#27: The Myth About Your Personality
“I am someone who…” Ever catch yourself saying this? “I am someone who...loves animals...needs to have coffee first thing...needs to have my desk completely clean before I work...loves to manage the details of an event...freaks out at the thought of public speaking…”
Do you do this consciously? Or do you use it as a way of explaining your behaviors?
I’ve been into personal growth since I was a kid. It wasn’t from a place of deficiency. It was more about testing my own limits.
Remember those Presidential Physical Fitness Tests? Do you know the ones where you had to do a shuttle run, a V-sit reach, and a bunch of other activities? Well, I had a pull-up regimen at home because the only thing standing between me and that top patch was the pull-ups. And BY GOD I WAS GOING TO GET THAT TOP PATCH. So I worked at my pull-ups for a couple of weeks. And guess what? Yer gal earned the Top Patch. Three times, thank you very much.
Did I work hard because I wanted those patches sewn to my cheap nylon jacket as a status symbol? Nah. That jacket was a total fashion bummer...but what did I know about fashion at age 11? I DID, however, like the challenge of working toward a goal.
And it’s an orientation that’s always stuck with me. “I’m someone who enjoys personal development” is a sentence you’d likely hear me say.
The thing about this statement is that it’s deceptively powerful. Because each time I say it, I anchor into that identity. And I reinforce my self-concept that’s rooted in preference, not some sort of singular life directive. Which is how we tend to think about personality tests. We think they’re a fixed representation of our innermost self.
In today’s article, we’ll explore why this way of thinking about personalities is a myth...and I’ll share a more helpful way to think about personality.
As humans, we’re always looking for ways to understand ourselves better: namely, why we think and feel and act the way we do.
And in the last several years, I’ve seen the rise of all sorts of personality tests. Nevermind those Buzzfeed quizzes about Disney Princesses, let’s talk about the Enneagram. It’s difficult to scroll your screen without reference to it across social media and among friends. We like a good shorthand to understand ourselves and to explain why we are the way we are. It helps us feel validated and like we’re part of a community...with some sense of control, instead of questioning what’s wrong with us.
These personality tests also seem to help us understand other people as well. After all, why other people are the way they are isn’t just a fun game you play with coworkers. It’s one of humanity’s enduring mysteries.
But there’s a downside to this cultural compulsion to categorize ourselves via personality tests. Because when we start to identify as a certain type of person, our self-concept or identity can harden.
If you’re even remotely interested in self-awareness and personal development, you’ve likely taken some type of online personality test. MBTI, the Enneagram, the Big 5, Gretchen Rubin’s four tendencies, and the list goes on. You take these personality tests as tools to learn more about yourself. To an extent, it can feel comforting to take a quiz and get some degree of validation for why you feel the way you do.
But a lot of the mindset work I do with clients is rooted in the premise that you create what you believe. If you believe you’re a certain type of person, then your brain will seek out evidence that supports you seeing yourself as that type of person and will then take action that solidifies that identity. You’ll become that person...for better or worse. This is true for reasons that have to do with your brain’s Reticular Activating System, which I won’t get into today.
Personality tests are essentially a survey of your preferences about your identity that reflect your unconscious, unmanaged mind. Because who you are is not an immutable circumstance. Who you are is just a collection of thoughts you currently have. And you can change your personality, if you want to. This is something we fail to remember as a society. Instead, our societal interpretation of personality tests are similar to if they were to “diagnose” you with a chronic disease, but the chronic disease is based on a symptom that’s actually totally “curable”...as in, your thoughts.
To clarify: I’m not suggesting you have to, or even ought to, change. Regardless of whether you’re into personality tests, it’s really helpful to know that you can change your “personality” if you want to. This is so important because when you identify deeply with a certain personality “type,” you may be less likely to see the potential for change in yourself. But when you view your identity as a collection of thought patterns, then your personality becomes a choice. And if you can start choosing to think and embody traits that are more desirable to you, then you’re making changes at the identity level that will filter through your entire reality.
During the last few years, I’ve notably shifted my MBTI “type” by learning to change the thoughts that created certain feelings and actions for me. That wasn’t my goal of course, it’s just something I noticed that happened after several years of self-coaching.
I used to be an ENFP, where the E and F were heavily skewed. And recently, I retook it because I was curious about how the challenges of this past year and my own coaching training and work these last few years would influence it. And my scores were notably different. My E and F were much closer to the middle now. Of course, I took a test and gave different answers, so I got a different result. But it was interesting to me that in all those cases, my scores were much closer to the center of the spectrums.
And now? It’s freeing to know that I could make so-called personality shifts based on a different choice about my thought patterns. And that I could do this at any time.
Do I have traits that others may find problematic? Sure. But I don’t particularly want to change. For example, I don’t like project management. And I’m okay with this preference. I don’t aspire to be a project manager. Side note: every time I see someone with the initials “PMP” behind their name on LinkedIn, I giggle to myself because I always--without fail--read it as PIMP.
So, no, I don’t want to change my lack of preference for project management. And I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything in life with this preference, but I know it’s created by my thoughts about those experiences. Even though I’m not into project management, I also know that I can change that if I want to in the future.
I also find coaching fascinating, and I love sports in general, yet I find watching most pro sports largely unappealing. This isn’t because I’m a certain kind of person. It’s because of my thoughts about it. And, right now, I don’t want to change those. But that may change because my partner is very into professional sports--he even works directly with professional football players. So who knows? Maybe I’ll want to learn to appreciate pro football more, as we spend more time together.
The joy and power here are in our freedom to choose. To make a conscious choice about who we want to be, rather than accepting that our unmanaged minds determine who we are.
As you consider your midlife pivots, whether they’re professional or personal in nature, knowing you have more agency here than you previously thought is exciting, isn’t it?
And if you’re wanting to explore this further for yourself, especially as it relates to your professional fulfillment, then make sure you’re up-to-date on all these resources and the program launches.
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