Can people change? Some say a Leopard does not change its spots. When prisoners are placed in a Rehabilitation program in prison, does it help them to learn new positive behaviours, which then leads them to change their old negative behaviours? If your boyfriend cheated on you and he begs you to take him back as he whimpers: “but I have changed”, should you believe him?

When we are born our brain is like an empty field filled with wild flowers. There are no highways, no service roads and no dirt roads. These highways of data flows are formed during our early years. Influences from our parents, teachers and our community help form these highways. They become stronger as the brain travels them more often and by the age of sixteen, you have developed your 5 key strengths. You will use these to make every decision in your life onwards. From whether you should answer a ringing phone to what career path you should follow. Thousands of decisions follow these highways in your mind on a daily basis. You will start seeing a pattern in the decisions you make from day to day. These highways are mapped in your brain like a high-speed Internet connection. The information you experience through your senses (eyes, ears, etc.) will flow into one of these paths automatically and a decision will be made seemingly effortless.

What type of strengths could you have and can you change them as an adult? One strength is to be Analytical. If your Customer/Supervisor asks you for a deadline when your project will be completed, do you need to understand all the details, allow your brain to sift through the data and evaluate options before you can give and back up a decision regarding the committed date? You will not be someone that just makes decisions on the fly even though it might appear to your friends as if you do. Every decision has been carefully investigated and compared against previous experiences and other information to your disposal before you answered. Maybe one of your 5 top strengths is Responsibility. When you and your friends go out for a night on the town you are always the sober driver that gets them home in one piece. You pay your bills almost before they arrive in the mail. When you make a decision you consider consequences and you weight up any risks that might have to be taken to ensure you choose the safest possible path. You could be a Connector. You get every task around you done using your relationships with friends, colleagues or strangers. If you need to achieve a new task you immediately map out in your brain what person/s you need to connect to in order to achieve the task at hand. Whatever your 5 key strengths might be, once they have been formed at sixteen years of age, they will remain with you for the rest of your life. It will require more brain capacity than is humanly possible to change one of these 5 key strengths into something completely new. They might change order somewhat throughout your life but movement is generally very limited.

Can people change their behaviour? I believe people cannot change their key strengths but they can change their value system. This means what they hold as important and measure their success as a human being by. Changing your value system is in itself an enourmously difficult task that some people just cannot master. An easy example of changing my value system was when I became a mother. Every decision I took before this period in my life was driven by one value system: ME and meeting my goals and needs. My needs were mostly making money, driving fast cars, collecting boyfriends, dancing all night at discos and travelling the world. When I was in a shopping center and a mother was having a difficult time calming down her screaming toddler, it would irritate me and I sentenced her as an incompetent parent. My Analytical key strength made this decision as how can calming down a 3 year old be so difficult? Of course, blissfully ignorant, I had no reference data, no experience, just logic. I was in for a simultaneously rude and magnificent awakening when my own children were born. My goals and needs changed overnight. Measuring my success as a human being was now compared against my breakthroughs as a mother. A new world opened up to me. What I valued changed and I was developing into a different person. 

So can people change? Is prison Rehabilitation effective? I conclude that for those people that are mentally strong enough to question their current value system, change is in the making. To change your value system you have to question the values that your parents, teachers and other important people instilled in your life. Are these values useful, do they contribute to your happiness; do they promote your mental and physical health? For the ones where you answered ‘No’, a new value must be found to replace the old one. Your key strengths will remain what they are but the outcome of your decisions will be driven by your new value system.  A new you might be waiting around the corner.