Tag Archives: Personality

Self-Awareness and Developing a Congruent Personality

Blogging every day for eight months gave me some serious insights on myself. It was an effective self-awareness exercise.

I mentioned multiple times before that we all have various subpersonalities in our psyche. I like to call these subpersonalities programs, because that’s easier to understand for a software developer like me.

Same Person, Different Thoughts, Feelings and Behavior

Different programs are triggered in us at different times in different conditions. As a result, we not only behave differently, we also think and feel differently.

Those programs write even different blog posts. That’s what I realized while thinking about an idea to write about today.

I initially picked a different idea to write about today. While I was outlining my post, I realized that today’s idea wasn’t 100% congruent with another idea I wrote about a few days ago. I was puzzled. What was going on here?

When I reflected on this issue, I realized that both ideas came from different subpersonalities. Then, I thought about which subpersonalities were operating in my psyche. How were they affecting my life? Which blog posts did they write?

Discovering Your Subpersonalities

I was inspired by the book Big Mind, Big Heart by Zen Master Dennis Genpo Merzel. After an introduction, Merzel spent the rest of the book talking with his subpersonalities.

I don’t plan to write a book, but writing a post about my most dominant subpersonalities could be interesting for you and for me. For me, this is a self-awareness exercise. And for you, it would give you an idea and inspiration to do it yourself.

Of course, you and I can go much deeper than this blog post, and I plan to do that because it’s interesting to get to know my subpersonalities better.

Ambition

The first subpersonality is ambition. He sets high goals and works hard for them. He is focused. His best friends and teammates are the anger and the monk.

He’s ready to make sacrifices for future success. As a matter of fact, anything that doesn’t serve his long-term goals is just a waste of time and energy.

He writes blog posts such as Bridging the Gap between Your Expectations and Your Reality.

Monk

The monk is an interesting figure by Western Standards, but he’s a familiar figure to the people who have an affinity to spirituality.

He likes to live a simple lifestyle. He enjoys the silence. His main aims in life are equanimity and mental clarity and the bliss they bring with themselves.

You can understand why ambition likes the monk, but sometimes, they contradict each other when the monk simply wants to be and do nothing while ambition wants to power through challenges.

He writes blog posts such as Equanimity: A Key Factor in High Performance and Success.

Anger

Let’s face it, we all have this subpersonality in one form or other. Some of us are aware of it. Some of us just suppress it.

If you have genuinely transcended your anger after years of spiritual work, my hat goes off to you, but I haven’t met many people who reached that level yet.

Anger writes blog posts such as The Dark Side of Motivation.

Pleasure

I’d be lying if I didn’t mention pleasure as one of the dominant subpersonalities. Again, we all have this subpersonality as well. For me, this personality also includes the enjoyment of food and coffee, as well as relaxation, a beautiful view, a walk in the park, working out, or having a conversation.

I don’t remember a blog post written by pleasure.

Ego

When people hear the word ego, they immediately think about what I call ambition and its variations. I take the textbook definition of ego in psychology.

Ego is the subpersonality that tries to balance all of the other subpersonalities while trying to keep me alive. From that perspective, he has the hardest job. Therefore, he doesn’t write any blog posts. He has already enough to do.

Conclusion

We all have different subpersonalities in our psyche that act out under different circumstances at different times. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s human nature.

The challenge here is to balance all of those subpersonalities in a congruent overall personality. The first step to do that is to get to know those subpersonalities.

I made a little introduction to my most dominant subpersonalities in this post. I have to go much deeper in my exploration of my subpersonalities to increase my self-awareness and congruency.

How about you? Are you inspired to do the same exercise on your subpersonalities?

The Psychology of Addiction

“Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.” Eckhart Tolle

Most of the time, we engage in an addictive behavior to escape an uncomfortable emotion. Sometimes, it’s boredom. Sometimes, it’s fear. Sometimes, it’s anger. And the list goes on.

When the addictive activity is over, we feel even worse than when we start. A heavy emotion of regret sets in.

We’re disappointed in ourselves because of the calories we consumed, the time we wasted, or the harm we did to our bodies with tobacco, alcohol, or other recreational drugs.

When everything is over, we look for ways of overcoming our addiction. We make promises to ourselves.

We study new techniques to get over our addiction. And we become hopeful again that we’ll be able to eliminate that addiction from our lives. All of that lasts until the next time we feel the urge, and we repeat the whole cycle again.

Today, I want to share my understanding of the psychology of addiction. I believe that it will be helpful to understand yourself and to quit your addiction.

The Psychoanalytic School

When it comes to the human personality, I subscribe to the psychoanalytic school that asserts that one’s personality is composed of numerous, independent subpersonalities.

As a software developer, I like to call those programs, because that term is more comprehensible and less creepy to me.

At different moments, different programs are triggered and executed in our psyche. Those programs can be complete opposites of each other.

Think about a parent who is loving and kind to their child most of the time, but once they get angry, they act as if they’d hurt their child. Those two programs are the opposites of each other. Yet, they inhabit the same person.

The Analysis of Addictive Behavior

Even though the theory of independent subpersonalities sounds weird, they’re pretty much a reality of our psychology. And sometimes, one of those subpersonalities become so strong that they overpower the rest, including our rational mind. A subpersonality takes the control of the whole person. As a result, we act in a way that we regret later.

Once the addictive behavior is over the related subpersonality loses its grip on us. Other subpersonalities such as the critical subpersonality start taking the control again. And we feel regret, guilt, and shame.

You might be going through this vicious circle over and over and wondering what’s wrong with you. You might be wondering how come you repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with you. This is a part of our human condition, and the psychoanalytic theory explains the addictive behavior very well in my opinion.

Conclusion

The lesson we can learn from this discussion is twofold.

We should stop blaming ourselves when we act irrationally or give in to temptation. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the responsibility. That’s something else, but blaming ourselves and feeling guilty make the problem only worse.

Second, we should expect those programs to get triggered again and learn how to manage them so that they don’t take over our whole psyche again. I’ll share a technique to do that in tomorrow’s post.

A Shortcut to Building an Identity for Success

Two months ago, I published a post called Why Your Personal Development Efforts Fail and What to Do about It.

In summary, our personal development efforts fail, because they are mostly on an intellectual level. We set SMART goals. We prioritize our tasks. And we schedule our days.

All of that is good advice and help on a certain level, but success requires us to go deeper than that, way deeper.

Your Identity Determines Your Results

Our thoughts and actions come from who we are, not from what we think on an intellectual level. On an intellectual level, you might think that you want to be successful, but if you aren’t a risk taker and hard worker, you won’t make much progress.

Beyond the intellectual level, we have our emotions, habits, personality, beliefs, and identity. I argue that all of that stems from our identity.

Finding Your Default Identity

Ask yourself the following questions.

  • Who are you?
  • Which personality traits do you have?
  • What motivates you?

You can find more questions to discover your identity in the post mentioned above. You can also determine your dominant personality traits. Which end of the spectrum are you closer to in the Big 5 Personality Traits?

  • Openness to Experience: inventive and curious vs. consistent and cautious
  • Conscientiousness: efficient and organized vs. easy-going and careless
  • Extraversion: outgoing and energetic vs. solitary and reserved
  • Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate vs. challenging and detached
  • Neuroticism: sensitive and nervous vs. secure and confident

Working WITH and/or ON Your Identity

Once you determine your default identity, you have two choices.

  1. Adjust your goals to match your default identity.
  2. Adjust your identity to match your goals.

Of course, you can choose the third option and combine the two. You can adjust some of your goals. Then, you can adapt your identity to the remaining goals.

It is possible to have a dominant personality but act the opposite when the situation demands it. Think about an introvert writer, who has to be an extrovert in a presentation. Or consider an extrovert businessperson who needs to stay alone to reflect on a problem.

Find Your Role Model

Once you made your decision, we can continue with the next step. That is to find a role model that matches your target identity. Your target identity can be one of the following.

  1. Your default identity,
  2. An identity that matches your goals,
  3. Or a combination of both.

Finding a role model is a powerful practice. Up until then, we are still on an intellectual level.

A role model is a concrete example. A person who has an identity that is similar to your target identity and had enormous success. That is also an excellent source of motivation.

If you’re an introvert problem solver, you can choose Albert Einstein as a role model. If you’re an extrovert visionary, Steve Jobs comes to mind. There are countless examples in the spectrum.

Success doesn’t require a single type of identity. You’ll find successful people with a wide range of personality traits.

Once you find your role model, learn as much as possible about them, especially their working patterns.

  • How did they leverage their strengths?
  • What did they do about their weaknesses?
  • In what kind of endeavors did they succeed?
  • How did they deal with the challenges?

Summary

Building an identity for success is hard work. Finding a role model that matches your target identity is the easiest and most effective way to do that.

Once you find them, study their lives and working patterns and model them to the extent possible, so that you can reach the same magnitude of success.

What I Learned from an Airplane Flight That Took Six Hours Longer Than Planned

Last Saturday, I returned back from vacation. What started with a 40-minute delay ended up in a perfect storm, literally. My three-hour flight ended up as a nine-hour journey between three airports, which was a great lesson to practice what I preach in my blog posts.

Lately, I’m writing more and more about personality traits. One of the most critical success skills is to integrate opposite personality traits and to deploy them whenever needed.

There are more than 600 primary personality traits, but researchers focus on the big five in practice.

  • Openness to experience
  • Conscientiousness
  • Extraversion
  • Agreeableness
  • Neuroticism

Studies show that people with high conscientiousness and extraversion, and low agreeableness tend to succeed more in their careers.

I believe that we can increase our success even more by determining the most suitable personality traits for the situation at hand and adopting it.

My Default Personality

In my daily life, I’m more conscientious. When things go according to plan, I’m introverted and relaxed. When reality doesn’t match my expectations, I become tense and vocal.

“Neuroticism” is a bad word choice in my opinion. No one would like to be neurotic. Yet, there are times when we need to be nervous.

You want to be nervous when you face a challenge. Nervousness gets your body into a high energy state. That helps you attack the problem at hand with all of your power.

In my career, it helps me to become nervous when things don’t go according to plan. I become alerted and energized to take the necessary measures. However, that isn’t always the best approach.

When Your Default Personality Doesn’t Work, Shift Gears

Shifting gears by shifting between different personality traits is an analogy by Dennis Merzel from his book Big Mind Big Heart. Let me explain it with my experience last Saturday.

Last Saturday, I returned from vacation, from Turkey back to Belgium. Airport transfers and flights aren’t the best occasions to be conscientious unless you’re driving the car or flying the plane.

I was triggered a lot by the chaotic traffic during the airport transfer. When I get triggered in my daily life, I get nervous and vocal. Neither of that would help me during the airport transfer.

There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t communicate with each driver in the traffic and tell them to be careful. Doing that with the driver of our vehicle wouldn’t change anything, but distract and annoy him.

My usual nervousness and extraversion in unexpected situations wouldn’t add any value at that moment. So, I decided to take deep breaths, calm down, and shut up. I consciously chose and adopted the most suitable personality traits for the situation at hand.

I Was Tested Whether I Learned My Lesson Well

I guess the universe wasn’t sure that I learned my lesson well and wanted to test me even further. My flight was postponed for 40 minutes. Again, something unexpected that would annoy me in normal conditions.

Since I couldn’t do anything about the delay, I chose to let go of the anger and disappointment about it.

On top of everything, the gate didn’t open until ten minutes before the delayed time. My typical reaction would be to get impatient, stand up, and look around. None of that would solve the problem at hand.

I was sitting in front of the gate. If the gate opened, I’d see it. And I expected the gate to open eventually. So, I calmed down, started to listen to an audiobook, and waited patiently.

It Was Just the Beginning

Finally, we got on the plane. When we approached our destination, the captain announced that we couldn’t land at the planned airport because of the storm there.

We landed at another airport, got some extra fuel, and waited for the weather conditions to improve.

In total, we waited for an hour or two on the airplane and spent another hour flying back to our destination. Many passengers became disappointed and started to express their discontent.

I kept letting go of my disappointment and stayed silent. Complaining to the staff wouldn’t change the weather conditions or magically move our airplane back to our destination. It would only make the whole situation worse for them and for me.

When You Can’t Do Anything about the Situation at Hand, Accept It

When we landed in our destination airport, we had to wait for an extra hour for our luggage. That was another problem no amount of neuroticism could solve.

Eventually, I expected our luggage to arrive. Honestly, it wasn’t that important to me if it got lost forever. It was just another hour of listening to an audiobook.

Finally, I got out of the airport six hours later than expected. Now, it was time to change the gears. I had to drive for one and a half hours from the airport to my home.

Now, I had to let go of the easy-going and careless personality and adopt the conscientious, focused, and even tense personality when I drove back home.

Conclusion

The moral of the story is that each polarity of the big five personality traits is useful in a different situation.

We need to know our default personality traits and be able to switch to the opposite polarity when the situation at hand demands it.

Integrating Seemingly Opposite Personality Traits for High Performance and Success

Last Saturday, I published a post about “being” goals. These are the personality traits that you cultivate to achieve your “doing” and “having” goals.

In the same post, I shared the big five personality traits, the 13 virtues of Benjamin Franklin, and a list of 600+ primary personality traits. Those lists should help you come up with your own list of personality traits to cultivate.

Today, I’ll discuss two approaches to personality traits, duality and integration. Our default approach is duality. Learning and using integration will significantly enhance our success with our “being” goals.

Let’s discuss both approaches and see their impacts on our personality.

Duality

Our default thinking is based on duality. In this pattern, we see the world in opposites.

  • Black and white
  • Light and dark
  • Good and bad

If we look at the big five personality traits, we would see two opposites in each category.

  • Openness: curious vs. cautious
  • Conscientiousness: organized vs. careless
  • Extroversion: introvert vs. extrovert
  • Agreeableness: friendly vs. challenging
  • Neuroticism: nervous vs. confident

Studies show us that conscientious, extrovert, and non-agreeable people are more successful in their careers.

An average career consultant would tell you to be conscientious and extrovert, and stop being so agreeable.

They’d think that you can be either organized or careless, an introvert or an extrovert, and friendly or challenging.

The world is more nuanced than that.

Integration

In the integration approach, we define qualities independent of each other. We don’t describe them as opposites of each other.

The best analogy to explain integration is music. You can define tones as bass or treble. You might think that they are the opposites of each other. In reality, they are tones with different frequencies.

Would you call a song bass or treble? You wouldn’t. A decent song includes sounds from a wide range of frequencies. The volume of the sounds from each frequency range varies throughout the song. A song is a composition of a variety of volume and frequency over time.

Now, let’s use the same analogy in personality traits.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness is a great example to explain integration.

Let’s say you’re friendly and compassionate and not challenging and detached. In this case, your approach would be like a song that includes only treble sounds and no bass sounds. Would you like to listen to such a song? I wouldn’t.

If you go to your average executive coach, they’d tell you to stop being friendly and compassionate and become challenging and detached. What kind of a song would that be? All bass sounds, but no treble? Who would like that?

The art is to add the traits of being challenging and detached to the mix as needed. If you’re a manager, you need to be detached once in a while and make the decision of firing someone. That doesn’t mean you can’t be friendly and compassionate when you share this decision with the related person.

Being friendly doesn’t mean not challenging someone when they’re making a mistake.

Extroversion

A challenging example to grasp is extroversion.

When I was in the college, I’d like to have a team of introverts and extroverts in our project team. The introverts would develop the project and the extroverts would do the necessary presentations.

The same approach is used in companies. On the one hand, you have the introverted engineers and on the other hand, the extroverted salespeople. You need both groups to succeed as a company.

If you could integrate both traits and use them whenever they’re necessary, you’d be unstoppable in your career.

Neuroticism

Integrating neuroticism is a hard example to grasp.

  • Who would like to be nervous?
  • What kind of a value would nervousness would add?
  • Isn’t nervousness the exact opposite of confidence?

To understand this, think about your typical college class. You have a professor who isn’t a bit nervous, because they know the topic inside out and gave the same lesson a dozen times before.

How would you feel at the end of such a class? Back in the day, I’d be bored and sleepy, because there wouldn’t be a bit of tension in the class.

In contrast, think about a student giving a presentation about their term project. They’d fail or pass as a result of this presentation. How would you feel during such a performance? It would be intense, wouldn’t it?

We need nervousness at some points in our lives.

Being nervous 24/7 would be an overkill, but at critical moments like giving a presentation or a meeting, being nervous increases the amount of energy our body produces. It’s up to us to channel that energy constructively.

Nervousness isn’t the opposite of confidence. It’s a physical state when your body gets into overdrive and produces high amounts of energy. You can be confident and nervous at the same time.

You need to be confident and nervous at the same time at critical moments.

You need to believe that you can succeed at the challenge at hand and at the same time, you need all the energy that your body can produce.

The next time you feel nervous, stop trying to calm down. Instead, focus on increasing your confidence and focus the energy that your body produces on the task at hand.

Conclusion

We tend to see the world in opposites. This perception of reality doesn’t serve us when we cultivate our desired personality traits.

Integration is a better approach than duality. In this approach, we cultivate the desired traits without trying to suppress our existing traits.

We see our personality as the composition of a variety of traits. We use each trait whenever it is necessary without trying to suppress others.

As a result, we develop a strong personality that performs well in variety of situations and success becomes inevitable.

Determine and Cultivate the Personality Traits that Serve Your Goals

When we first start setting goals, we set “having” goals.

  • I want to have a million dollars in the bank.
  • I want to have a Ferrari.
  • I want to have a five bedroom home.

There’s nothing wrong with “having” goals, but after a while, we quickly realize that we need “doing” goals to achieve our “having” goals.

  • I want to get an MBA.
  • I want to start a business.
  • I want to sell my business.

Most of us get stuck in the “doing” goals and have a hard time achieving them because there’s a lower, subtler level we are missing. That lower level is the “being” goals.

  • I want to be decisive.
  • I want to be resourceful.
  • I want to be courageous.

We need to set and achieve our “being” goals to achieve our “doing” and “having” goals.

Setting Being Goals

Here are a few questions for you to reflect upon.

  • Do you have any “being” goals?
  • Which “being” goals do you have to set to achieve your “doing” and “having” goals?

That second question isn’t that easy to answer, because most of us lack self-awareness. Sometimes, we don’t even know the criteria that we have to evaluate ourselves with. It’s in the domain of what we don’t know we don’t know.

Most of us know that we need self-discipline to succeed. Some of us are also aware that success requires courage as well. But have you thought about being decisive?

  • Do you consider yourself decisive or not?
  • How does that affect your success in your private and professional life?

Which Personality Traits Do You Need to Cultivate?

Take a moment and think about which personality traits you need to cultivate to achieve your goals. Can you come up with a list?

It’s not that easy to see flaws in our personality. If you aren’t lucky to receive feedback from others, you might remain unaware of them for the rest of your life.

Going over a list of personality traits and virtues can help you evaluate yourself and find your weaknesses. Then, you can set being goals based on your evaluation. I’ll share three lists with you in this post.

Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues

Benjamin Franklin practiced 13 virtues. He focused on a single virtue per week. You can read more about his practice in his autobiography.

  1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
  2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
  3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
  4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
  5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
  6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
  7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
  8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
  9. Moderation. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
  10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
  11. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
  12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
  13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

The Big Five Personality Traits

If you do a google search on personality traits, you’ll come across lists that consist of hundreds of personality traits. That might be overwhelming, and you might wonder where to start.

An excellent place to start is the big five personality traits, which covers the basics.

Openness to Experience

Are you more inventive and curious or more consistent and cautious? My life experience taught me that we need to have a balance between these two polarities.

When you’re stuck in a particular situation, innovation, diversification, and inventiveness pay off. When you find a job, business, project, or relationship that offers substantial benefits, it’s a good idea to focus on it, and be consistent and cautious.

It’s also a good idea to find an occupation that satisfies your openness to experience. Entrepreneurs are more inventive and curious, where else consistent and cautious people are drawn to jobs such as engineering, medicine, and law.

Conscientiousness

The polarities of conscientiousness are efficient and organized vs. easy-going and careless.

Our culture glorifies being efficient and organized for a good reason. But I do believe you have to add some easy-goingness and carelessness to the mix. That would open you up to new ideas and opportunities.

You can include both polarities in your personality. The more efficient and organized you are, the more room you have to be easy-going and careless.

Extraversion

The polarities of extraversion are being outgoing and energetic vs. being solitary and reserved.

Being extroverted is praised in our culture, but we are missing all the work done by the introverts. Think about all the technology developed by engineers.

Sure teamwork is important, but at a certain moment, someone has to sit in front of a computer and get the work done to make the rest of the system work.

Agreeableness

Are you friendly and compassionate or challenging and detached?

This can be a sensitive subject for many because it’s connected to relationships. We all know a person that is too nice and taken advantage of. We also know someone who is too challenging and detached for whom we have some choice words.

Neuroticism

The polarities of neuroticism are sensitive and nervous vs. secure and confident.

I guess no one would like to be nervous, but I think we need to add some sensitivity to the mix. Being overconfident can result in overseeing some severe mistakes and cause disasters.

Using the Big Five

Even though our culture glorifies one end of the spectrum for all of the big five personality traits, I recommend you cultivate a balance on all of them, even on neuroticism.

Here’s how I’d use the big five to set “being” goals.

  1. For each personality trait, determine where you are in the spectrum.
  2. Does your place in the spectrum serve your goals?
  3. If not, cultivate the opposite polarity to move toward the optimal point in the spectrum.

Remember, the optimal point is rarely on one end of the spectrum. It’s mostly somewhere in between those polarities.

It’s a good idea to work on your personality traits to modify them to serve your goals. It’s also a good idea to adjust your goals to match your personality traits. That way you’ll end up with a better match between your goals and personality and maximize your chances of success.

638 Primary Personality Traits

If the big five personality traits and Benjamin Franklin’s 13 virtues aren’t enough for you, here is a list of 638 primary personality traits.

You might want to go over that list once in a while to determine your own dozen or so personality traits to work on.

Conclusion

Most of us are focused on having and doing goals, but there’s a subtler, yet more effective dimension underneath them. That is who we are.

To achieve our having and doing goals, we need to set being goals that serve those high-level goals. To do that, we need to evaluate ourselves and determine which personality traits we need to cultivate.

Once we determine and cultivate the necessary personality traits, our doing and having goals are achieved almost on autopilot. They come as a byproduct of our personality.