Psychology Today “How To Polish Your Personality” “Most people recognize the need to tweak various facets of their personality, and it’s entirely possible to do so. Change starts with a critical assessment of your traits and whether they work well for you-or don’t.” By Grant H. Brenner, M.D.
Image from verywellmind.com
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Summary of Article
This is a very helpful article in what I might dub get-out-of-your own way. First Dr. Brenner reassures us that, while not always comfortable, almost everyone, alone or better in professional consultation, at some point makes an inventory of their personality. We should do this, time marches on but most of us don’t reassess how our individual and relationship goals and needs might have evolved. We then should ideally work, alone or better in professional consultation, on adapting or modifying specific actions for better personal and or professional satisfaction.
The author uses cases to exemplify themes; cognitive dissonance for one individual “between his sense of caring and being perceived as hostile.” He would “either…let things slide…or react too defensively.” “Having better people skills, he suspected, would help him manage others more effectively.”
Another person struggles with “cognitive agility” being very ethical but also very agreeable had trouble speaking up on matters of principle worrying about “negative fallout.” Dr. Brenner points out that “Personality traits can be in balance with one another or out of balance of one another.” Being agreeable is great for teamwork but can also lead to submissiveness and even abuse. “Life demands flexibility, and that requires development of self-governance. Specifically, everyone needs the capacity for cognitive agility, the ability to switch back and forth between different parts of personality as situations require.”
Just promoted into leadership and comfortable with ambiguity, another individual, struggled with translating her vision with the level of detail team members, not comfortable with autonomy, needed to accomplish the desired outcome without them worrying about damaging missteps. When things didn’t work out as envisioned the leader would lose their cool. Called an automatic maladaptive reaction, not good at the executive level, the leader eventually adapted by realizing the team’s need for more detailed guidance. What evolved was a better process that facilitated solutions to arise, without worry, from the team.
Another case was about how some struggle in sorting out responsibilities in business transactions with those that are also valued as a friend.
In a heart-wrenching vignette, one individual hurts the one they care about, at a critical moment in an evolving relationship, because they don’t realize the need to respond appropriately and in a timely way to succcessfully keep the relationship moving forward. In this case, death of a parent in early childhood, inadvertently hardened this individual making them habitually maladaptive and rendering them unable to “make decisions appropriate to the situation at hand…”
Finally, an also gripping example, as relationships evolve, especially those involving child-rearing, partners make tradeoffs often putting off or putting aside individual needs but as time marches on everything evolves. Suddenly the children are gone and we reexamine our needs and our mortality. Research identifies steps in long-term relationships that lead to infidelity rather than leaving. These elements include; inertia (we can drift apart as situations and circumstances change), investment (we can be so invested in our relationship and do not want to be seen as “squandering their investment”) and social (“worry what others might think”). It turns out, not surprisingly, some personality traits for both partners that were effective at one point in the relationship might not serve each other so well later. In this case, the wife “was grappling with a problem of identity.” A problem, Dr. Brenner comments “is much more common today than is generally recognized.” Our personality can be suppressed, out of sense of duty etc., for years but ultimately is not forgotten such that when “circumstances” change…”authentic needs and personality traits…[take] on new importance.” Ultimately, according to Dr. Brenner, “The awareness of mortality can be clarifying. It drives a lot of our decisions.”
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