What Makes You Tick?
Take a look at your friends and family: They’re all really different, right? And not just in a physical sense, but also in terms of who they are and what they are good at. Maybe one has great taste in clothes, or another is the go-to person for notes you missed in history class, or another is a genius at Call of Duty. Yet no matter how different we may seem to be, we can also be assured of sharing certain similarities. The way that humans prioritize work and the enthusiasm in which we undertake different tasks has been the subject of much research over the years—and a lot of speculation as well. But it’s important to think seriously about what kind of a person we are. By understanding the similarities that we have with the behavior of other humans, we can benefit from their experiences and avoid common pitfalls. Scientists and sociologists call these similarities “personality traits”—and once you know yours, they can serve as signposts to point you in the right direction and make your progress through life just that much smoother.
But don’t be fooled: Personality is a hard thing to pin down. It is very complex and always evolving. A host of external factors help to shape it, such as your inherited temperament, your family and social environments, your peers, your education, and your activities; but despite our personal styles and quirks, there are common themes that researchers have been able to identify and measure. Most have to do with how our human brains process and integrate information, which influences emotions and behavior, which impacts how we interact socially with others. If you were a computer, then your physical body would be your mainframe and your personality traits, or the fundamental psychological factors that shape how you relate to the world, would be similar to your operating system.
Happily, you are not a machine—you have vast and unprogrammable depths—but you can start now to identify certain basic tendencies, or traits, in your personality that will help you make an informed decision about your future. After all, when it really comes down to it, the only difference between doing something you love and doing something you hate is your ability to know what you love and pursue it. Maybe you think you know yourself pretty well by now, but chances are you aren’t aware of things going on in your subconscious (the hidden part beneath your conscious mind), as well as habits you’ve acquired over the years.
TEMPERAMENT
Temperament is the bedrock of personality. It can be hard to differentiate the two, but personality is actually the expression of temperament.
Temperament is defined as the innate emotional activity that we inherit from our parents, and is identifiable when we are tiny babies in the way we, say, react to strangers or a change in temperature or light. Temperament can be developed or squashed by the way we are raised, including how receptive our caregivers were to our needs, but it remains our default condition. Some of the characteristics studied in babies that are associated with temperament are:
- Activity levels (relaxed or amped)
- Consistency of habits (sleeping, eating)
- Distractibility
- Sensitivity
- Irritability/frustration
- Persistence
- Approach/withdrawal to novelty
These qualities are, in the very broadest of terms, inherited from your folks and are the psychological hand you are dealt when you come into this world. The more accepting you are of your natural temperament, the easier it will be to create a life that works for you. In other words, you can grow into your personality, but you can’t grow out of your temperament.
PERSONALITY TRAITS
Now we wade into deeper waters. Personality traits, which are an expression of temperament, are considered to be intrinsic to who we are and have been studied as a way to categorize people into certain psychological “types.” Researchers are consistently coming up with new studies on this topic, but the theory of different kinds of personality types is largely based on psychological preferences that were the brainchild of a Swiss psychiatrist named Carl G. Jung (1865–1961).
He worked with Sigmund Freud, who is widely considered to be the father of modern psychiatry.
Jung was a complicated man with a lot of issues. (When he was a child, he used to faint every time he had to go to school or study.) He viewed the human experience as a kind of mythic journey and used the word “archetypes” to describe primordial patterns of behavior that give our lives significance. Behaviorists and psychologists either love him or laugh at him; yet his work lives on and can be a useful lens to look through to see ourselves, our struggles, and how we think. Jung believed that human behavior, varying as it does from individual to individual, is actually the result of major differences in how we use our mental capacities. In his theory, personality is dependent on a temperamental tendency toward external or internal processing, plus other opposing mental functions that Jung described: the way we receive information (sensing or intuition) and the way we process information (thinking or feeling). During World War II, two American women, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, added an additional function to Jung’s basic theory on personality. They described two ways in which a person might prefer to classify information (perceiving or judging).
One personality trait that is very useful to know about yourself is your level of extroversion (or its sister, introversion). Many psychologists and sociologists consider an individual’s natural preference for one over the other as an intrinsic part of their personality. Simply put, these qualities describe how and under what circumstances you tend to get your energy and where you like to put your focus. Everyone comes equipped with both, but individuals tend to express one over the other. Knowing which way you trend is a good baseline.
An extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people; they prefer doing to thinking and like to work out problems by talking about them with other people. Being alone makes them feel apathetic and crabby; they prefer a wide circle of friends, a variety of activities, and a full social calendar.
An introvert is a person who gets energized by the life of the mind; they like thinking and exploring their thoughts and feelings. They get drained when they spend too much time in groups of people and often prefer a few deep friendships to the social whirl, with plenty of breaks to just hang out and chill.
You are probably thinking that you and every teenager you know is an extrovert, but remember, extroversion and introversion are traits you’ve had since birth. If you were the kind of baby that got over-stimulated easily and cried when too many relatives passed you around at Grandma’s, you may be a natural introvert who has learned to be extroverted because you simply like people. An introvert is not necessarily somebody who is shy or quiet or a wallflower at parties, but somebody who feels recharged after spending time alone; in contrast, an extrovert is not necessarily a chatterbox class president or the life of every party, but rather is somebody who feels more alive after interacting with others. They clear their heads by talking with friends or doing something that engages them externally—like a sport. In other words, an introvert can be social and an extrovert can like to be alone, but that’s not where they get their juice. I bet you have an instinct about whether you tend toward introvert or extrovert, just by how you feel after you leave a big party (psyched or drained), but just in case you don’t, take the quiz on pages 26–27 to find out. If you want to dig deeper into the other kind of personality preferences, check out the websites I’ve listed in the sidebar on page 28.
Recent studies into the plasticity of the brain and human adaptability prove that we can learn all kinds of behavior and use any tool available to us, given the right circumstances, and new information is coming to light all the time. A study reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, and based in a field of medicine called neuropsychology, has called into question the idea of dividing the brain into left and right hemispheres. Author and neuroscientist, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and his partners, looked at the way the brain processes information and believe that there is a better way to understand how we think and why. They wrote a book about it called Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think.
Generally speaking, these authors claim that rather than divide the brain into right and left hemispheres, we should split it into top and bottom systems. The top-brain and bottom-brain work in tandem, but the top-brain system uses information about the environment and is more literal. The bottom-brain system uses signals from the senses and compares information stored in memory to interpret the world, in a more abstract way. According to Kosslyn, people can predictably fit into four different categories depending on to what degree they rely on each brain system:
Mover Mode Both top and bottom brain systems are being used in optimal ways. In this scenario, a person would be good at taking in external information and then interpreting the data for subtleties and significance. They like to hatch their own plans, execute them, and see the consequences of their actions. They make good leaders.
A’s ________ B’s __________
If you answered mostly A’s, chances are good you are looking for a party most of the time and have a lot of extrovert qualities. If you answered mostly B’s, you are most likely more introverted and would appreciate a little break from the craziness of the high school social scene. Now that you know, write it down here:
I am more of an ___________________________________.
All this talk about personality traits and brain systems only scrapes the surface of the digging you can do into your own tendencies. If you are into this stuff and would really like to know more, there are tons of free tests and explanations online, including a popular one called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, available at personalitypathways.com or humanmetrics.com. It is used by a lot of employers, coaches, college admission counselors, and even matchmakers, to help understand personality or psychological type and create good fits at work, on teams, in partnerships, and in school. It has its share of detractors, including some serious scientists, so take the results with a grain of salt and remember what I said about adaptability. If what you read seems apt to you and helpful, then great, but if it doesn’t seem to fit, don’t worry about it. These sites offer interesting reading regardless of the quizzes, as well as in-depth explanations about the different personaility types, why they matter, and how you can best apply the information. They can also help explain why certain traits in your friends or siblings drive you nuts! (It’s pretty fun.) You can also go to CelebrityTypes.com and check out famous people that match your MBTI personality type, which is a crack-up. Like I said, take what’s useful and leave the rest.
Perceiver Mode In this mode, the bottom-brain system is typically used. These people tend to look deeply and introspectively into their experience and try to understand the significance in a larger context. They prefer not to make or put into action grand schemes. They tend to shy away from attention and find meaning in translating what they perceive in a more personal way. These people make great artists and healers.
Stimulator Mode In this mode, the top-brain is utilized. These are the radical dreamers, who can make and execute grand plans but don’t always see the trees for the forest. They don’t foresee the consequences of their actions and can get themselves into trouble with their insensitivity. However, they can also be the disruptive thinkers that move society forward.
Adaptor Mode This mode is when both systems are operating on low-burn. These folks are the easy-going, free spirits who live in the moment and easily adapt to moment to moment changes. They are not into making plans or translating their experiences into a larger context—they are just here. They easily relate to others and don’t get hung up on one idea or scheme over another. They are great team players.
Sections of the brain don’t work separately from one another, just as you are not only extroverted or introverted. All of these theories simply suggest a preference for one style over another. These kind of preferences flow from your subconscious, so don’t be surprised if you aren’t consciously aware of any of these mental functions. You can start to get a feel for your own orientation by paying more attention to how you react to different situations and what kind of operations you use to function in the world. For instance, someone who has a greater tendency to gather information by sensing will rely on literal, concrete data more often than someone who intuits information (uses more abstract measures). We all use both sensing and intuiting to gather information, but to different degrees and comfort levels, depending on our personality. In the conscious world, this means that a sensory person (one who relies on the top-brain system more typically) will predict a snowfall by listening to the weather report, looking at the thermometer, and feeling a chill in the air. An intuitive person (one who relies on the bottom-brain system more typically) will come to the same conclusion simply consulting their inner world, remembering a snowy day in their past, and declaring, “Feels like snow.”
Consider your own brain for a minute. Which of the above criteria feels like it fits you?
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
This kind of self-identification as it’s used here is not intended to be some kind of be-all, end-all scientific analysis that preordains your future. No person is a static being locked into their behavior. Your preferences will evolve your entire life. What’s useful at this moment is to see if there’s a pattern or tendency that can serve as a guide along the way. Take, for example, a leadership seminar I once attended where the organizer split the room up into two groups of people: those who rolled their toothpaste-tube up neatly from the bottom, and those who smushed it haphazardly in the middle. Turns out, I’m a smusher, big time, and smushers tend to drive rollers crazy. At the very least, I learned never to marry a roller. I also learned that I would not be happy in my work if the role I had was inflexible, exacting, or strictly monitored. In other words, I would make a lousy air traffic controller. Does this mean I will never choose to roll-up the toothpaste tube from the bottom? No. But it means that it’s not my preference, it does not come naturally, and I am a way happier person if it’s not an issue with the people I work and live with.