This is the first in a podcast series on personality and the building of character. I’ve called it ‘Being the Best You Can Be’ because, in my opinion, this is the best way to fulfill our most important of desires: to maximise wellbeing for ourselves and for those around us.
An important way to maximise wellbeing is to understand one’s own personality and to have the skills to recalibrate it to function more wisely in everyday life. This is what I mean by the development of character.
1. This first podcast will address the questions: ‘What is personality?’ and ‘Why does it matter?’
2. Podcast 2 will suggest practical strategies for adaptive change. This naturally raises the highly debated and important question of whether you can change personality, including how we can recalibrate our natural preferences when needed.
3. Podcast three will then apply all this to the development of character and a practical moral outlook.
In the first podcast describe the general features of personality:
• that it is a preference system and thus motivates us emotionally
• that this deep motivational system is largely unconscious, that is before we reflect on it consciously, we are already predisposed to situations in predictable ways
• that personality it is crucial to understand as it influences everything we do and knowledge of that is of utmost importance in living a happy and successful life
• that personality is largely genetic and for most people doesn’t change much across the lifespan, so accepting, working with it, it is absolutely necessary
• that each dimension of personality is distributed on bell curves and the further we are apart from each other on each dimension, the harder it is to understand that person
• that this is a part of the egocentric bias, whereby we project our worldview onto others and become upset when they are not like us… but they of course do the same towards us!
• that re-calibration is the answer when we find ourselves in environments that don’t naturally suit us.
I then give brief summaries of the Big 5 : Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. Finally, we explore a number of combinations of these 5 traits, indicating how they help us ‘cut through’ and understand people and their behaviour more clearly.
