E133 - How Does Your Personality Affect Your Life? - Live at Imperial College

What if you finally had a road map to your psychology?

This week Alex shares a talk he gave at the MRC institute at Imperial College - Personality: How the Science of Who We Are Can Help Us Lead Better Lives.

This talk describes how we can define personality, why its useful to have an understand of personality for career, relationships and quality of life, how personality affects our political leanings and much more. 

This lecture is also available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yI1EJfP1zg

Dr. Alex Curmi is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

Alex's TedX talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JvG10zQups&t=52s

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com - 
Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast Tiktok - @thinking.mind.podcast 

Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome back to The Thinking Mind Podcast, all about psychiatry, psychology, self-development, and related topics. Today I'm sharing a live recording of a talk I recently gave at the MRC Lab of Medical Sciences at Imperial College London. And this talk is all about personality and personalities, a topic I'm absolutely fascinated by.

So in today's talk I'll discuss what personality is, how we define it, where we go wrong, when we talk about personality culturally, why it's useful to have an understanding of the human personality, both for yourself, other people, and your relationships with them. And specifically, I go into the five factor model or big five model of personality.

And I discuss why I focus on that model and not say the Myers Briggs or the Enneagram, or dare I say, astrology as a way of understanding ourselves. I discuss a little about how personality can influence things like our political opinions, our [00:01:00] interests, our hobbies, our passions, and how understanding personality can help us when we're choosing our career, making decisions about dating and relationships, and how we can use an understanding of personality for quote unquote personal growth.

The full video of this talk will also be on YouTube very shortly. So as soon as that's up, I'll be adding the link to the description of this podcast. If it's not there now, it'll probably be there in the next few days. And my special thanks goes to James Elliott, who works at the MRCA Institute who invite me, who is a listener and friend of the podcast.

Before we get into the talk, just a couple of announcements. Firstly, my TEDx talk that I gave at London Business School back in April is now out. This is a talk based on my recent Guardian article about why we shouldn't always be trusting our instincts. Even though we very much live in a trust your gut, trust your instinct, go with your intuition kind of culture, that's not always the [00:02:00] best decision.

So if you're interested in that, the link is also in the description. Doing this talk, I should say, was super intense, but an extremely rewarding experience for me. I want to personally thank everyone involved at the London Business School. It was essentially such an amazing opportunity to work on writing, public speaking, and I had a lot of fun.

Incidentally, if you'd like me to talk for your team, company, or organization or on your podcast, you can email me at Alex Crummy therapy@gmail.com and put speaking inquiry in the subject line. Our second announcement is we're extremely excited to announce The Thinking Mind Blog. Coming next week to Substack.

For a long time, the team and I have been wanting to experiment with different ways of communicating interesting ideas around mental health and psychology, and all the stuff covered by the podcast. This blog is headed up by Dr. Rosie Bloodstone. She's a psychiatry and psychotherapy registrar who has been working with the podcast behind the scenes for a few years now.

This is going to be a monthly newsletter [00:03:00] companion to the podcast. It's with featured different discussion points, talking about news and mental health. New mental health technologies, things along those lines. Also, reviews of recent podcast episodes, news about upcoming episodes, and the book club where we discuss different books on psychology and mental health, a bit about news and politics as it relates to mental health.

And on the first edition of the News Data, which is coming out next week, we'll also be discussing a bit about the origin story of the podcast and how we originally started putting this together back in 2019. This will be out next week. So we'll be putting the substack link in the description of all our podcasts from next week.

And we're super excited to share ideas with you in different formats. And now here's my personality talk recorded live at Imperial College. As always, thanks for listening. A bit about my background. So I'm a consultant psychiatrist. I'm training as a psychotherapist, so I've been training as a psychotherapist for four years.

I've also more recently [00:04:00] started doing something. I called behavior change coaching. So helping people to change their behavior in some way to improve their quality of life. I've been kind of obsessed with psychology for about 10 years. I'm very fascinated by why people do the things that they do, how people get in their own way, and how we can work around that.

So that's the, that's the background from which I'm coming at this issue. Why is personality important? Personalities is a roadmap. A particular model of personality is a roadmap a person can start to use for, as I said before, a bit of self understanding, a understanding other people. We're often, the strange thing El Elaine when you start training as a psychotherapist is that we're often an enigma to ourselves.

We can feel on the one hand that we're quite self-aware, and yes, we seem to know what our patterns are, and yet we can run into trouble all the time. We can make the same mistakes over and over again. Have the same kind of conflicts with people over and over again, run up against these issues. And perhaps we might see it the same in our personal lives and the [00:05:00] people that are close to us, that they seem to be running headfirst into the same particular wall over and over again in their lives.

So it might be understanding personalities, finally getting a map or an instruction manual for ourselves that can help us to decode ourselves a little bit. Really interesting question. What is personality? We're all fascinated by it. We all have some idea of what a personality is. We use the word personality a lot.

Um, but how can we define personality? I think one problem that comes up in our culture is we tend to talk about personality in a very moralistic sense. Does someone have a good personality or a bad one? I think one of the takeaways, um, of this talk would be to think about personality less from a value, more holistic point of view, and more from a pragmatic point of view.

By which I mean are, are my personality traits? Working for me in this situation or not is an effective tool. [00:06:00] And this, this theme of personality traits being a tool is gonna come up a few times. And similarly for other people, like, is their personality working for them in this moment or not? The way I define personality is the set of traits that tend to be relatively stable across life.

And each trait is really a pattern of thinking, feeling, behaving. Importantly, a way of seeing the world. And each trait is trying to help us solve some sort of problem, usually in the way we relate to ourselves or we relate to the world, or we relate to other people. So if you take extroversion, for instance, if you really extroverted, that's gonna be a way of seeing the world.

Seeing the world as a social landscape primarily. It's gonna be a way of thinking, behaving. I love socializing. I want to go out and socialize as much as possible. That's what, that's what brings me joy. So it's a set of traits that help us solve problems. To [00:07:00] solve problems right to ourself, other people, the world, and relatively stable, uh, cross life.

Which model are we gonna use? As I said, we're gonna concentrate on the five factor model for the simple reason that it's the most evidence-based and it seems to have the most predictive power. I'm super interested in personality models in general. I've looked into the Myers Briggs, I've looked into the Enneagram.

I think they're all fascinating. I think they're all fascinating to help stimulate thoughts. Of course, we even look to the stars and we look at the month we're born to see if that can influence our personality. That's called astrology. I don't put much space in astrology 'cause it's not that evidence-based.

But then again, I am a Sagittarius. So do keep that in mind. We're gonna talk about the five factor model today. The cool thing about the five factor model, and you guys would appreciate this from a scientific perspective. Is that in contrast to a lot of other models of personality where you come up with a [00:08:00] hypothesis and you set out to prove it.

I think people work like this. Let's find the data that supports that. The five factor model is different. The five factor model just asks people a bunch of questions, like hundreds and thousands of questions about personality, and then they studied that to see what theory emerges from that data, which is really what you want in science, right?

So you want to get a bunch of data and see what kind of hypothesis might emerge rather than coming up with your own hypothesis and trying to find data which fits that, which as we know can be a huge, uh, problem in science. So the five factor model, I mean it's, its origins can trace back as early as the 1930s and forties when people started to think about personality traits took off more in the sixties and seventies really became formalized and really well studied cross-culturally in the nineties.

How they came up with it. As I said, asked loads of people, uh, lots and lots of personality questions. Do you like to [00:09:00] go out? How do you like to spend your time? Are you emotionally sensitive? Do you cry easily? Do you like to work hard? All those kinds of questions. And then based on the, that they got the, a huge amount of data from that and they ran something called a factor analysis, which helps us to understand which answers correlate with which other answers.

So they found this people that said, oh, I like to go out a lot. That answer might correlate with, uh, I like to spend time around people or similarly I often feel worried, tends to correlate with, I often feel sad, for example. So what you found is they found doing the factor analysis on this data is that five factors, five spectrums.

Emerged, and I really want to emphasize that they're dimensional spectrums. They're not boxes. A lot of personality models. The problem with them is they tend to put people in boxes. Whereas here we're thinking about people, we're thinking about people as always falling on a single point [00:10:00] along five different spectrums.

And you can imagine how much individuality that actually produces if you're at a single point across five separate spectrums. And these are the spectrums we have. Openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and the probably the worst named one neuroticism, which I prefer to call emotional sensitivity.

Um, and we're gonna go through each of these in turn on what they mean. So the first one we're gonna discuss is openness or openness to experience. What you'll find is each of these broad traits subdivides into SubT traits, and there are probably more SubT traits under that. But openness subdivides into aesthetics and ideas.

Though people who are high in openness, they'll tend to be interested in things like art innovation, trying something in a new way. They love ideas, poetry, philosophy, music. They're the kind of people that aren't going to listen to the music that's just on the [00:11:00] radio. They're gonna create their own Spotify playlist 'cause they, they want to listen to their music.

Um, conversely, people who are low in openness, they tend to like sameness. They're not so addicted to novelty. They prefer boundaries. They prefer things to be put in boxes. Boxes. They're not so interested in abstract ideas. If they're watching a film, they're much more likely to watch the summer blockbuster at Cinema World.

They're not gonna go to the buzz on Art house cinema to watch the Hungarian film in black and white subtitles. Um, and, and with, with each trait here, I'm putting example questions. So, so these are the actual questions that you might find on a big five personality test. Where the ones at the top would be ones that confirm or suggest someone being high in openness.

Like I have vocabulary, I have a vivid imagination, I have excellent ideas. The ones at the bottom are reversed. So people that answer in the affirmative or would say very often or very much. [00:12:00] Um, they would tend to be low in openness. They would be, they'd say things like, I like things the way they are, not the way they could be.

I'm not super interested in abstract ideas. I prefer nonfiction. Fiction just seems like a waste of time. I just don't, don't get it. That's openness, as I said, subdivides to aesthetics. So people are already interested in visual beauty and ideas. So people are really interested in thinking about things in a new way, like a philosopher, for example.

The next one is conscientiousness, and that subdivides into industriousness and orderliness. So industriousness is that propensity to work hard to prioritize the future over the present 'cause that's really what work is. Work is substituting the present for the future and orderliness, how much do I like things in a particular order.

And you can imagine that at the physical levels. At the physical level, someone high in orderliness is gonna have their cupboard. Everything arranged perfectly. The mug. And then the big glasses. And then the small [00:13:00] glasses. But it's also, uh, in the sense of ideas. They want ideas to be in a very particular order.

They might want their countries to be in a very particular order. We're gonna talk about that a bit later. Examples of conscientiousness. I'm always prepared, so I've thought about the future already. I sacrificed some of the present before so I can think about the future. I pay attention to the fine details.

I get chores done right away. I follow a schedule. People who are hiring conscientiousness tend to be very predictable and reliable. As a result. Conscientiousness is one of the most, one of the strongest predictors of life success. Um, generally speaking, IQ is the highest predictor and conscientious. This is number two.

There are some studies which have even put conscientiousness above IQ in terms of a predictor of success. People who are alone conscientiousness, they don't tend to like order so much. Um, they prefer to live in the moment. Again, not sacrificing the present, but actually enjoying and [00:14:00] appreciating the present.

Uh, I often forget to put things back in their proper place. I tend to shift my duties. I prefer things a little bit messy, that they were gonna talk about extroversion, which I think is probably one of the most well-known personality traits. Extroversion is really about how you relate to the social world.

So it subdivides into assertiveness how much you assert, assert yourself, and express yourself. And enthusiasm, which is like positive emotion. So people who are higher in extroversion tend to be higher in positive emotion. Generally, people who are extroverted, they tend to be good at making a large amount of social connections very rapidly.

Um, but they might not be so deep. So an introvert is the opposite. Not that an introvert doesn't like social connections at all, but they prefer to have a very few social connections and then go very deep on them, and also also, of course, to spend time alone. Whereas the extrovert is that person. In the past, he [00:15:00] was speaking to everyone and making friends with everyone, and they're so good at socializing because they can leave a conversation gracefully.

You barely know. They've left the conversation and they're on talking to the, they're talking to the next person. They're called social butterflies. Often people are not so extroverted, they're not gonna talk as much. They're prefer to keep in the background. They don't like to draw attention to themselves so much.

Agreeableness, this one comes up a lot in psychotherapy. A lot of times people go to psychotherapy because they're actually too agreeable. And they need to learn to be more disagreeable, and I'll talk about that more later. If you're really high in agreeableness, you're very interested in people, you're, you're gonna prioritize social harmony over yourself.

I prefer if everyone just gets along rather than I getting what I want necessarily. They're very good at picking up what other people are feeling and sympathizing. They're probably going to have trouble standing up for [00:16:00] themselves, and they'll, they'll sacrifice themselves for other people all the time.

Uh, conversely, people who are very disagreeable, low in agreeableness, they, they really good at priorit, prioritizing themselves or maybe the people close to them as opposed to everyone else. Disagreeable people are a bit more us or them. They tend to prioritize rationality, often over social harmony. They can be too blunt, agreeableness, subdivides into politeness and compassion.

So you can imagine very highly agreeable people. Very, very polite. I'm more focused on what's good for the other person. Often what's good for the underdog, disagreeable people tend to be the opposite. Emotional sensitivity, very important trait of course to understand if you work in healthcare, but especially in mental health, healthcare, uh, being higher in emotional sensitivity is a risk factor for something like depression, anxiety, other kinds of mental health problems that [00:17:00] subdivided into volatility.

IE how rapidly your emotions change in a given situation and withdrawal how like you likely you are to withdraw from a, from a situation due to perceived threat or danger. People are higher and emotional sensitivity tend to get stressed out more easily. They tend to worry, but they are very good at picking up other people's emotions.

Similar to highly agree with people might get upset more easily. Whereas if you're low in emotional sensitivity, you tend to be the opposite. It can take a lot of emotional punishment. Really emotional sensitivity is a measure of like, how much ne how much negative emotion do I experience per unit of stress?

So you can imagine two people might lose their job, say a very stressful life event. One person might get more stressed out than the other one. Uh, people who are very, very low in emotional sensitivity, they're good at like politics for instance, where you have to take constant, uh, harassment and barrage of, of pressure, or they [00:18:00] tend to be good in military or police or special ops or stuff like that.

People who are high in emotional sensitivity, they tend to be good at working with people in some capacity. They tend to make good therapists, healthcare workers. Any situation where you need to pick up on the emotions of other people. Something I'd really love to emphasize now that we have an idea of the traits.

The traits aren't just about behavior, and I think normally when we think of personality, we think of behavior. What someone does crucially, personality is the lens that you have on the world. So your personality is your particular lens. So what do I mean by this? If there's just one thing you take away from the stalk, take away this.

There's a huge amount of data you could be taking in from the environment. At any given moment, you're actually only taking in a tiny, tiny amount of it. There's too much for your brain to process all at once. Your brain has many mechanisms to figure out what actually is [00:19:00] relevant to me. That happens based on various things.

But one of the things that it's based on is your personality. Your personality will affect what you perceive as important and relative relevant in the environment and what you don't. So if you're, for example, uh, highly extroverted, you see the world as a social landscape, an opportunity to, to socialize with people.

If you're on an internet page and there's an advert for a party, you're much more likely to perceive that as opposed to just block it out unconsciously. If you're very highly conscientious and you're interested in finance and you read a newspaper, all the stories about the economy or job opportunities or that kind of thing is gonna be really important to you.

On the, on the other hand, if you're very agreeable, all the stories about damage to the environment or the underdog or the person that's in trouble though the human interest stories, those are gonna be the stories that are gonna be relevant, that the rest are unconsciously filtered out. It. Very important to understand this, [00:20:00] we're all, were walking around with our unique lens, which means we all see the world slightly differently.

And this problem is extremely amplified by the technology we now have access to because we all know we now have one of these in our pocket. And what is this doing? Essentially, it's amplifying that lens because TikTok knows to show me certain videos that it doesn't show you based on your interest, based on your personality.

So at least in the past, if we had a situation where we were at least huddled around the same radio or the same television, at least the base information was the same. And yeah, we might emphasize or de-emphasize different parts of that. Now it's gotten a hundred times worse 'cause we're actually taking very different information based on our preferences.

And there's this constant dynamic interaction between our preferences and what we're being shown. It's not just what we see, it's also what we care about, of course. And that's, you know, what we [00:21:00] perceive. And our values are very intimately linked, as I alluded to before. Gonna be what motivates us, what we think life is about, what we think is worth pursuing, but also what we think is worth stomping out or eradicating what we don't like about people or the world.

Personality influences all of this. As a result of the past two ideas I've shown, you can imagine that personality is a huge cause of conflict. And I think people don't take personality difference into account enough when they do have conflict. I think we take it into account sometimes, but do we really take into account, okay, this person's has a unique lens on the world and therefore they're picking up different information than me.

So we're working on different facts and that's why we're coming into conflict. No, we don't do that. I think most of the time we usually think that person's. And I am. And I am, I am right and they're wrong. Yeah, perfect. Sometimes that's the case. A lot of [00:22:00] times it's this much more sophisticated, um, subtle psychological process.

So the next time that you're arguing with your uncle at dinner about politics, and we will talk about politics in a second, just keep that in mind. Like they're seeing the world slightly differently. They're picking up information that, that I'm not, I'm picking up information that they're not. We functionally kind of live in slightly different world worlds and slightly different media landscapes as well.

As I said before, this is a dimensional model, not a categorical model, which I think is a huge strength because it means that we're taking into account everyone's real uniqueness. And individuality in a way that a categorical model can't. So you see this with Myers Briggs, I believe is categorical. The Enneagram is categorical.

And again, while I think they're interesting to read about and can really stimulate thought, they always get into trouble because they have to make these big categories. And then to [00:23:00] explain all the variation, you have to create this very elaborate, often confusing system of subcategories. Uh, like you'd be your main, an Enneagram type, and then there's a bunch of subtypes and your wing and this and that, and the, the big five elegantly, uh, disposes of that problem.

Another point I would really love to emphasize is that there are no good and bad personality traits. Uh, every personality trait is a strength and a weakness at the same time, I actually believe that strength and weaknesses, strengths and weaknesses tend to be joint at the hip. We think of them as separate, but actually I think they're very, um, connected to each other.

Whether or not a personality trait is a strength or a weakness largely depends on the match between that trait and the situational context. So if you're very low in emotion sensitivity and you're very high in, uh, disagreeableness, that will make you a very conflict prone person. You can do a lot of conflict, maybe violent, that's [00:24:00] terrible in the boardroom in 2025, although it might have some advantages, but mostly it's terrible if you're a Viking in the Middle Ages.

It's extremely advantageous, and that is part of the problem we encounter with personalities. The, it really, it shines or doesn't shine based a lot on the environment and the context that person is in. One interesting question, obviously is nature or nurture. I think working, uh, in a, in a place of science.

I'm sure you guys would have a very educated opinions on this. People get stirred up by discretion, of course. 'cause a lot of people really don't like to feel there is any kind of genetic influence or biological determination of how we think or feel or behave. It's a very uncomfortable idea for us of people, for good reasons.

But I mean, I wonder what you guys think. So do you guys have a, maybe anyone who thinks there's a MO that is mostly nature, could you raise your hands? The very few of you? [00:25:00] Do any of you think mostly that it's nurture? Yep. And that does tend to be the more popular opinion. As I said, we prefer to think of it as nurture, right?

I guess by nature we mean our parents perhaps. Um, so what the science would suggest is on average it's about 50 50. Yeah. It depends on the traits. So some traits are, seem to be more genetically determined than others, but then different studies will come up with different results. It seems to average out at around 50 50.

This doesn't mean of course, that we're biologically determined or, you know, purely genetically determined. It just means there's a strong genetic influence. Uh, and of course, a 50% is biologically or genetically determined. That leaves a huge 50% range for environment, which means environment, meaning parents, siblings, school culture, religion, community work has an enormous effect.

Politics, there's a [00:26:00] lot of political conflict at the moment. One of the cool things about this model is you can predict someone's political opinion based on the traits that they have. Uh, this was made famous by the company Cambridge Analytica, which, uh, as far as I know. Allegedly illegally, or at the very least, unethically, harvested a lot of data from Facebook and fed that into a person personality model to target people with particular personality advert, uh, political adverts, dependent on their personalities.

In terms of the big five, what we have is the higher you are an openness, the more likely you are to be left leaning politically, which makes sense because openness means you like innovation and you like to do things a little bit differently to the way they've always been done. You, you tend to be a bit more skeptical of tradition, that kind of thing.

Uh, you're less ty about everything being tightly boarded and that works the idea level, but even the [00:27:00] geographic level, like maybe we don't need super tight borders, like literally maybe, uh, more in favor of immigration and that kind of thing. If you're very low in openness, you tend to be more conservative.

You prepare things in boxes. You prefer things to be a very particular way. You're, you're really a big fan of tradition. You're conservative. It's like, let's do what has always worked before. Let's not try anything new. Innovation can be very dangerous to someone that's low in openness. Similarly, if you're very high in agreeableness, you tend to be more left leaning.

You can understand that agreeable people tend to be more compassionate, tend to favor the underdog, tend to prioritize other people over themselves. So if you're interested in like, uh, minority ethnic populations or poor people or homeless people, the underdogs of society tend to be hiring, um, in, uh, agreeableness.

Uh, whereas disagreeable people, they tend to care about sort of themselves and their immediate community a bit more. Uh, and as I [00:28:00] said, they tend to prioritize something like rationality over politeness. They're the kind of person that they prefer to make sure everyone, when we're splitting the bill at the restaurant, that everyone pays their exact amount.

Even if it's a very small difference, whether it's the agreeable person, it's actually sold, split the bill, split the bill, it's fine. We don't have to fight over this. How does p, how does personality tend to change, um, across the lifespan? So, in general, you know, one of the things that defines personality is stability.

You can say, I have a particular personality because you can see how I am today and I wanna be roughly the same tomorrow. I'm probably roughly the same next week. So personality is defined by stability, barring, you know, very, uh, exceptional life events, trauma, et cetera. But there are changes that tend to occur across time.

So as people get older, they tend to get higher in conscientiousness and they tend to get lower in emotional sensitivity. And that makes [00:29:00] sense because I think the more life you live. The more you realize actually sacrificing the present for a future is probably a good idea. You know, I didn't really realize that when I was 10 or 20 or 30, but by the time I'm like 40, 50, 60, I get it.

Like saving some money now will really come in handy in 10 years time. Uh, and similarly with emotional sensitivity, I do think in general most people tend to create an environment around them that supports them. So they tend to get into a stable relationship, some kind of stable job and income, stable living situation.

And all of those tend to ameliorate our sensitivities a bit and we feel a bit more secure. Um, I think this is backed up by some other studies about like happiness across the lifespan, where actually people are often happiness happiest towards the end of their life. I think that's for a few different reasons.

Like they also have gotten outta the way some of their life's biggest challenges. But also because I think [00:30:00] when people get towards the end of their life, they've built a system which really works well for them and keep, helps to keep them stable. What are the main limitations of the five factor model?

So I, I'd want to emphasize every model that's gonna be have limitations. Every model is just a model, and I would prefer that you take away from this talk the notion that I should really understand personality in general and think about it and use it to design my life rather than taking away from the stock.

The five factor model is everything. I think it's the best model, most evidence-based, the most predictive value, but it's got some limitations. I don't think it's explains everything about. Human behavior. In fact, there are newer avers of the fire factor model that have been developed or are being developed that have, uh, one new personalized trait, which I mentioned cross-culturally.

It has been studied cross-culturally, and largely these traits have shown to be valid across different cultures. Uh, but there's still likely to be exceptions. There's still likely to be [00:31:00] some traits which might exist, for example, in a country like China, which are just not likely to be pre, uh, prevalent in, in a western country.

Um, so every model is just a model. And I, I would want to emphasize this, human behavior is simply too complex. The other thing is that the five factor model is good at descr. It's a descriptive model. It's not a causative model, but the five factor model is not saying anything about what causes you to have the personality that you have particularly, but it's a really good way of giving you a snapshot of where you are right now and what are you like right now.

And the last limitation is that. It's not, it doesn't take into account situational changes, how someone might be, for example, very conscientious in one situation, but then not super conscientious in another situation. Also, because of course in life we are constantly dealing with and navigating different situations, and the five factor model probably doesn't take that ly into account.

What I want you to think about when you're by [00:32:00] yourself, if you so choose, is think you know, where do you lie on these five spectrums? And I'll give you some tests you could take online. Importantly, how do these traits influence that influence your, your view of the world and your little micro world? What strengths and weaknesses, uh, does your personality structure give you?

How does it affect your particular choice of work? How does it affect your politics? How does it affect your lifestyle choices and all the different choices you might make in your personal life? Next, we're gonna talk about personality disorder. So where do things tend to go wrong at the personality level?

Personality disorder is very, very stigmatized. It stigmatized generally in, in the culture, and I'm sad to say that it's also stigmatized within mental health settings as well. So often I, I've obviously worked in a few different mental health settings and you'll often find people saying things like, oh, I prefer working with bipolar, say, or schizophrenia rather than [00:33:00] personality disorder.

I think this is for a few reasons for if someone is, for example, presenting with a manic episode, we don't give them a huge amount of responsibility for that. We, we tend to feel, you know, they have an illness of some kind and this illness is causing a manic episode. Whereas I think when people have personality problems, we give them a lot of moral responsibility for their behavior and I think this is a very human thing for us to do.

And I, I think. As I said before, because person, we don't really choose our personalities. You know, personality is determined by genetics and by environment, but we don't choose either our genetics or our environment. We can kind of start to choose our environment. Once we're like 21, we can start to select our environment a bit.

Um, but we don't choose our personalities by and large. So I think the same amount of compassion and and understanding is warranted for people with personality problems as it is for someone with a different kind of mental health condition like bipolar or schizophrenia. [00:34:00] But they're incredibly stigmatized and it's worth saying.

People with personality difficulties often evoke very strong feelings in the people they're working with. If we call counter transference, very strong countertransferential reactions like anger or sadness or things like that, this is how we classically have trusted personality problems in psychiatry.

I'm gonna give you a little bit of a sense of this through the big five. So sometimes people might meet the criteria for something like paranoid personality. For example, people with a paranoid personality tend to be very mistrustful, defensive, isolated. So you can think in terms of the big five, they're probably be quite introverted.

They'll probably be quite emotionally sensitive. Those are the big ones. I'm mistrustful. Uh, someone with a schizo personality, they tend to be very isolated, but without the paranoia. So they tend to be very solitary. [00:35:00] It's very unlikely that they're gonna form a lot of relationships outside of their family relationships.

And so someone with a schizoid personality think, okay, they're gonna be very, very high in, uh, introversion. Um, probably not as high as sensitivity, uh, as someone with, with a paranoid personality. And then schizo schizotypal personality is someone who, again, very isolated, but they believe in all sorts of ideas, which are considered outside of the mainstream.

So they might think a lot about UFOs and the paranormal. They might spend their weekends ghost hunting. They might believe in the power of crystal healing and things like that. That's very typical of a schizo typist. So what you're seeing there probably is, again, a high amount of introversion, but then probably really high openness to experience.

Like I'm open to everything. I'm very open minded. Plus B, where we're thinking about antisocial, which is another word for like psychopath, psychopathy, and antisocial. They're synonymous, [00:36:00] uh, borderline or more recently called emotionally unstable personality. His young narcissistic, uh, looking at someone with antisocial personality.

They're very likely to be very low in emotional sensitivity. Very, very low in agreeableness, and very low in conscientiousness. Though someone who's a bit more antisocial, they don't really care about rules. They don't invest in rules. They don't invest in rules for themselves or for other people. That's the low and conscientiousness part, and they don't really care about other people.

They haven't very, you know, what's characterized as anti-social. Personality is a lack of empathy, but they tend to be, um, lower in agreeableness and low in emotional sensitivity, which predisposes for all this very difficult behaviors. Someone with antisocial personality might get up to, like getting into fights or burglarizing someone's house.

You or I were to try and break into someone's house. That might be a bit [00:37:00] anxiety provoking. For someone with antisocial personality, that's not such a big deal. Uh, if you think of something like emotionally unstable personality disorder, uh, you're gonna have someone who's probably quite high in emotional sensitivity.

Um, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, they can really vary, but it's a sensitivity, emotional sensitivity, uh, which really characterizes something like emotional, uh, emotionally unstable personality disorder. Um. Histrionic, what you, what's really emphasized there is the extroversion.

People with a histrionic personality tend to be quite dramatic and they tend to be quite attention seeking. I think narcissism deserves its own lecture. Narcissism was talked about so much. Nowadays, it's actually quite hard to distinguish narcissism from antisocial in terms of the big five, but just broadly psychologically, what you have with narcissism is that that [00:38:00] entitlement, that feeling of specialness, that feeling of status and rewards, which is importantly not necessarily deserve or not ne, not necessarily concordant with reality.

But generally speaking, in your typical, let's say, grandiose Trumpian muske narcissism, what you would see is low emotional, well at times, quite high emotional sensitivity, disagreeableness. A high extroversion. Uh, and then conscientiousness can vary, and openness can vary. So there's, there's a number of other personality disorders I could talk about.

You know, avoid independent, obsessive compulsive, thinking about obsessive compulsive, for instance, that someone who's gonna be really, really high and hardiness needs things to be a very certain way. And if they're not, um, that's very anxiety provoking. Um, or avoid to force. Again, emotional sensitivity is going to be very high, probably extroversion is gonna be very low dependent.

[00:39:00] Agreeableness is gonna be very high. When you get a really high in agreeableness, what you get to someone who's very willing to sacrifice themselves so much for another person that they in fact try and merge with other people. Um, they really see relationships as them being the powerless one. And they try to form relationships with people who they feel are more powerful and can take care of them, hence, dependence.

How does personality disorder typically present? Um, sorry, actually one thing I want to emphasize is when you're going about your life, like be at work or personal life, one really good principle is extremes tend to not be such a good idea. So when someone's extremely high in, in a particular trait, they tend to lack the complimentary traits, which could really balance it out.

So if they're really high in openness, uh, which means they're really into new ideas, it could be really helpful for them to, to develop a little bit of [00:40:00] skepticism. So extremes are generally a bad idea. And also what I would want to get you thinking about in your personal life is. Dangerous combinations, what kind of combinations can, can form themselves to, to cause trouble.

So just as a simple example, someone who's really high in extroversion, but really low in emotional sensitivity, they're gonna be very talented socially, but they're not gonna be necessarily so good at picking up on other people's emotions and caring about them. So I just want to get you thinking about this idea of dangerous combinations.

How does something like personality disorder typically present? They're usually extremes of one trait or another. Usually extremes of a few traits. And so they tend to, uh, present with extremes of behavior. If you think of something like emotionally unstable personality that often presents with things like self-harm and other like impulsive behaviors, um, things along with suicidality, things like that.[00:41:00] 

Uh, something like narcissism may present very obliquely, uh, so a narcissist. Because of the nature of narcissism, they often don't really think something is wrong with them. They usually think something is wrong with someone else. Uh, but a narcissist might present when their life falls apart as a result of their narcissism.

So a narcissism will often present later, let's say forties or fifties when they're divorced, or they don't necessarily have a very good relationship with their children or they just got fired for bad behavior and then maybe they become a depressed as a result of that. And as a therapist, you're seeing them for depression, you think.

And then as you get to know them and you get to work together, you actually realize underlying this depression is a series of problems fuel by narcissism. The medical industry has tried its best to treat personality with medications and like, can we. Use medications in the same way we use medications with bipolar disorder [00:42:00] or depression and kind of predictably it hasn't really worked.

I think using medication, using a as blunt an instrument as psychiatric medication to treat something as complicated as personalities, kind of a fool, fool's end and we know it doesn't really work. The most you can do with medication is perhaps you can, for example, tamper down someone's emotional sensitivity because psychiatric medications can help, um, tamper down someone's emotions.

People often describe that as emotional blunting. Sometimes people find that useful and it helps them get through life, and sometimes they actually find it decrease the quality of their life quite a lot. So in general, medications aren't the way to help someone with their personality. It's generally the remit of something like psychotherapy.

Why is that similar to what I wanna talk about in part three of this talk. Psychotherapy helps to develop self-awareness and then from that place of self-awareness to gradually grow, [00:43:00] change, cultivate, cultivate traits which might complement or balance out your existing traits and help you to negotiate better with yourself, relate better to yourself, relate better to the world, relate, be, relate, relate better to the people around you.

So psychotherapy really works at the personality level and a lot of like prominent psychotherapists, like Carl Rogers for instance, who founded personality, uh, person-centered therapy, really talked about personality change as one of the explicit goals of, of psychotherapy. This is another activity you can do at home if you like.

Think about some of your trickiest clients or their, I say colleagues or people in your life and have a think what's, what is the personality structure like broadly, like roughly speaking. How do you think these traits contribute to their behavior? And crucially, what is the personality dynamic between you and them?

How do you relate to each other at a personality level? Because as I said before, that's [00:44:00] obviously gonna take a lot of ownership of yourself and hopefully the first activity will help. But the emphasizes that it's often about this dynamic. What are the differences? What you find, for example, in every romantic relationship is there's a clean one and a messy one.

There is an extrovert and an introvert. And the introvert in one relationship, they might end that relationship and date someone else. And perhaps when they date someone else, they're the extrovert in that relationship. 'cause it's all relative. It depends where someone sits, uh, in relation to the, to the person they're with.

And you might think how much, once you understand a little bit about their personality, this difficult person or people in your life. How would you approach them differently if you understand their scaffolding, if you understand like how they see the world, if you understand what they care about, if you understand what motivates them, how might, how might that subtly or not so subtly change the way you approach them.

So

the [00:45:00] last part of this talk is really the practical part. What do you do with all this information that I've given you? How do you, once you know a little bit about your personality, how does that help you structure? Like, as I said earlier, self awareness is the first step. Once you have a little bit, uh, of a map of self understanding of what motivates you or what you care about, that can inform a whole bunch of decisions that you make.

If you think about work, my general advice when it comes to personality on work is you don't want to choose a kind of work where you're always swimming upstream to your personality. You're going to make life very, very difficult for yourself. So to give you an example, um, if you're really high in openness, you probably shouldn't be an accountant.

Accountants don't get rewarded for creativity. Quite the opposite. Accountants tend to go to prison when they're too creative. Uh, accountants are, if you want, if you want to be an accountant, you should probably be very high in [00:46:00] conscientiousness because you need to be very reliable. You need to be very detail oriented.

Probably more introverted, I imagine, because a lot of accountants might do a lot of work, uh, solo. If you have very high extroversion, you could be something like, uh, an events planner where you're constantly interacting with people where your job is really to help people to have a good time. Uh, if you want to be, if you're introverted, you'd probably make good therapists because introverts are good at having very, very deep one-on-one interactions and then thinking about those interactions quietly by themselves.

Uh, as opposed to the event planner, it's gonna be making lots of different social connections all the time, but not necessarily connections that are deep. I think often people get really, really successful when they find a line of work which helps them, which compliments and amplifies their existing strengths rather than trying to do something completely different, something counterintuitive.

It is exhausting to do something [00:47:00] that's counter to your personality all the time, as I'm sure you guys have learned from one point or another in your life. Now that being said. I do think having found a niche that compliments your strength, I think there is, uh, something to be said for starting to broaden your personality, which I will talk about, and that can make you from successful to hyper successful.

'cause now you're not only in a niche which compliments your strengths, but you're also developing a very dynamic skillset, a dynamic way of seeing the world and solves problems. And that can make you really unique in whatever form of work you're doing. I think understanding personality is crucial for team building.

I mean, I think we have such different personalities as a species because it helped us to become the dominant species on the planet. So if you read a book like you all know her are Sapiens, his main thesis is our ability to collaborate in large numbers is what helped us to become number [00:48:00] one. But in contrast to other species, let's say a species of ants, for instance, where.

Again, they're collaborating in large numbers, but answer all roughly the same and doing the same thing. Uh, whereas human beings, we specialize. So if you just think about the team that you exist in and the organization that you exist in, you are all doing different things and you all excel at slightly different things and that makes you much stronger.

Collaborating and going back to the conflict idea, I think it's worth remembering. Human beings of all different types exist for a reason. I think all these different personality types evolves because each kind of personality, each trait is a way of solving a, a particular problem. And life is constantly throwing these very unpredictable problems at us.

So if you take away, for example, all the people who love innovation. When you get a new problem coming at you, you're not gonna have those really innovative people who are gonna help you solve that problem. Conversely, [00:49:00] if you take away all the people who love tradition and you're just innovative people, you, you're never gonna get the chance to build a tradition of we know what these practices work, we know career works, so we know marriage works.

So these very traditional things. And so there isn't a lot of reliability there, there isn't a lot of solidity there to your culture. So the point there here is that we need people of all kinds, all kinds of personalities. True, like real diversity. Uh, I think you can think about your team building in terms of the different roles that someone might serve in your team.

So if you're working in a company that needs to acquire clients and then retain clients, you might have some people who are really good at acquiring clients and some people that are really good at retaining them. So you can imagine an extrovert, again, is gonna be really good at acquiring clients 'cause they're good at forming those relationships initially.

But for their attention, you probably want someone really high in conscientiousness because they're reliable. When it comes to retaining people love [00:50:00] predictability, uh, and reliability. The really cool thing about knowing personality is it helps you form win-win relationships. And it's my belief that win-win relationships are really the holy grail when it comes to friendship, business, marriage.

This is the, the, the concept of win-win. I don't know if it started with, but I definitely encountered it in the classic self self-help book, uh, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. You can build a win-win relationship much more easily if you understand personality, because a win is different for, for everyone.

A win is different for me and for you, dependent on my personality, what motivates me, again, what I care about. If you understand personality, you can much faster than the average person, understand what is a win for them and then give it to them explicitly. And that helps to form a much more sustainable relationship.

And of course you can think, what is a win for me? What do I really care about? And that just makes you, helps you to build a happier [00:51:00] life. Cultivating hobbies and passions. The one thing that I think is that really that felt sense of fascination. Engagement and a feeling of, I can do this forever. I can get paid to do this.

I'm happy to do this for as long as I can. That's a sense that we can feel somewhere in our bodies or even our guts, that sense of fascination. And of course it's informed by our personalities. So when it comes to cultivating hobbies and passions, which actually strangely lots of people have trouble with nowadays, um, my advice is to experiment with doing lots of different kinds of things and just look out for that feeling of fascination.

But through no choice of your own, one kind of activity is gonna make you feel really passionate and engaged. And another one, because of your personality, is gonna give you no interest at all. And I think in an era where I think we hyper consume, again media. [00:52:00] It can be very easy to not experiment with different activities, but that's what I really encourage, experiment, look out for that sense, felt, sense of fascination.

That's gonna be a window into what could be a hobby for you or a passion, potentially what could be a career as well. And some people make their passion, their career. And of course that's gonna give you a window into your personality. What do you care about Dating and relationship. So this is the big one.

This is why. Why you have personality quizzes on the cover on lots of magazines. I am curious in terms of dating and relationship, how many of you guys think you need to find a personality that's very, very similar to you? Very few. And how many people think you need to find a personality that's very different to you?

Okay, a few more people. So it's kind of similar to nature and nurture. I definitely think we are more attracted to the idea. We need to find someone different. Opposites attract, [00:53:00] right? Opposites attract. I think the evidence would largely suggest to me to people find people who are kind of similar, not the same because you actually, the chance of finding someone the same is extraordinarily low.

But in general, what makes a compatible relationship, and of course not a compatible weekend fling, but a compatible relationship that lasts four years and decades is largely similarity because similar personalities means you care about the same things. You see the world roughly the same way, and it means you can negotiate with each other a lot more easily.

So that's what the evidence says, and I think that's largely true. I do think we should make room for interesting polarities in personality, and I do think they tend to happen, even if someone's, even if two people are quite similar, as I said before, you still find someone who's like the messier one, someone who's the more extroverted one.

Someone who's perhaps a little bit more industrious or orderly, and I think. It's probably okay to have a big difference on maybe one trait, maybe two traits. [00:54:00] If you're really different on like four traits, it's gonna be very, again, you might have an amazing weekend playing. I don't think that's gonna translate into a very sustainable relationship.

That's a little bit how to think about dating conflict. I think we've talked about enough, a lot of the people I see in psychotherapy where they struggle with is relationship with self. How do I relate to myself? I think part of the process of coming to terms with your personality is developing self-acceptance.

And I don't mean self-acceptance in a kind of Instagram hallmark kind of way, or just like love myself forever. But it's more just coming to terms with who you are and coming to terms with your nature and kind of having a baseline level of equanimity with that. And then from that place, if you want to be different in some way, you can do that, but it's actually very hard to change.

Grow. If you don't at first, accept yourself. The very concrete example of this is if you recognize in [00:55:00] yourself, oh, I have a tendency to eat too much and gain weight and I don't love going to the gym or exercising, it's very hard to change any of that. If you don't accept it to the degree that causes a lot of shame and embarrassment and you, you resist it all the time.

If you can come to terms with that, like, yeah, actually I do eat too much. If the opportunity present, present itself, I love to exercise, I can accept that. Then from that place, okay, now I can start to build systems. I can build a system that helps me, 'cause I have this tendency because can I help myself? I might throw all the junk food outta the house, for example.

Or I might make exercising easy by going to a dance class, which I love 'cause I love dancing rather than lifting weights. Something like that. So personality can be very useful to cultivate a more harmonious relationship itself. And then one way you can actually start to make changes. This brings us to the very interesting question of can you expand your personality range?

And I think that's probably the healthier way of putting it. 'cause some people might say, how do I transform my personality? [00:56:00] And I think maybe we'll put aside transformation right now, even though it's probably a better title for like a self-help seminar. But how can you expand your personality range?

How can you expand your personality toolkit if you like? I think there is a pessimistic case and the optimistic case, the pessimistic case, is really from the literature, which says actually most people tend to be quite stable in terms of their personality across the lifespan. So if you look at a lot of groups of people, they tend to remain roughly the same minus those particular trends I mentioned.

The optimistic case is we see this all the time in psychotherapy that of course people do change. People are able to develop self awareness and from that place they can do something different. That doesn't mean it's not difficult. And I'll talk to you a little bit about what personality change or expansion can look like.

Um, but I think we overestimate the degree to which it's not possible at all. And I think that's largely 'cause we never really talk about [00:57:00] personality or past personality change that much in the mainstream culture. So I think the best way to frame it is difficult, but achievable, especially if you have a plan.

So what might be the plan if you want to change your personality? I think one thing is probably to recognize that you're not actually gonna totally change. So if you're an introvert, it is very common, for instance, in psychotherapy for an introvert to want to become more extroverted. And an introvert is probably not gonna change night and day.

They're not eventually gonna become an extrovert. The way I put it is an introvert can can learn the toolkit of extroversion. I consider myself a natural introvert, and through years I've cultivated the toolkit of extroversion that I can do public speaking and things like that. Uh, that doesn't mean I don't need a lot of time alone to recharge because I do, 'cause I'm an introvert, but it doesn't mean I can do a lot of the things that extroverts do.

And I think the same case can be made for any [00:58:00] personality trait and sometimes in ways which aren't so obvious. So someone might be really high in conscientiousness, for instance, which might be really useful 'cause they're so industriousness and orderly and reliable. But they might not be a lot of fun at a party.

They might have might, they might have a lot of trouble appreciating the present. They might work really hard to afford an amazing holiday, but then once they're on the beach they can't enjoy it 'cause they're sending emails. 'cause I said before, there is no good personality trait. There's just a trait that's well adapted to its context and not.

If you wanted to expand your personality in some way, so let's say you are an introvert and you wanted to become an extrovert, what I would advise you to do is study the micro habits of an extrovert. So really look at a very, not at the big picture level. It's a very granular level. What does an extrovert do?

What they do when they're going shopping or they talk to the people in front of them in the queue, or they might share a few extra words with the cashier. Or if they're at a party, they're gonna start [00:59:00] three or four different conversations and they're not super shy about leaving conversation. So you study those micro behaviors and then you slowly but consistently start toag them in your, in your, your own life.

So you might go to a party, you say, normally I'd speak to one person in the corner for four hours. That's my introverted way of dealing with the party. Today I'm gonna challenge myself to speak to two or three people. So it doesn't have to be this huge, rapid overnight change, but small, consistent change over months and years can do the trick.

And you might say, how the hell do you sustain this for months or years? Which is a really good question. And the answer is, if you really actually want it badly enough and you start to do it, you're gonna eventually start to get the rewards of that behavior. So for example, if you're really low in conscientiousness and therefore your financial situation isn't so good, and you start to be more conscientious with money, and you study the behaviors of your conscientious friends, and then in a year's time you're like, oh wow, I have like [01:00:00] a thousand more pounds in my bank account than I normally would have, then that becomes its own reward.

And you start to realize, oh, this trait isn't just boring. This trait actually has a reason behind it. And then it becomes a self-reinforcing engine and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's how it tends to work. A lot of hard work at the beginning. Uh, but as you start to develop the rewards of that trait, then you're like, wow, this is really useful.

And then I think, again, this is the optimistic case. You can keep going and going and keep developing and developing a personality trait to quite a high level doesn't mean, it, doesn't mean you're a completely different person, but it means you have a way more dynamic way of interacting with, with the world and with your life.

Part of this is also developing your own unique offering. So you, you might know the world, uh, unique selling point USP AC company tends to have a USP or product tends have a USP. This might might seem a bit vulgar, but you as a person, you have your own USP, and that's based on your personality. [01:01:00] So if you get to know your personality, you get to know the very, very, very particular way you see the world that's very different from the person next to you and what you have to offer because of those combinations.

And it's all about the combinations that someone has doesn't, and that if you choose to discover it. It grow. It can mean you can contribute something very real and very unique. That could be in your job, that could be in your personal life, really in any area of life. The last activity, again to to reflect on bio yourself, can think, how does my personality affect my life?

What are the strengths? So where is it serving me? Where is it working really well? But then conversely, where is it getting in my way? How does it contribute to the way I might approach a situation that's not get getting a very good outcome? Crucially, and maybe this might be one of the most difficult questions to reflect on, how well matches my personality to my circumstance, how well matches my personality, my work or my career, [01:02:00] or my relationships or where I live, all those various things.

Which traits or traits could I. Theoretically cultivates which trade? That would be really, really handy for me to have. Like maybe I am an accountant and I'm really introverted, but every so often I have to do a presentation and I know I'm not gonna get a present, I'm not gonna get a promotion. And it's, I good at, get good at presenting, so maybe I need to develop that extroverted toolkit.

How would you go about doing this? So if you had to make a plan to start developing that trade, how would you start to do this? Shameless plug, this is my podcast, the Thinking Mind. Every week we release an episode about either psychiatric medicine, psychology, mental health, self development kind of things I've talked about.

Today we're on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here are a couple of tests. So this test has a small fee, I think it's like $5, but I would actually recommend doing a test with a [01:03:00] fee 'cause they tend to be better tests and give you a better report. I'm not affiliated with either of these tests.

But that one has a small fee. That one is free. And it's, um, on the website of a man called Raid Audio. Raid audio is one of the most successful investors of all time. Uh, he has a company, I believe called Bridgewater Associates, and he, in terms of his hiring process and team building process is a big believer in the Big Five.

And so he, he put, he wrote that, he wrote about that in his book Principles, which is a really good book. And he made a personality test. That's not the big five exactly, but it's based on the Big five and it's quite good for identifying like career preference and things like that. I'm happy to take questions.

Thank you very much for listen.