Change can be improvement or degradation. There are many times when qualities deemed negative are in fact positive ones, or potentially positive ones.
So we have people thinking that I’m bad for having gumption. Sometimes gumption is necessary to stand by one’s contributions. Or they are thinking that I’m bad for having been in love a number of times. Being in love is one of the best experiences of being alive and one that should be encouraged. Or they think that I’m bad for having a lot of ideas. Everything we have started as someone’s idea, and people who come up with new ideas do a lot for the world.
I had a wife whose father accused her of being manipulative. He was himself a businessman, and in business what some call manipulative is called competence and people skills. You want emotional intelligence in your group; when it is had by someone else it is a problem. So the same qualities that label a woman bad news is worshipped in business and politics, and the direction of social services is directed toward bullying a woman out of what are in fact winning qualities while worshipping the same in the business and political world.
Now there are many groups out there that promote personal change. Sometimes the change they achieve is improvement, sometimes it isn’t. For a long time New Age has promoted the attitude that everything that happens to people is their doing, and that trying to do anything in the world is forcing one’s will on the world. This attitude did not result in personal improvement. It resulted in people becoming careless, unethical and short-sighted and failing to address the problems facing the world.
There were a number of related movements. One has been promotion of positive thinking. Positive thinking causes more problems than it solves. You think positive, you fail to anticipate problems, you do foolish things. Positive thinking is something you want in a salesman; but don’t tell an engineer to think positive. An engineer needs to anticipate everything that could go wrong with the product. An engineer who thinks positive will design equipment that will blow up on use.
Another is self-esteem. This results in an inverse set of incentives. If you have higher standards for yourself, you will find it harder to feel good about yourself than if you have low standards for yourself. The person with lower standards will have higher self-esteem; the person with higher standards will be a better person. Rewarding self-esteem does not reward personal good. It rewards low standards. And I say this as someone who has tested moderate on the self-esteem test and cannot be accused of having low self-esteem.
On the other side, we see some qualities labelled as bad that aren’t. One is being obsessive. While many people justifiably don’t want obsessive attention directed at them, it can do good things when directed elsewhere. Obsessive focus is useful in research and any number of other pursuits. Another is being egotistical. Sometimes one needs to be egotistical to call attention to what he has to say.
A lot more is found in the definition of the narcissistic personality disorder. If it’s narcissistic to want great success or have lots of ideas, then we owe to narcissists most of what we have. If it’s narcissistic to dislike authority, then the ancestors of all white people in America and a number of other countries – immigrants – were narcissists as they disliked authority enough to go looking for freedom on the other side of the world. What we see persecuted here is the very thing that is responsible for America’s greatness; and it is completely hypocritical for people believing such things to attack the people whom they are attacking even as they benefit handsomely from the actions of these same people.
We have people claiming love to be transference or co-dependency. We have people claiming altruism and compassion to be low self-esteem. We have people claiming genius to be narcissism. All of the above are wrong absolutely. Good things get misrepresented as bad things. And that results in people being denied the benefit of these good things.
So that while a particular set of qualities can be negative in one situation, it can be very positive in another. The correct approach is looking at what can be the positive manifestation of any given qualities. So that if, for example, someone is of an obsessive temperament, then the solution is giving him a purpose on which he can hyperfocus and achieve. And if someone is manipulative, then the solution is directing her attention to business and politics in which such a thing is in order.
As for personal change, it can go in any number of directions, and great care must be taken to ensure that whatever change one realizes is an improvement and not a degradation. The test of any path is whether what it achieves is improvement or degradation. I recommend applying this analysis on all paths that claim that outcome. That way one would know which paths to follow and which ones to avoid.