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Personality

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Personality

Background

This information is about the specific health area mentioned above. It comprises a combination of textual and video information, on our site and on external sites.  We will be adding new specific health areas and further information continually.

The idea is for you to understand more about the health area you are addressing before you get too far building your action plan.

General Information

Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole. (adapted from the Encylopedia of Psychology).

What is Personality?

Verywellmind say: “While there are many different definitions of personality, most focus on the pattern of behaviors and characteristics that can help predict and explain a person’s behavior.”  They have a good article (reviewed by David Susman PhD) setting out what is personality by showing its characteristics – defined as consistency, psychological and physiological aspects, behaviours and actions and how we express it (thoughts, feelings, interactions). It then covers how personality develops by looking at different schools of thought: Type theories (people are in different personality types), Trait theories (which view personality as as a result of genetically based internal characteristics e.g. agreeable, extravert, etc), Psychodynamic theories which emphasize the influence of the unconscious mind (Freud), Behavioural theories which suggest an interaction with the environment, and Humanist which emphasize free will and individual experience. See it in full here.

Types

Personality tests are beloved by high school guidance counselors and self-help book authors — but less so by many scientists. There’s controversy among them over whether clear-cut personality types exist at all.

A large new study published in Nature Human Behavior, however, provides evidence for the existence of at least four personality types: average, reserved, self-centered and role model. Each one is based on the extent to which people display five different major character traits, including neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

“It seemed like personality traits were very well-accepted and established in psychometrics, but personality types were not,” says study co-author Luis Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University. “I just wondered, could it be that the reason why people haven’t been able to establish personality types was there wasn’t enough data?”

However, there are many different views on the 4, 12, 16 or whatever number personality types there are.

Background Information

There is information available which will help you formulate your action plan – both on our site and on external sites.

On our site

PersonalityDrive

PersonalityDrive is about all aspects of your personality.

Personality is one of the most complex area of the body, you cannot touch It, feel it, monitor it, isolate it, treat it but yet it can influence every part of the body positively or negatively. Every personality is made up uniquely based upon DNA and life events. It can change over time and is sensitive to its surroundings. It can become damaged or developed by external circumstances. It influences our match making preferences, our social circles and our wellbeing.

There is much written about our personality but yet many don’t know their own personality or pay much attention to It until we are emotionally intelligent enough to manage it. There is a lot of articles about different aspects of personality but very few pull all the areas together in one place. We have attempted to take a holistic approach to personality and character.

We have relevant information on PersonalityDrive
Go to PersonalityDrive
CommunicationDrive

CommunicationsDrive is about how we communicate with each other, which is critical in many aspects of our lives.

Communication sounds easy, after all its one human’s biggest asset in the human world but how many humans are good at effective communication, looking at the statistics not that many. Why is that? Whilst some people are more reserved and quieter and others naturally never stop talking, effective communication can be taught but it seems it isn’t as a matter of course in our education system.

We created CommunicationDrive in the same way we created PersonalityDrive because we realised that both play a very important part in all the other Drives. Talking to experts and life coaches they often say; This person has some life issues but its because of their personality and the communication skills are quite poor, which makes the person feel inadequate to speak up and say what’s wrong.

In work relationships and family relationships personality and communications come high on the list of breakdowns; it’s her personality, She/he/they are so hot headed they listen to have what you say and then respond with the first thing that comes into their heads, full of emotion and lacking in clarity.

We have relevant information on CommunicationDrive
Go to CommunicationDrive

On external site(s)

Essential Life Skills have an article on how to improve your personality. Below is an extract.

“Contrary to what you may think, you can improve your personality!

We now know that not only can we improve the personality, but we can also develop it in ways we previously did not understand, or believe possible!

Until quite recently it was believed that personality is permanent. In 1890 William James, the famous Harvard psychologist, wrote in his influential work The Principles of Psychology, that personality was “set in plaster” by early adulthood.

This view prevailed for over a century; however, the idea that personality is more fluid has gained ground over time. We are now at the point where we realize that we have influence and control over which traits and characteristics we want to develop or refine.”

Go to external site

Psychology Today have an article by Alex Lickerman MD entitled Happiness in this World which discusses personality vs character. An excerpt is shown below.

I once conducted a job interview with someone I found to be passionate, energetic, intelligent, engaging, and prepared. As I asked her questions designed to produce an accurate picture of her potential future performance, I remained attuned to my emotional reactions to her demeanor, trying to hear what my inner voice was telling me about her. At the end of the interview, I found myself excited about the prospect of her coming to work for me. I had to remind myself to remain cautious, however, as I reflected on just how easy it is to confuse personality with character and how critical it is to separate them.

Go to external site

Video

Sometimes the owner of a video will not allow the video to be played on external sites.  If you see the video is unavailable on the left just click the ‘WATCH NOW’ link on the right and the video will play in a new window.

Personality types

This is a 20 minute Tedx Talk by Jean Kummerow which explains the different MBTI types with humour and makes it interesting, and the info below is from the video.

Jean specializes in leadership/management development and coaching and team building has worked with a variety of for-profit, non-profit and government organizations.

She is a leadership coach and coordinates the coaching consultants for the Blandin Foundation’s Community Leadership Program, a program developing leaders from Minnesota’s rural communities. She trains professionals internationally in the use of psychological instruments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and the MBTI Step II™ assessments.

She is listed in Who’s Who in American Women. She was named one of Minnesota’s best-known experts in career development to commemorate 50 years of vocational and career support by the Minnesota Career Development Association. A number of years ago, she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show as an expert on psychological testing and was featured in a short television spot on the Smart Women series.

Watch Now

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Questionnaire

In order for you to assess what you know about this health area, we suggest using a questionnaire. This might help you understand your situation in this area, or taking it might improve your understanding of the area.

You may be able to take this questionnaire online – either here on our site or on an external site – or download it and complete it on paper – it depends on copyright (and whether we’ve managed to build it on our site!).

The ways you can take a questionnaire:

More than one external site questionnaire, Questionnaire on our site

Take Questionnaire on our site

You can take a questionnaire on our site. This will score the questions automatically and give you a summary showing what your score means.

Our Questionnaire

Our version of the Big Five Personality test is courtesy of ipip.ori.org will take you 5 – 19 minutes to give a quick summary answer to 50 statements, which in turn will give you a score in each of the five areas.

This quiz is no longer available.

Take questionnaire on external site

You can take this questionnaire on at least one external site.

The BigFive Personality Test is available online – this test has been taken over 700,000 times.  You don’t have to register and the test takes about 10 minutes.  You get your results as a score in each area – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, each broken down into sub-traits.

Go to external questionnaire

Possibly the most well known type of personality test is Myers Briggs created by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, in the 1960’s. Myers and Briggs built on the personality theories of Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung as outlined in his book, Psychological Types, and developed one of the world’s most popular personality assessments, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator®, or MBTI®.  There are four opposing scales and you score on each.  They are:

• Extraversion vs. Introversion: Gaining energy. Extraverts prefer to be with others and gain energy from people and the environment. Introverts gain energy from time spent alone and they need periods of quiet reflection.

• Sensing vs. Intuition: Collecting information. Sensors gather facts from their immediate environment and rely on the things they can see, feel and hear. Intuitives look more at the overall picture and context and think about patterns, meaning, and connections.

• Thinking vs. Feeling: Making decisions. Thinkers look for logically correct solutions, whereas Feelers make decisions based on their emotions, values, and the needs of others.

• Judging vs. Perceiving: Organising your environment. Judgers prefer structure and like things to be clearly regulated, whereas Perceivers like things to be open and flexible and are reluctant to commit themselves.

So you can be either end of these 4 scales, giving 16 possible personality types. Each has a 4 letter code to show what type of personality you are, and there is a lot of information on each type.

To take the MBTI formally, you have to do it through the Myers Briggs Foundation.  This costs about $50 for an official test. However, you can take a similar test which will give you an indication of your type at 16Personalities.   This takes about 10 minutes and gives a good in depth summary of your type, which you can have emailed to you.  You can then buy a more in-depth report of your type if you wish.

Go to external questionnaire

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All areas of health are interlinked

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Find your initial focus

You might think that physical, financial and mental health are quite separate, and for some people they are. However, often a problem in one area has a knock-on effect on others. Losing your job can lead to anxiety and depression, which can turn you to drink and impact your health.

You might have a severe issue in one area but that can lead to problems in other areas, and the people treating you for the first problem won’t be equipped to deal with these linked issues.

For example, doctors and nurses can treat you for a physical problem but can’t advise you about your job or finances.  Nor for the anxiety that comes with it, apart from prescribing some drugs, which might or might not be the best solution.

We encourage you to take a holistic view – we look at all areas and offer support across the whole spectrum.

health areas interlinked

Even this view of health is simplistic, as you’ll discover later if you go down that route.  You might want to consider overall health, or wellness or wellbeing, which include additional types of health, such as occupational health (how you are in your job).   Then there’s happiness and quality of life – how do these fit?

If you’re interested in that, click the link here to see more information.

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Health Areas in Domains

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Domains

We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains. 

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area. You can create your own Action Plan to address this area, and see

Emotional: Anxiety, Compassion Fatigue, Depression, Gambling, Laughter, Narcissistic, Personality Disorder, Sleep, Stress

Environmental: Environmental Issues, Greenness

Financial: Debt, Family Finance, Financial Planning, Financial Wellness

Intellectual: IQ, Personality, Procrastination

Occupational: Jobs for Different Personality Types, Retirement Income, Work Life Balance

Physical: Alcohol, Disabilities, Dizziness, Drugs, Fitness, Food Preferences, General Health, Healthy Ageing, Illness, Nutrition, Sleep Apnea, Smoking

Social: Communication Skills, Communication Styles, Domestic Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Love Partnerships, Mental Abuse, Parenting Styles, Sexual Addiction

Spiritual: Are You Sensitive, Mystical Guidance, Spirituality

Each health area has supporting information and its own questionnaire.

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Understand Health

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Physical, financial and mental health

One definition of health is:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. 

The NHS define health as: ‘We use a broad definition of health that encompasses both physical and mental health, as well as wellbeing. This means we are not only interested in whether or not people are ill or have a health condition, but also in how healthy and well they are.’

We believe we also have to consider financial health, as this can easily impact physical and mental health. Click the button to see an example of how these are connected.

 It gets more complicated…

running physical health
See linkages between physical, financial and mental health

What is Health? How about Wellness, Wellbeing or Happiness?

The Active Wellbeing Society (TAWS) define Health as a state of the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease. They define Wellbeing or wellness as a way of life that aims to enhance well-being and refers to a more holistic whole-of-life experience which also includes emotional and spiritual aspects of life.  We expand on this definition of health to include financial health and mental health, to make it synonymous with wellbeing or wellness.  

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Health domains

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We break down the overall concept of health or wellness into ‘bite-sized chunks’ that we can actually do something about.  The first level we call health domains.

We like the Life of Wellness site and we have chosen the following domains.

1. Emotional Wellness: Awareness and acceptance of feelings
2. Spiritual Wellness: A search for meaning and purpose
3. Intellectual Wellness: Recognition of your creativity, knowledge and skills
4. Physical Wellness: Need for physical activity and balanced nutrition
5. Environmental Wellness: Positive awareness and impact on your environment
6. Financial Wellness: Debt reduction, cash flow balance or financial future planning
7. Occupational Wellness: Personal achievement and enrichment from your career
8. Social Wellness: Contribution to your community

wellness wheel

Health Areas

Within each domain, we have included a number of health areas. These are specific issues that you can tackle.  Within each health area, e.g. Depression, once you have subscribed we have built additional information and exercises which you can do to help in the area.

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See which domains you should address

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Having established that we use 8 domains, you need to understand which you should concentrate on.

The 8 are:

  • Emotional
  • Environmental
  • Financial
  • Intellectual
  • Occupational
  • Physical
  • Social
  • Spiritual

 

You can take a questionnaire, which scores you in each domain.  You can decide which domains you are strong in, and which you need to improve.

Another analysis shows which domains you should look at, but also which domains you want to look at.

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Locus of Control

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  • We want to help people in all aspects of their health  – physical, financial and mental. We also provide detailed explanations of how overall health (or well-being) is measured.
  • We believe these things are often linked, so we try and address health holistically. We are building templates, questionnaires and exercises to help you identify what’s important to you.
  • We think people should try and take responsibility for  of their own health as much as they can.  See below for what that means.

People look at things differently.  Some people believe things happen to them, while others believe they can influence what happens to them. Technically this is called the ‘locus of control’.  People can have an Internal or external Locus of Control

So how do you see things?

Psychology Today have a 15 minute test which gives you a summary of your position you can buy the detailed results if you want to.

My Personality Test have a 10 minute test which gives you a summary.

People tend to take more responsibility (locus gets more internal) as they get older.  However, external isn’t always bad – for example if you are physically unable to do some things you can accept it and focus on the things you can do.  This American video explains the concept and gives examples of how this can affect relationships.

locus of control

Internal

  • More likely to take responsibility for actions
  • Tend to be less influenced by others

External

  • Blame outside forces for what happens
  • Don’t believe they can change their situation themselves

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Add your attitude to change - see how you view changes in your life

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Do you need to change?

No matter how healthy you are at the moment, the chances are that there are some areas you could improve. It may be that you have a real problem in one or more areas, and you would like to make some improvements.

At YouDrive we accept that there are many different degrees of ‘not wellness’ in a large number of different health areas, ranging from physical illness such as covid-19 through mental illness such as anxiety through to financial problems like debt.  We try and help where the problem ranges from ‘slight’ to quite bad’ – after this expert help and intervention may be needed.

However, especially in these times, we have to try and make these changes ourselves, possibly with some help from others, whether remotely or face to face.

The thing is, to make an improvement we have to change some things.

This involves changing our behaviour in some respects, and that’s not always easy.

Henry Ford, the creator of the assembly line, is quoted as saying “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got”.  

henry ford

Another way of looking at this: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” – attributed to Albert Einstein.

Consequently we need to make some changes.  The problem is that we have already developed a lot of habits, some of which we need to break and replace by better ones.  Some of our bad habits have become entrenched, and the bad results they create in turn engender further bad habits to develop – in effect the bad habits can feed on themselves.

We need to understand how we can make changes and stick to them, and that’s what this part of your health profile is about.

It will involve some learning, through reading, some videos and some additional information and also seeing how you react to change currently.

It will also ask you to consider whether you feel you are in charge of your future, or whether you feel it’s all fate.

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Assess your overall health using a health questionnaire

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At YouDrive we try and help people improve their health. We use ‘health’ but we understand there are other terms such as wellbeing or even happiness that reflect how we are doing in our lives – if you’re interested in the different definitions and ideas see our page on the subject.

We want to help whether you have a particular problem – physical, financial or mental – or if you just want to improve some specific part of your life or just make some improvements overall.

You’d be surprised, but there has been a serious amount of scientific work done in this area over the last twenty years.

So first we allow you to assess your current health (or wellbeing, or happiness).  We do this by questionnaire.  Which one is determined by the type of person you are:

  1. You understand yourself well and want a quick overview of your health and wellness, and will drill down in any areas needing work
  2. You want to do a more detailed assessment and then focus on areas you’re already aware of
  3. You want to look at the whole situation in more detail across all the health domains.

By the way, we take your privacy seriously – we collect information that you choose to provide but we de-identify it as much as possible and will never share it with anyone without your explicit consent.

You can then drill down into some specific areas and there are more questionnaires to see your situation in these particular areas.  We provide you with specific information and refer you to other potential aspects of help. Our next step is to build a personalised action plan – for now we will make a suggestion for you to develop your own plan and then after a time you can see whether this has had a positive impact by retaking the test.

In future we will be engaging with medical and behavioural specialists to devise action plans for individual people with specific situations.

We have an overall questionnaire which you can complete which will assess your current state.

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Values, Attitudes and Beliefs

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We all have our beliefs, attitudes and values – these have developed throughout our life based on who we are and what we have done. Let’s look at what these are.

The University of Reading explain: “People’s values, beliefs and attitudes are formed and bonded over time through the influences of family, friends, society and life experiences. So, by the time you’re an adult, you can hold very definite views on just about everything with a sense of “no one is going to change my mind”.

The combination of your personal values, beliefs and attitudes are your moral principles that guide you in life and affect your behaviour. However, your views can wildly differ to others and in an institution such as a school, these beliefs may be counter to the values of the school, child development or indeed the law.” 

Let’s look more closely at the differences between beliefs, attitudes and values.

Beliefs

These come from real experiences – we think our beliefs are based on reality, but in fact our beliefs colour our experiences; also, an original experience e.g. when we were a child is not the same as what’s happening now. Beliefs can be moral, religious or cultural and reflect who we are. They can be rational (‘it gets colder in winter’) or irrational (‘I am never going to make something of myself’).

Attitudes

This is an immediate belief or disposition about something specific. It is a recurring group of beliefs and behaviours aimed at specific groups, people, ideas or objects. They will normally be positive or negative and we will always behave that way to the target group. Examples of attitudes include confidence (I can or can’t do something), grateful (I an entitled to / grateful for XXX) and cheerful (I am generally happy / miserable).

Values

These are things (principles or qualities) that we hold in high regard or consider to be worthwhile or right / wrong. They are formed by a belief related to the worth of something – an idea or behaviour. Some values are common (e.g. family comes first, the value of friendship) or cultural (which the whole community have – see video at Study.com here)

The theory

Links to Wikipedia

Expectancy Value Theory suggests you balance your beliefs about something with the value you attach to it. The Theory of Reasoned Action suggests that beliefs and evaluation about behavioural outcomes determine attitudes, and intentions lead directly to behaviour.

Beliefs

Expressions of confidence – can change over time

Attitudes

Learned predispositions to something – are subject to change

Values

Ideals that guide our behaviour – Generally long lasting and often need life changing experience to change

Iceberg demonstrating implicit and explicit bias – from Owlcation

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A Butterfly Life: 4 Keys to More Happiness, Better Health and Letting Your True Self Shine

Times of change can be a challenge, no doubt! Whether it’s a relationship breakup, job loss, or being diagnosed with a serious health issue. Or you may WANT things to be different, but it feels a little scary or overwhelming. The butterfly reminds us change can be beautiful, even necessary, in order to realize our full potential and live our best life.

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