A Google search will produce a list of tests that help identify your personality and the characteristics it has. There are tests that rate your personality by number, fruit, acronyms, and more. Each test has a unique way of exploring the dynamics of personality and gives tips and tactics to use to overcome the deficits of a personality while maximizing the benefits.
Knowing your personality can be really helpful for understanding how you tend to choose things like a career, a mate, or how you make decisions. Making decisions is tied directly to your personality. How you process information and the action steps you take are tied to many things, including your personality. Let’s take a look at how different personality traits affect decision-making.
- Introverts tend to process decisions internally
- Extroverts process their decisions out loud
- People with a high value for feeling tend to go with their gut
- People who intellectualize seek knowledge and counsel before making decisions
These are a few examples of how personality can affect decision making. Knowing if you are an introvert, extrovert, intellect, or feelings-based personality helps you understand the ways you come to a decision.
Is personality nature or nurture?
Your personality is a mixture of DNA influenced by how you were raised or significant situations and people in your life. Personality is formed somewhere between ages 2-7 but it can be affected by adversity. An example could be a person with a personality trait of extroversion may become withdrawn and quiet if bullied or ridiculed by a significant person.
Your personality was likely developed and impacted along the way by the family you were born into, the schools you attended, the friendships that you had, and the significant people and situations that left an impact on you. All of this combines to form your current personality and level of functioning.
If you struggle with making decisions, it could be that your personality is affecting your willingness to be firm with making decisions and weak in carrying them out. It doesn’t mean that quieter people can’t make decisions, it simply means a meek person may struggle to make decisions more than an assertive person. Consider your personality when looking at your track record of making decisions. In the same way an undesirable personality trait can be overcome or modified for other reasons, it can be changed to help make decisions that are firm and serve your best interest.
