The Importance of Personality: Why You Should Know Yourself

by Mitchell Thompson

(4 Minute Read)

In the modern age of social media, the necessity for introspective thought and self discovery is far less pertinent than it was for our ancestors. What need is there for deep intuitive thought when you can Google any answer for any question? Well, there are some questions that cannot be answered by Google, and some questions that require deep introspective thought.

Like “Who am I?”

“What do I want out of this life?”

“Why am I the way I am?”

Though you cannot Google the answers to these sort of questions, you can utilize tools on the internet to help explore the depths they pose. For example, in attempting to answer “Who am I?” you can utilize certain tools like personality tests (which we will use today) to find some clarity.

There are many different types of personality tests; MBTI 16 (Myers-Briggs), The Big 5, DISC, and a few others. The CIA’s preferred test today is still the MBTI 16, or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which uses a 16 factor model of 16 different traits to categorize peoples’ personality type. Though the MBTI is effective, it can be tedious and overwhelming for a lot of people in practice. With my health and wellness consultations, I have resorted to using The Big 5 Personality Test instead as I have seen my clients benefit more from the Big 5 than any other tests - including the MBTI.

“But what is The Big 5 Personality Test? What will it tell me about myself?”

To keep it simple, if you ask enough people enough questions about themselves using specific phrases, questions, or adjectives, you will get similar responses that are answered in similar ways across all people. Through this specific process of questioning and answering, there are revealed 5 differing dimensions of personality traits that we can “measure” in accordance to an individual’s responses to such questions.

These 5 different dimensions are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Openness indicates how relatively open-minded an individual is and their willingness to experience new things. Conscientiousness reflects how much a person “cares about the details” and maintains a striving toward goals/organization. Extraversion is simply how socially outgoing and personable an individual is. Extraversion can also be seen as an individual’s propensity for positive emotion (“high energy”). Agreeableness is pretty self evident in its naming, but when broken down has some unique things to consider. Neuroticism is one’s sensitivity to pain and negative emotion. It helps to think of Neuroticism as essentially the opposite of Extraversion. All in all, I remember these 5 traits using the acronym OCEAN.

This “5 factor solution” (meaning there are 5 primary factors for consideration) can be further broken down into a total 10 factor solution with 2 sub personality traits per letter of OCEAN. Where:

Openness breaks down into “Intellect” and “Creativity” where intellect correlates to abstract thinking (not how smart you are) and creativity is how creative you are.

Conscientiousness breaks down into “Industriousness” and “Orderliness” where industriousness correlates to productivity and work ethic and orderliness expresses how orderly you are.

Extraversion breaks down into “Assertiveness” and “Enthusiasm” (self explanatory; how assertive are you and how enthusiastic how you).

Agreeableness breaks down into “Compassion” and “Politeness” (self explanatory; how compassionate are you and how polite are you).

Neuroticism breaks down into “Withdrawal” and “Volatility” where withdrawal maintains an individuals willingness to engage in confrontation while volatility is the unpredictability of the individual’s behavior.

When you take the Big 5 Test, you will score for each trait and its subsequent sub-trait on a percentile scale from 0-100. For example, if you score 12/100 on Extraversion, 8/100 on Assertiveness and 15/100 on Enthusiasm, then in a room of 100 people, 88 of them are more extraverted than you, 91 are more assertive, and 84 are more enthusiastic. What a personality expert or consultant like myself will do is help you analyze your scores and help you determine what they mean. However, a personality expert or consultant is not required. If you can simply understand what your 5 primary traits are and their subsequent sub-traits in their most basic form, then you can ultimately get to know yourself better. Though these sort of tests aren’t perfect, they are a good baseline for any individual to begin when looking within and trying to get to know their self a bit better.

And getting to know yourself a bit better is only good. In fact, I’d argue that the reason 80% of the population doesn’t workout and doesn’t take care of themselves to be baseline healthy is in part due to an unwillingness to get to know themselves on a deeper level. Most people don’t want to be healthier and better because they do not realize the greatness that could come from it. Most people don’t want to be healthier and better because they don’t have to - because they have the luxury of leading complacent/sedentary lives. Yet, with every client I’ve consulted and every client I’ve trained over the years, I can safely say that none of them knew what they were capable of until they finally did something. For some, it was starting with the gym. For others, it was starting with their diet. For some others, it was taking a personality test and getting to know themselves a bit better. Either way, every client I’ve worked with had at some point been blind to their own potential - which is why they were working with me in the first place. Being temporarily blind to the truth and temporarily ignorant to your potential isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Staying blind to the truth and staying ignorant to your potential is a bad thing. Either way, the choice is always yours.

If you’re curious to know what your Big 5 Personality Traits are and their subsequent sub-traits, click the link for a free test and free results.