I did some interesting work recently with a very high achieving client who was working on improving their empathy and reducing their aggressiveness - something they'd had feedback on many times both from their team and their boss.
On a programme some time ago, my client had explored their DISC profile - a simple personality type model which uses two dimensions of personality to create four quadrants with characteristic approaches: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance (Google it for more information). He was firmly in the D quadrant and he saw the change as being about using a more I style.
Of course, the difficulty with that framing of the change is that it doesn't recognise that there are deep beliefs and attitudes which cause him to be high D in the first place and there are many positive aspects about being high D which he wouldn't want to lose. So although his conscious was trying to be more I, his unconscious was driving him to continue to act as a high D - effectively sabotaging any change.
A breakthrough came from some more experiential work we did around a specific event. What became clear is that his instinctive reaction to any situation is to see the threat in it, and his aggressiveness is largely a defence against perceived threats. What he hadn't realised up to that point is how this pervades his life and often stops him seeing opportunities (including in career etc). Recognising that this blind spot was a distortion of reality that he might enjoy freeing himself from was a frame for change he was truly motivated by.
The interesting tie back to DISC is that although one dimension is often described as being about whether someone is task or people focused, in the original model it was about whether you perceive the world as a threat or an opportunity. So a characteristic of high Ds is that they see threat rather than opportunity - particularly in people - and they nulify that threat by dominance. If they can recognise and accept the way they distort threats - again, particularly in other people - they will be less gripped by their D style in dealing with them.