The question usually arrives after something has failed. A pattern you have run through twice, then a third time. A version of yourself you keep returning to without wanting to. You have tried changing the circumstances: the job, the city, the relationship, the routine. Some of it worked at the surface. None of it quite closed the gap between a changed life and an unchanged self. That gap is what sends you back to the question.
Most people asking this question have already suspected one of two things: that change is possible but they have not tried hard enough, or that they have tried and something keeps pulling them back. Both of those positions are ways of circling the harder possibility, which is that you may not be asking the right question at all.
Three thinkers on the Consilium roster would approach this from fundamentally different directions. One of them would not begin with the question until he understood your daily environment. Another would say the question is already answered by the meanings you have chosen. The third would stop you before you got very far and ask what you are actually asking. All three would disagree with each other.
Skinner: change the environment, not the self
B.F. Skinner would find the question almost unanswerable in the form you are asking it. In his framework, there is no stable self sitting apart from behavior and directing it. What you call your character, your personality, your identity is a pattern of behavior that has been shaped over time by what your environment has rewarded, punished, or ignored. The question "can I change who I am" is pointing at something that does not exist in quite the way the question assumes.
He would not be interested in your intentions or your resolve. He would want to know the actual structure of your days. What behaviors does your current environment reinforce? What does it make difficult, costly, or impossible? If you want to become more patient, more disciplined, more honest, the relevant question is not how much you want it. It is what the contingencies of your daily life are selecting for, and whether you have actually changed those contingencies or just thought about changing them.
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
Frankl: change as an act of spirit
Viktor Frankl would push back on Skinner directly. He survived the Nazi concentration camps, and what he observed there was that the behavioral environment was designed to strip away everything external. It nearly did. But some people were not destroyed by it, not because the conditions were less brutal for them, but because of something they were doing with the experience that the environment could not reach. He called it the last human freedom: the capacity to choose your response to whatever is happening to you.
For Frankl, you do not change who you are by rearranging circumstances. You change who you are by choosing, deliberately and with effort, the meaning you assign to what you are living through. Not positive thinking. Not optimism. A specific act of engagement with the question: what does this situation demand of me, and who do I choose to be in response to it? The change he witnessed in himself and in others was not behavioral conditioning. It was something closer to a decision about identity, made again and again under pressure.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
Wittgenstein: you are asking a confused question
Ludwig Wittgenstein would stop you before either of the other two got very far. Not to dismiss the question but to examine it. When you say you want to change who you are, what is the "who" you are pointing at? A list of behaviors? A pattern of emotional reactions? A story you tell about your past? A feeling you carry into rooms? A reputation you have in a specific community? Each of these is a different thing, and the answers to whether each can change are very different from one another.
His central claim, developed in his later work, was that many of the deepest confusions come not from the world being difficult but from language leading us to expect a kind of clarity that is not there. The word "self" sounds like the name of an object, something fixed that either can or cannot be altered. But look at what you are actually pointing at. It is several overlapping things, some of which are already shifting, some of which may be stable, some of which depend entirely on context. Wittgenstein would say the confusion is grammatical. Untangle what you mean, and you may find you were asking several different questions at once, some of which already have clear answers.
"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
Where they disagree
Skinner would say: you are not trying to change a self. You are trying to change a pattern of behavior, and the lever is the environment. Intentions without structural change are noise.
Frankl would say: the environment is not the determining factor. The meaning you bring to any situation is. That is where identity lives, and it is always within reach, even when nothing external can be changed.
Wittgenstein would say: before either of those answers can help you, you need to be clearer about what you are actually asking. Some of what you call "who I am" may already be in motion. Some of it may not be a thing at all in the sense the question assumes.
None of them cancel each other out. You can think Skinner is right about the role of environment and still think Frankl is pointing at something real about meaning. You can think Wittgenstein has made the question more honest without the question becoming easier. What you cannot do is use any one of them to avoid engaging with the other two.
The question you came here to avoid
You came here with a single question. What you have now are three people who disagree about what the question even means. That is not a failure of the process. That is the process working as it should. A question this central to how you live is not going to be settled cleanly, and you probably knew that before you searched.
Here is the one underneath: when you say you want to change who you are, which version of yourself is doing the wanting? Because that one is already not who you thought you were.