Something Only You Can Leverage – Utilising Personality To Its Full Capacity

Hi all In recent weeks I have been learning about personality, emotions, and the role they play in defining our lives. This first began when I was reading A book called Unstoppable, by Ben Angel in which he talks about mental visualisation and neurolinguistic programming (NLP) as a tool for Improving past experiences this got me thinking if it was possible to use NLP to change one’s personality. After beginning my research into what makes up personality and whether or not it was possible to change it, I stumbled across a book The Emotion Brain by Joseph LeDoux while reading this and connecting it with the information I had learned from other books I had read such as The Chimp Paradox (Peters, 2013) and Thoughts Without a Thinker (Epstein, 2013) I began to gain a clearer insight into personality, the brain, emotions, and how they all work. I even felt like I was able to formulate some sort of rudimentary image of how the phenomena of consciousness work.

I began to see how personality operates on much more than just a conscious level and this allowed me to realise the importance of personality in everyday life and perception. I believe everyone should be educated on how personality affects the big picture of our lives and on tools that we can use to alter our personality so that improve on and take full advantage of the unique traits bestowed on us.

What is personality

First of all, we need to be able to define personality. Personality can be broadly defined as the set of our unique behavioural patterns and tendencies, this applies to both cognitive (thinking rational) and emotional behaviours but, as you read through this post it will become apparent that these two are more intertwined than you may think. Personality is often divided into different generalised categories or dimensions one of the most popular of these multi-dimensional models is the Big Five (OCEAN):

  • Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
  • Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
  • Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
  • Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
  • Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)
wikipedia.com

It is important to note that there are other personality models out there but the big five is the most widely accepted. Our grouping across these categories remains relatively stable however we do vary across these dimensions over the course of a lifetime and personality has both an environmental and genetic component.

It is easy to think of personality as just a label and nothing else, doing this totally undermines the impact it has on our thinking, feeling, and perception. We often operate under the misconception that our rational mind is totally in charge and that we perceive things in a purely rational way. This is almost backwards in a sense, The rational mind is quite new on the evolutionary timescale and we evolved as primarily emotional creatures first. As stated earlier, our personality encapsulates our behavioural patterns, so it actually governs our perception as a whole, we will dive into how this works further on. Jordan Peterson at the beginning of his personality lecture series summed it up by saying

Personality determines how you choose to extract facts from the world

Jordan Perterson Personality Lecture 01 (2015)

the Importance of Understanding personality

After defining personality we can say that to understand one’s own personality better is to understand the lens through which we look at the world. Obviously, this lens has been in place for our entire lives but, to be able to categorise ourselves roughly across these 5 dimensions will allow us to better understand our needs and align ourselves to them. This knowledge can be used to identify what traits can be leveraged in our current environment as well as traits that could potentially cause problems for us. If we fail to understand the mode in which we operate in the world and the unique challenges and problems that it may present, we can often be left upset and confused, wondering why it is that other people are able to do things and blossom in situations that we seem to struggle with. The very simple answer to that is that we are all different people with different personalities.

in The Chimp Paradox, the author talks about our “chimp” (emotions) as something we need to manage and deal with. While this is true in the context of the book, which focuses on the chimp as mainly our most primal emotions and desires. I like to extend the chimp idea and use it as an embodiment of the genetic component of our personality and not just our most primal needs and instincts. It is helpful to our chimp and us if we make sure that we are in an environment that suits our natural inclinations and traits. For example, our chimp may be a natural introvert, so it wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial to have a career in which you were in a highly social environment in which you had to spend your energy on social interactions that required you to be relatively outgoing and extraverted in nature e.g. sales. This would leave you mentally drained and it doesn’t align with your chimps needs. if we ignore our chimp’s traits and needs we can begin to wonder why it is we may be so drained and mentally exhausted. Emotions are something that can be notoriously difficult to understand and when stress levels are high they can begin to override our thinking and take over1.

More than Just a feeling – Emotions and their effect on perception

We have been talking about emotions but what are they And what role do they play in our personality? Often emotions can be hard to pin down and remain highly subjective furthermore, the science supporting them doesn’t really help to define clear boundaries between emotions and the rest of the brain. The way conscious phenomena such as thoughts & feelings occur seems to be a byproduct of many interconnected brain areas all working harmoniously.

If we can have a better understanding of emotions and the role they play in personality it can help us not only realise parts of ourselves that may be outside of any conscious control but also realise the parts of us that have been moulded and adapted to fit our environment. It is these environmental adaptations that are subject to change and transformation and it is where our effort needs to be focused if we want to mould our personalities so they can propel us towards our goals.

Unconscious Processes

As we briefly mentioned our conscious mind is actually just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our perception of the world and how we act. There is a lot of processing that happens in the brain that we are totally unconscious of for example, think about the last thing you ate for dinner, no problem right? Now try to explain the processes that gave you the answer you arrived at, it’s not possible we simply are not aware of it, it just sort of happens. This type of unconscious processing is something that happens all the time in cognitive processes2. Our emotional systems have been around for a very long time and are no exception to this unconscious processing, it is actually possible for our actions to be affected by emotional stimuli that we don’t even register consciously3. The way it is laid out in The Emotional Brain is

conscious emotional experiences are a consequence of prior emotional processes (evaluations or appraisals) that occur outside of conscious awareness.

(LeDoux, 2003)(

Due to this aforementioned unconscious processing and evaluation of the world around us, Our emotional systems have a great influence on what we consciously feel and think, they also govern what we direct our visual attention to4. Emotions operate as a sort of compass in a sense directing us towards or away from things in relationship to our goals and internal values. You can already see this idea of individual personality being built, people have different goals, motivations, and genetic predispositions thus the emotional processing of stimuli can be “appraised” differently between individuals. To me though, it isn’t immediately obvious that our goals define our emotions and not the other way around in fact potentially our predisposed emotional reactions could potentially bias us towards certain things and having certain goals and motivations. It could be that these biases, based on the unconscious processing of stimuli, can somewhat partially constitute the genetic component of personality.

With this being said it seems only rational that we pay attention to our emotions and what they may be telling us because they were designed to act as our guide through this world directing our attention and our thinking towards things of importance.

We can already see this intertangled web of unconscious emotional processes, feelings, and conscious thoughts & attention emerge. This interconnectivity of it all is most likely one of the reasons that we are unable to totally categorise emotions & feelings vs rational thoughts.

Unwanted Emotions

As we have seen it is very difficult to define strict boundaries between our emotional brain and the thinking brain. It is then easy to understand how changing behaviours especially when they are strongly tied to emotion can be very difficult. There is still hope though, behaviours can be a result of learned experiences too, and it is this learned behaviour that can be modified and changed so that transformation can take place. Some of these behaviours are no longer useful to us in our current situation and they can often get in the way of our development into a well-rounded individual. Such behaviours can be a result of experiences that we may not even be able to consciously link back to, and how they operate and manifest themselves in our minds can be unknown to us. This is similar to Freud’s idea that we can be influenced by unconscious memories, we have already seen that emotional processing can be done on an unconscious level and in fact, stimuli that are recognised only on an unconscious level actually have a greater impact on us that stimuli we are consciously aware of5.

Now that we know the significance of personality and the role emotions play in behaviour and perception how do we go about adapting and transforming our personality to become better individuals? I will now further delve into methods for bringing unconscious behaviours into awareness and steps that can be taken to change emotional behaviour and changing conscious action to affect our personality.

Elevating Consciousness

The first step in being able to change adapted emotional behaviours is being able to know what they are, this can be a difficult endeavour in and of itself. Due to unconscious processing, it is really only the end result that we are presented with and even then, the actions we take based on this processing may be rationalised due to some other plausible but incorrect reason. The goal here at this stage is to increase our self-awareness of the emotions in our mind and to almost begin to explore thoughts and feelings and actions and try to associate them with some form of emotional significance. This is essentially “free association”, which is a Freudian psychoanalytical technique that is used to gain access insight into unconscious processes.

Letting things come to mind honestly and in an unfiltered fashion is very important here as sometimes when we arrive at a conclusion due to unconscious processes, we can actually begin to make up reasons as to why we arrived at that conclusion based on what seems plausible or acceptable. Often we come up with a priori theories and assumptions about why we do the things we do because we don’t actually know6.

I have spoken about meditation before but the reason it is coming up again is because when it comes to self-improvement it really is like an all-purpose tool. In almost every situation it helps to have increased self-awareness especially when we are trying to tune into our mind and emotions. Meditation/mindfulness makes us more aware of that stream of thoughts & emotions in our heads. It is a tool literally designed to elevate consciousness and awareness and the non-judgmental approach that meditation applies to thoughts and feelings fits in nicely with the idea and concept of free association.

The importance of awareness or lack thereof is also highlighted in the emotional brain with the author having this to say:

The fact that emotions, attitudes, goals, and the like are activated automatically (without any conscious effort) means their presence in the mind and their influence on thoughts and behaviour are not questioned. They are trusted the way we would trust any other kind of perception

LeDoux, 2003 p. 63

he then goes further on, saying

When one is aware of biases and possesess values against having these, he or she can excersise control over them

LeDoux, 2003 p. 63

Advanced Thinking – Writing & Journaling

Another great tool I talked about in my first post (Self Therapy Through Writing) was a writing tool called self-authoring in short, this is a program designed to help people understand themselves through thoughtful writing of their past, present, and future. In the documentation of my experience, I spoke about the fact that I had a greater understanding of myself and I was able to use this understanding to come up with a specific set of goals that take full advantage of my unique character. This tool is specifically designed for our purpose, to understand your unique traits and to create a plan that takes advantage of your specific set of skills while also, looking back to past events to think about how they may have affected your personality in a manner that isn’t best suited to us. I think in this post I touched briefly upon the meditative effects of writing, In my research writing this I definitely see a clear link between meditation, writing, and techniques like free association. Writing can often take on a meditative-like experience in which one freely associates with ideas in their head but, it goes one step further than having to then bring forth those ideas into words, clarifying them and making them more comprehensible in the process.

It’s Always Been Connected

A Method That sprung out to me is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which is essentially changing we think about the world and our internal values. This can have a huge impact on emotional our mental and emotional state and can be used to treat personality disorders and things like anxiety and depression. If we think back to our previous model of emotions and their impact on perception this makes sense. We mentioned before how emotions are evaluated or appraised against a reference to our internal values and goals. This demonstrates an almost 2-way street between these values and emotions, not only can we work through and identify unwanted emotional behaviours individually we can actually change our frame of reference by assessing and modifying our core internal values and goals. This in effect will change where we are navigating and our emotions will start aligning us with these new values and goals.

Increased self-awareness is something that helps here too, if we can become better at introspection and listening to our brain’s thoughts and feelings we can then start to decode them and gain a bigger picture of our current view of the world, once we have this picture set up then we can work to modify our values using an approach similar to CBT.

Therapy & Awarness

I have talked about becoming aware of our emotions and realising that our behaviours can be based on ideas that we hold about the world but I haven’t written about the ways in which we can change these learned behaviours anor to actually get an idea of which behaviours link back to certain experiences and memories.

Therapy is probably by far one of the most effective tools for constructing the link between experiences and behaviours. We shouldn’t underestimate the amount of power and effectiveness a trained professional can have in their specific field. Therapists can take their professional experience and the education in the surrounding knowledge and they can apply that to you, the individual, to help to realise, work through, and improve behaviours that are no longer welcome or holding you back.

Meditation and psychotherapy go hand in hand. Meditation cultivates qualities of the mind that allow for increased self-awareness and observation in the individual. The patient and therapist can use this enhanced observation to then illuminate where they should collectively focus their efforts. In M. Epstien’s Thoughts Without A Thinker, he talks about a patient of his, called Jean, as an example of this and states that her practice in meditation helped her to realise that she was keeping the author (her therapist) from being important to her. He then goes on to state that therapy can then begin to work on how she managed to keep herself from caring for people. I would like to note that the author emphasises that he became aware that she was avoiding her and he began to pursue this with her, I believe that this perusal helped narrow the focus down to a potential “problem area” or onto a topic that could potentially reveal something interesting. It was then the increased awareness of the patient that allowed for that realisation which enabled therapy to work as Epstein describes it:

This was doing what therapy does best —enabling Jean top to see how she was unconsciously reproductng behaviour that had once been adaptive but was now simply repetitive, using the relationship with the therapist to demonstrate her unaware inhibition of herself

Epstein, 2013, p. 131

There is a clear importance here in the relationship between therapist and patient.

Habits

Habits are a nice way can take advantage of this interconnectivity between the thinking brain and the emotional brain by forming habits we can actually embed behaviours into our mind so that we do them with little or no conscious effort using initial conscious change in behaviour we can actually select specific habits to help us embody certain traits of personality.

Imagine we are someone that is low in trait conscientiousness we are messy, disorderly and have trouble planning ahead. Creating a new habit that aligns with conscientiousness such as cleaning your room once a week or beginning to plan your days out with a calendar is literally consciously creating and applying a new behaviour. if we stick to this habit and it becomes somewhat automatic then we are embedding this newly learned behaviour into our minds and thus we are transforming our personality for the better. Habits are something that is notoriously difficult to form however, I think James Clear does a good job of providing the necessary tools and ideas to make it much easier in his book Atomic Habits, which is a book I urge everyone to read.

Summary

In summary, personality isn’t just a label it is deeply tied to our biology and experiences. If we find a way to take advantage of our biological traits and emotional needs, we can then also take the time to begin to adapt and change our personality so that we can become more well-rounded flexible individuals.

Footnotes & Sources

  1. Arnsten, A., Mazure, C.M. and Sinha, R. (2012) ‘Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down, primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in’, Scientific American, 306(4), pp. 48–53.
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  2. Nisbett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. (1977) ‘Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes’, Psychological Review, 84(3), pp. 231–259. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.3.231.
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  3. Bornstein, R.F. and D’Agostino, P.R. (1992) ‘Stimulus recognition and the mere exposure effect.’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), pp. 545–552. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.545.
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  4. Schupp, H.T. et al. (2007) ‘Selective Visual Attention to Emotion’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(5), pp. 1082–1089. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3223-06.2007.
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  5. Bornstein and D’Agostino (n 3) ↩︎
  6. Nisbett and Wilson (n 2) ↩︎