Personality

Personality is a tricky thing to talk about. We think we know what we mean when we say that someone has a “great personality”, for example, but if you asked people to define what that actually meant, they might throw a lot of stuff in there, including traits, moods, behaviors, and even habits. I think that the source of my discomfort when discussing personality comes from a belief that it is something fixed. In other words, that you’re born (#blessed/#cursed) with it, and that it will stay with you throughout your life, like a blueprint based on which the structure of You is to be built. In mental health counseling education, we are taught that the ten personality disorders (such as borderline, narcissistic, or histrionic), are among the most difficult to treat, partly because those clients typically have a hard time recognizing that they have a disorder in the first place.

Finding out that personality traits are not at all fixed was a relief. Like most people (and unlike many with narcissistic personality disorder), I want to believe that I can change some parts of my personality that I don’t particularly like, or strengthen those that have served me well so far. And obviously, I would wish the same for my clients.

Reports from an ongoing large-scale longitudinal study of personality trait trajectories that is currently underway support the notion that personality traits are definitely changeable, and that there is also a specific direction for the change: as we age, the positive traits of openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion seem to decrease, while there is evidence of “late-life increases in neuroticism”. Ouch.

Perhaps knowing the good, the bad and the ugly of your personality helps in bringing awareness to the traits that you want to cultivate, and those that you want to cultivate less, which would, in turn, reverse this trajectory. In any case, I believe that increased self-awareness is a good thing for (almost) everyone.

One of the easiest ways to get your personality “checked out” is by taking a free online Big 5 Personality Test, which is evidence-based, and measures the big five personality traits that are often used in psychology research (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Neuroticism); I like the version by the SAPA project, but there are many more available online.

What is the use of knowing if you score high on extraversion, and low on conscientiousness, for example? For one, there is a huge body of research that tries to connect differences in personality traits with various important things in life. For example, studies suggest that low neuroticism, high agreeableness, and high conscientiousness are positively associated with relationship satisfaction (duh); interestingly, it wasn’t so much the starting point that had an impact on the relationship, but rather the change over time in traits like neuroticism and conscientiousness. Big 5 Personality traits have also been linked to workplace and academic performance, creativity, and resilience.

If you are interested in taking an online assessment such as the one I recommended above, great.

Just remember, nothing is fixed or set in stone.

And don’t forget to bring your kind, non-judgmental, loving awareness to the ever-changing, ever-growing, ever-evolving Self.