Not trying to get all hippie dippie or existential but I think your personality is strongly influenced by your environment so 'being yourself' you're talking about is just one 'version' of yourself.
There's a genetic component for sure... but environment is huge I think.
Indeed the definition of human growth is built upon changing yourself and exposing yourself to novel situations/environments and stress-ors where you have to become a 'new version' of yourself..whether more competent, more wary, more upbeat, more physically capable, etc. in order to overcome the challenges.
However, I don't think you have to travel to Costa Rica and stay in a eco-friendly yurt in a rainforest for this.
Just somewhere significantly far away where you don't have to maintain any sort of status quo. Pittsburg is as good as Paris in this regard.
There's a genetic component for sure... but environment is huge I think.
Indeed the definition of human growth is built upon changing yourself and exposing yourself to novel situations/environments and stress-ors where you have to become a 'new version' of yourself..whether more competent, more wary, more upbeat, more physically capable, etc. in order to overcome the challenges.
However, I don't think you have to travel to Costa Rica and stay in a eco-friendly yurt in a rainforest for this.
Just somewhere significantly far away where you don't have to maintain any sort of status quo. Pittsburg is as good as Paris in this regard.