What is Personality?

We all have needs.

Food 🍲, water 💦, shelter 🏠, love ❤️, community 👫, purpose…the list goes on.

Being alive means constantly solving the problem of how to get our needs met in a world that’s not designed with our needs in mind.

Personality is the strategy we’ve adapted over time to navigate the discrepancy between what we need and what the world can actually provide.

As infants, we are fully dependent on our relationships with others — completely helpless to meet our needs. We learn as infants what gets our caregivers attention and what doesn’t. In most cases, crying works to get us fed and changed. Smiling and cooing gets our caregiver to meet our needs for attention and love.

As we grow, we develop more agency. Agency is our ability to act in the world independently and to change the world around us on our own. In other words, agency is being your own person. The limits of our agency change overtime as we grow and become adults. We are continually testing these limits — what can we do for ourselves, and what can’t we do?

Adapting to Change

As we go through life, not only do we change, but our environments change as well — from infancy to school to adulthood. Each environment over the course of our lives is different in terms of how it does or doesn’t meet our needs.

Sometimes the strategies we learned in childhood continue to meet our needs as adults, and sometimes they don’t.

Our biological predisposition and our lived experiences make us more or less able to adjust and adapt our personalities (i.e. preferred strategies we have a tendency to use to meet our needs) to our new environments.

But personalities are sticky — they are hard to change. That means that, for most of us, our personalities are at least somewhat stuck in the past and aren’t fully effective at getting our needs met in the here and now.