Personality and Personality Assessment

Personality captivates people because it holds the key to so much of what shapes human behavior: how we relate to others, choose professions, make decisions, and understand the world. It is what makes one person an extraordinary teacher and another a high-performing executive. It determines whether someone thrives in the spotlight or prefers intimate connection, and how they move through life's struggles and triumphs. It is also what inclines one person toward kindness and compassion and another toward mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness. Given how much of a life is shaped by personality, it is no wonder the subject commands such intense interest.

Personality can be understood as the consistent and enduring pattern of how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. It develops through a complex interplay of genetics and experience. We appear to be born with a genetically determined temperament that largely shapes how we respond to life, and it is the combination of our experiences and our reactions to them, across different phases of development, that coalesces into personality. Some psychologists hold that personality cannot be changed. I agree that certain temperamental traits are unlikely to shift significantly over a lifetime. However, personality as a whole can move toward a healthier version of itself when a person heals from painful or traumatic experiences that disrupted their development. There is even emerging evidence from genetic science suggesting that genes can activate or deactivate across a lifetime in response to changing experience, raising the possibility that such shifts may occur at a biological level. We are far from fully understanding these mechanisms, but the findings are compelling.

Insight into one's personality matters enormously when making life's most significant decisions: where to live, whom to marry, what work to pursue, and how to grow as a person. Reflection on one's traits, and occasionally seeking outside perspective to find clarity, can be immensely valuable in making decisions with genuinely positive outcomes. Once a person has built a life, a marriage, a family, a career, a community, that self-knowledge becomes even more important in making those relationships and commitments as healthy and fulfilling as possible.

Consider someone with a strong trait of dominance. In the courtroom, that trait may be an asset. In a marriage, unchecked, it can be corrosive. When a person recognizes dominance as one of their defining traits, they can learn when to rely on it and when to consciously access a different part of themselves. I approach all personality traits this way, not as fixed liabilities or assets, but as qualities with the potential to be healthy or unhealthy, useful or destructive, depending on context. Extraversion and introversion, risk-taking and rule-following, competitiveness and cooperativeness, planfulness and spontaneity each exist on a spectrum, and each carries both gifts and challenges.

The goal of therapy is not to change who a person is. It is to build insight and skills, support healing and development, and unlock the beauty and potential that already exist within each person.