who am I?

Most of us navigate our way through life on automatic pilot, relying on our fixed patterns of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to guide our reactions to people and life’s situations. This is done with little self-awareness. How do these patterns develop? We enter this world with a certain temperament, such as easy or difficult to soothe. It is believed that we enter this world as either an introvert or extrovert. We develop a certain level of attachment to our caregivers, such as securely or insecurely attached. We receive messages from our parents, teachers, peers, the media, social media, bosses, partners, friends, and life experiences, which we use to form a belief system about ourselves and those around us.

These combined factors lead to the construction of our personalities, which frame our system of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Personalities tend to be trait driven, meaning they are thought to be fixed especially after adolescence. I believe most personalities can be altered to change what doesn’t work in life. This is where self-awareness is key. You can’t change what you can’t see (or don’t want to see). There is a plethora of information about different personality types, such as Type A or Type B, or extrovert or introvert, to name a few. (We fall somewhere on the spectrum and can change our colors depending upon the situations we are in or the people we are interacting with.) Some people detest labels, but knowing our personality style and temperament help us to understand our behaviors, which can either work for or against us, and highlight what we want to change or leave unaltered.  

The following is a simple example of why understanding our behaviors towards others is beneficial. Opposites do tend to attract, and this duo can be disastrous. On the other hand, if managed properly these relationships can complement each other, and shift one’s behavior from being too extreme. Say you have a type A personality (the wife) married to a type B personality (the husband). In the morning, the wife, who tends to have a sense of time urgency, asks the husband, who tends to take be laid back and procrastinate, to take out the trash. The wife means take out the trash now, and the husband hears take out the trash whenever. At the end of the day, the wife realizes the trash hasn’t been taken out, becomes perturbed because once again he “isn’t following through”, so she confronts the husband. Of course, the husband becomes perturbed because the wife is “nagging” him again, and in his mind the trash doesn’t need to be taken out until the next morning when waste management comes for the trash. This example probably seems insignificant but these behaviors send a strong message to each party and this cycle repeats in a variety of situations, thereby creating frustration and discord for both the wife and the husband.

So, understanding each partner’s personality style can help reduce frustration and discord. The wife can help the situation by knowing that the husband will get the job done so she can avoid repeating the request, even though it is not in her time frame (i.e., immediately). Who cares as long as the trash is taken out in time. The husband can help by not viewing the wife’s request as nagging, and by reassuring her it will be done in time. It wouldn’t hurt for the husband to compromise and take the trash out the night before instead of waiting until the morning. Understanding how someone ticks, using effective communication, and compromising in situations help reduce negative interactions between people, whether it is between partners, parents/kids, friends, job relationships, etc.

Another driving force in how we engage with others is our level of emotional intelligence, which has been widely examined, especially in the workplace. Emotional intelligence comprises one’s emotional self-awareness and self-management, the ability to accurately read the emotions of others, and the social skills necessary to improve relationships with others. Our level of emotional intelligence is part of the system that drives our thoughts and actions, thereby affecting our interpersonal relationships.  

Why is all of this important? Because people want happiness and success, such as improved relationships, a more fulfilling job, having more money, and being less stressed and overwhelmed. But we get in the way of ourselves and our relationships, thereby impeding our ability to achieve what we say we want. If we step back and look at who we are, what our belief system is, and why we behave the way we do, we can make alterations in how we think and behave which can lead us to the happiness and success we say we want and deserve.