What’s in a personality?
Personality is a term that is bandied about in general conversation often with very little effort going into trying to understand the word. The concept of personality traits has become popular, and you can easily test yourself online for free to discover something about your personality traits. For the sake of clarity, personality traits are different concept from the concept of personality. When we talk of personality, we are referring to five key elements that go into making up who you are (confusingly there are generally considered 5 personality traits, these are a separate concept). There are different models out there, but a well referenced and respected model comes from McAdams and Pals (2006). The rest of this section heavily references McAdams and Pals (2006), so if in doubt, this is where I am referencing.
Five principles of personality: A schematic (McAdams & Pals, 2006)
We could run a whole course just on the intricacies of personality, but the brief version will suffice. The first level is basically the human body you live in. It’s based on your DNA, and is the vessel in which you were born in. Applying our knowledge from the previous section over control/influence/concern – we can begin to ask at each level how much we can control. Our present understanding is that our DNA is relatively fixed, but we are beginning to see that there is some influence/control we have over the expression of our genes (google epigenetics for a never ending rabbit hole with varying levels of misinformation). We probably want to add hormone expression into this category as well, given that it is a physical element of our personality. The gut-brain connection is one example of where we can begin to influence the way our personality is expressed. If you eat poorly, exercise little, sleep horribly – then all of these physical elements will play a role in negatively influencing the way your personality expresses itself. So within this category, there are elements we can control, others we can influence, and probably some we should just accept. As research expands, we are finding more and more falls into the category of things we can influence. Again, what’s the relevance for mentoring teams? Well, if your mentees haven’t eaten, slept, and have been sitting in the same office for weeks – you can guarantee that the session will go poorly. Jordan Peterson, love him or hate him, says that 80% of the cases he dealt with as a clinical psychologist could be resolved through eating well, sleeping regularly and exercising (Peterson, 2018).
Category 2 is called dispositional traits, these are what people are actually talking about most of the time when they talk of personality traits – those things you get labelled on the internet. These are one of the few things cognitive psychologists are in agreement on. The dispositional traits have been tested over multiple cultures, differing time periods, multiple studies, and have been shown to be relatively robust. There is some argument around the fringes over should there be more than 5 traits etc, but generally speaking people talk about the personality traits as being 1) Openness to new experiences/desire to seek novelty 2) Conscientiousness, which is basically do you do a good thorough job, do you care about getting it right, do you ‘dot the I’s and cross the T’s’ 3) Extraversion, do you gain energy from being around others, or do you gain energy from being by yourself. The introversion/extraversion element is the best known of these elements. 4) Agreeableness, basically are you willing to pick a fight and argue with others, or are you disposed towards agreeing with others just to keep the peace. This is similar to being conflict avoidant, but is actually slightly different. As true conflict avoidance is a coping mechanism which falls under category 3. If you like debating issues and think a good argument is fun, then you likely rate low on agreeableness, same if you think it’s fun just to prod others to watch them react. 5) Neuroticism is basically your propensity to have neurotic thoughts. As well as how likely you are to have negative affects such as anger, self-consciousness, anxiety, instability and depression. As a gender studies tangent, women are on average more neurotic than men (Lynn & Martin, 1997) – however, it was men who designated what is ‘neurotic’ and what is not, so it could be that the label ‘neurotic’ applied more so to women is definitionally problematic. Men are labelled more psychotic on average though (ibid) – if that’s of any comfort. Back on track, an easy way to remember these five is through the acronym OCEAN – each letter representing a trait.
Now these traits are relatively static once you become adults, however are still within our control. They are perhaps a bit like our bodies, hitting the gym once won’t make a big impact – training for several years and you’ll notice the difference. So we can change these traits but the noticeable difference might take years. Doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort, but just be aware you are in for the long haul with these factors. Each of the five form a spectrum, which is to say it is not binary or either conscientious or not conscientious, but rather somewhere between the two. Some scholars have suggested that actually for each factor there should be two scales, extraversion/introversion might be the easiest example for this one. Whereby you can rate both highly in terms of extraversion and extraversion, whereby you love being with others, but you also love being by yourself. Which is the correct way to measure is yet to be settled, so you can create your own opinion on this. What is crucial though is to think of these things as dispositions, which means they don’t directly control your actions, they just influence what you prefer. Just because you are high on conscientiousness it does not mean you will be accountant, but it might mean you prefer working in jobs where order and structure is highly valued.
Category 3 is the part where things start to get really interesting from my opinion. These are the characteristic adaptions. These are the parts that have the biggest impact on our daily routines and behaviours. They include motives, goals, plans, strivings, strategies, values, virtues, schemas, self-images, mental representations of significant others, developmental tasks, and many other aspects of human individuality that speak to motivational, social-cognitive, and developmental concerns. They also include coping mechanisms and defence strategies – something I hope we can dig into in our physical meetups. All of these elements combine to influence the ways we show up and behave in situations, which is not to say they are the full story – there is 4 other categories remember. Each of these elements within characteristic adaptions are changeable, some take longer than others like changing your self image might be a long term project, while others can happen much quicker such as shifting goals. Good mentoring can involve gaining awareness around these elements, then beginning to have individuals make decisions about which elements they wish to retain versus which they wish to practice altering. Your role as mentor will often be to help lift peoples level of awareness around their coping mechanisms.
Category 4 is what we call life narratives. Simply put, this is the story you tell yourself about who you are. This story can be changed in an instant, and is therefore fluid. We cannot change the physical events of what happened to us, but we can change the stories around them in an instant. If you had a horrible experience, is your story about how the horrible event happened to you, your helplessness in the situation, and how it has ruined you? Or is your story about how you survived, the strength that took, the lessons your learnt and how you grew as a person after? They can be the same event, but the story surrounding the event is crucial. It is not about denying the horrible experience, but realising the ways in which the story and our relationship to the story can play a role in supporting us or holding us back – the power and choice is within you (although those with a positive upbringing have a greater chance of accessing those positive mental resources). Much of traditional psychotherapy therefore had a focus on retelling stories around childhood when you developed who you are, where you might have experienced events that felt horrible, but when examining with the understanding of an adult you can begin to shift your perspective on it. Stories told repetitively to ourselves influence the way we show up in the world, and therefore we need to be careful in our internal narratives and the stories we tell ourselves. A few quick examples, when you are loosing at a game of squash are you the type of person who tells yourself internally you are going to win, because you have come back from behind before, or are you the person who tells yourself you are going to loose now because this always happens to you. This story will make all the difference in the way you compete. Are you the person who tells yourself the story that your team mate is playing with their phone because they hate you? Or are you the person who tells yourself the story your team mate is playing with their phone because they are anxious and don’t know how to socialise with you? Again the difference in story is powerful and important. The story also plays a crucial role in stimulus/response mechanism we have discussed earlier.
The final category is the cultural bubbles in which we live. These bubbles might be as small as a relationship between two people, or as large as a country perhaps even the entire world if you’re feeling generous. This level is about the way we are able to express ourselves in a way that is socially acceptable. What are the norms within the society or cultural bubble in which we live. Some of these bubbles we might feel relatively powerless to change, other we might be able to exert a strong influence. The team bubbles in which you operate/mentor are one prime example where you will likely be able to exert a strong influence. You’ll be able to influence whether vulnerability is the norm, you’ll be able to normalise talking about feelings, you’ll be able to normalise deep listening. Also, be aware though of the power groups can have over you too, if you need an example of this look no further than the Asch experiment. Very few of us are able to resist such pressure to conform with group norms.
You’ll see that each of the 5 categories interlink with each other, just to make the picture more complex. For example cultural norms impact the way we interpret others signals, which leads to interpreting events in certain ways and therefore influencing our life narratives. Our life narratives become our truth or our reality, and then we begin to act in accordance with the stories we tell ourselves and take actions to confirm our stories as true – which can very quickly lead to self fulfilling prophecies and negative spirals.
The key takeaway for me from this model is that we can focus on which elements we have the most control over. The easiest and quickest to change is our life narrative, so we should be very aware of the stories we tell ourselves and constantly check whether they reflect reality or whether we are warping our perceptions of situations. The next big takeaway is realising the role our characteristic adaptions play in influencing daily behaviours - that is beliefs, coping mechanisms and goals. How conscious are you about each of these? The chances are maybe you have a few goals, but the rest is likely nicely packed away out of sight, and out of mind, meaning we are operating on auto pilot and oblivious to the ways out characteristic adaptions are steering daily behaviour. The final takeaway is becoming aware of our personality traits (OCEAN), leveraging what we are good at, but not really sweating the fact that we have some weaknesses here too. We can work on these over time, but know that it is a long term project.
Lynn, R., & Martin, T. (1997). Gender differences in extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism in 37 nations. The Journal of social psychology, 137(3), 369-373.
McAdams, D. P., & Pals, J. L. (2006). A new Big Five: fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality. American psychologist, 61(3), 204.
Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos: Penguin UK.