Day 6: Discover Your Personality

Today you will learn what personalities are, why discovering your personality is important for developing a purpose, and the how to process for uncovering your personality.

Summary

What are Personalities?

Personalities are who you are now, but they are also ideals for who you want to be or who you could become.

• They are evolved solutions to the problem of a highly complex world.
• Act as filters of our perception, cognition, and motivation influencing our actions in the world.
• Creates a mask to present to the world, but if it's the wrong mask it can leave you feeling like an imposter, inauthentic, shameful and not like yourself.

Alongside the positive attributes we show others, the personality also comprises of the shadow, the negative attributes we try to hide from others

• Our job is not to judge our personality. Our job is to understand it in its entirety and the role it plays in our lives.

Why are Personalities important to purpose?

Every day, you have to interact with yourself as well as other people in your family, work, and romantic relationships. Each of them has a unique personality.

People are different, and it can be challenging to understand other perspectives because you see the world through the lens of your own particular personality.

Although personality differences can be frustrating, they are important. Each personality type is evolved to solve a different kind of problem. Humans cooperate in societies by solving many kinds of problems together, through these diverse personality types.

You must learn to:

• Understand yourself and others better to more effectively cooperate with other people.
• Embrace and integrate the shadow, understanding your own capacity for good and evil, so that you may direct your personality and actions towards good.

Victor Frankel saw that a person is free to shape his own character. And man is responsible for what he may have made out of himself. What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them.

How to discover your Personality

We will use two approaches to understand our personalities: our perspective of our personality and outside assessment of our personality.

First Exercise: Present Authoring Faults & Virtues

• The Present Authoring Program has two modules. The first helps you understand and rectify your personality faults. The second helps you understand and develop your personality virtues.
• These activities will teach you how to observe yourself with a critical eye and question yourself
• Note: As we will use all the journaling exercises in this program in upcoming lessons, I recommend buying the entire Self Authoring Suite ($29.90).

Second Exercise: Personality Assessments

• We start with writing about ourselves first so that we're not influenced by the outside world yet, but once we've written that down, we want to compare our perception with outside objective data.
• Understand Myself: Based on the Big 5 personality scale and will give a comprehensive description of the factors and aspects of your own personality
• 16 Personalities: Based on Myers Briggs
• Principles You: Understand how you prefer to think, how you engage with others and how you apply yourself.

‍

Activity

First, spend time responding to the writing prompts in the Present Authoring Faults & Virtues program.

Then take at least one personality assessment (I highly recommend the Understand Myself).

Then reflect, what differences came up between the way you perceived yourself vs the assessment?

‍

Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.