Richard Leow
- Sep 29, 2022
- 4 min read

Why Personality Matters?

Some say it's in your blood. Some say it’s your birth date and time. Some say it’s written in the stars. Some say it’s your family upbringing. Some say it’s your gene. Some say it’s your culture and environment and occasionally, you learn about it from a survey.

It is Personality

If you are wondering what we are talking about - Personality, well you are not alone here. Mankind has always been searching for answers about themselves. This curiosity and demand to discover and understand our personality has grown exponentially with the global trend shifting from the materials focused into mental wellbeing concerned.

We see more websites featuring the 4,9 & 16 types of personalities and how it impacts our daily lives individually. In parenting, children and personal development courses emphasise on personality guidance as the core study topic. In professional settings, recruiters are starting to adapt and consider personality matches to develop long term employment and leadership skills in workplaces.

Understanding personality has suddenly become an important tool to help people understand us, to guide “me” understand “myself”, so we could learn, discover and develop ourselves.

Undeniably, our focus shifted from “doing well”(materialism) to “being well” (self-fulfilment) also indicates the increasing awareness of self-acceptance. Getting to know our personality helps us understand why and how we react and respond to our life events. The level of reactions varies depending on one's capacity to understand, feel, aware, reflect and more. Metaphorically speaking, personality is like shapes, colours and all the intangible qualities that we perceive and think we understand in a certain way. In fact, there are more than 1-2-3 dimensions to explore personalities.

What is Personality?

Oxford Languages defines Personality as the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.

Encyclopaedia of Psychology defines Personality as the individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole.

What is My Personality?

As we began exploring our personality, the first question that came to mind would be: What is my personality type?

Funny how we believe that everyone is unique, yet when it comes to personality, we jumped right into self-categorisation. Then, we start thinking to ourselves:

“I’m not a creative type of person” or “I’m definitely an introvert because I am shy”... etc.

Your personality is a combination of multiple layers of you, subconsciously and consciously. These layers of you give you a sense of being you.

How do you feel?
Why do you feel this?
What comes to your mind when this happens?
What would you do?
How would you react instinctively? Why?

These questions not only explain your patterns, when paired with different scenarios, past experiences and triggers, your reactions vary based on life events, childhood, beliefs, values, preferences… etc. At this point, you might feel a sigh of relief.

“Ah, this is me!”. …But wait…Did I create my personality or did my personality create me?

Our personality isn’t created from our life experiences. That is just our patterns.

The blindspot here to look out for is what is actually driving us to experience our life the way we did?

Usually, having undergone some similar personality tests, the answers instantly become your personality type as you know it, but there’s more layers of you than these. The fact is, we cannot recognise personalities hidden beyond the known life experiences in human history, thus hindering us from more in depth discoveries. To offer another perspective, personality will be unrecognisable if there is no range. This means we cannot know what happiness feels like if there is no sadness. Hence, what we can learn from personality tests are statistical, generalised, and somewhat relatable but not precise. We need more than generic answers to understand the different layers of our personality from an individual’s perspective.

TalentsTech defines Personality as the collective being and unique sense of a person's tendencies in behaviour, feeling, and thought.

Here are the fundamentals of personality:

Uniqueness - Every person is innately unique.
Existence - In your conscious and subconscious.
Collectiveness - Spectrum of senses, feelings, thoughts and behaviours

------------------------------------------ Try this : Experience You in 1-2-3

Are we being mindful about our personality now? Remember what we have learnt about personality? Interestingly, there are many personalities and different angles worthy of further exploration. All the differences we learn about ourselves and others, makes personality such an interesting subject of learning. We shall explore the different faces and phases of personality and development in upcoming posts.

Learning, Practising and Accepting “What-Is” could be a fun exercise for you.

Self-Reflection exercise

Duration: 5 minutes

Ingredients: A pen, a paper and yourself

Steps: 1. Find a uninterrupted space and be alone before your start

2. Answer the following questions using your intuition, (without applying any past experiences or logic)

Without anything as reference, how do you describe “self”? List 3 words that come to you to represent your personality.
Imagine if you are now a friend/family/colleague/stranger, how do they describe you? Write 3 words that you think others think/feel about you.

3. Take 1 minute to read your answers. Which of these words most and least resonates with you, why?

There are no right or wrong answers. This exercise reminds you about you.

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Reimagine Personalities with New Possibilities

What was the word that represents you in the exercise above? Trust this process as your first step into self discovery. Well done!

From the day we exist as a cell, a foetus, a baby, a toddler, a teenager, an adult and the journey of our life till now. We as humans instinctively set a journey to seek meaning and definition of being alive, being a life, being “Who Am I?”.

For decades and centuries, we are inching closer to our answers through knowledge, ideology and technological advancements, which inspire us with flourishing ways to understand personality with self-awareness from all imaginable dimensions.

Your Possibilities

Your curiosity has brought you here. The answer for “Who Am I?” will always and shall only be from yourself. At TalentsTech, we believe that a person’s self discovery journey on their personality will always be full of surprises. For each insight you gain, every clarity you witness, every enlightenment you are aware of, brings you joy.

Enjoy Being You!