda Is It?
Are we working in service of the client’s stated goals, or our own preference for how they “should” show up? Is the client seeking to change to fit in with what society expects of them? Is it really what they want?
If a client wants to lead more visibly, build influence, or feel freer in rooms that currently shrink them, then exploring the fear beneath their introversion is in service of their desire - for me, that makes it ok.
2. Are we Messing with Identity?
Helping a naturally introverted leader find an extra inch of confidence so they can contribute their thinking more fully is not the same as trying to turn them into a high-energy networker.
The aim is to remove unnecessary constraint not change who they are at their core.
3. Are we Over Promising Transformation?
An anxious trait may never disappear - but it can be understood, regulated, and prevented from running the show. Sometimes management is enough.
We are not always here to change the architecture.
Sometimes we are here to help clients navigate it more skilfully.
So… Are We Doing Something Wrong?
Are we doing something wrong when we gently challenge “that’s just the way I am”?
I don’t think so - not if we are doing it lightly, relationally, and in service of possibility.
“That’s just the way I am” can sometimes be a statement of self-acceptance.
It can also be a statement of resignation.
Our job is to be curious about the statement - to hold open the space for reflection on identity and behaviour, the connection between them and when they differ.
We help clients differentiate between:
Who they are
How they learned to survive
And who they might become if survival no longer needed to drive
The paradox, of course, is this:
We do not change personality by trying to change personality.
We change outcomes by increasing awareness, expanding choice, and creating safety.
When clients feel safe enough, they often surprise themselves.
And when that happens, it is rarely because we have made them someone else.
It is because we have helped them access more of who they already were.
To receive regular Inside Out Leadership News and Nuggets (like this one), sign up here.