Stage 1: Self-Discovery | Your Personality

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This is Stage 1, module 1 of the Life Design Method series, where I guide you through a 5-stage life design process: from self-discovery to life context, vision, strategy, and daily practice. It's designed for people who are tired of living a life that doesn't feel like theirs.

In this module, I cover why your personality matters and how it can shape the way you design your life.

By now, you probably have a pretty decent idea of who you are and what makes you tick. I thought I did too. I'd spent plenty of time reflecting on my experiences, putting labels on myself, trying to cram myself into boxes that didn't fit (but that I really wanted to fit), and taking in what other people said about me. I knew my strengths and weaknesses, what upset me and what made me happy, and how I related to the world. I'd even compared adult-me with childhood-me, and even though I felt amazed at how far I'd come, I could also notice myself following nearly identical patterns and behaviours (for better or worse).

So when I finally went all in on self-knowledge to understand why I kept ending up in very similar situations, I found things I'd never even thought about. I started seeing myself in a new light, and a lot of things started making more sense. I could see exactly what to strengthen and what to work on to become the person I think I actually am, but keep hiding away or avoiding for one reason or another. I don't have the full picture yet (this takes time), but I've never had as much clarity about myself and what I need as I do now. And it’s a pretty good place to be.

Know thyself, the old version

None of this is new, which I find comforting, because clearly it isn’t something that I just came up with to worry about for no reason. For example, the ancient Greeks inscribed two words over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “know thyself”. It is said that people travelled long distances to get there so they could ask the oracle about their futures, but just before they could enter the temple, they were met by this piece of advice: before asking the gods what lies ahead, look inwards first.

Then around 319 BC, Theophrastus (a student of Aristotle) wrote Characters: thirty short, funny sketches of personality types, think things like the Flatterer, the Chatterbox, the Boor, the Coward, or the Late Learner. It might be the first personality typology ever written. I guess that all of us can recognise every single one of those people, which tells us that human personalities have patterns, and people have always wanted to understand them.

This module, therefore, is about using modern research to understand our personality, and how we can use it to design a life that works for us, not against us. It won't necessarily be an easy thing to do, but you should come out with enough clarity about how you could start moving in the right direction.

Temperament, then personality

I’m sure you’ve already heard at least a thing or two about temperament. Psychologists use it to describe the wiring we’re born with - the tendencies we naturally have before life, culture, other people, and our experiences shape us into what we eventually call personality. We’ve all got one, but very few of us are fully aware of it.

And I strongly believe that our personality is important to know, because once we understand our natural (and developed) wiring, we can’t unsee our patterns anymore. We stop spending our energy pretending to be someone we are not just to fit in, feel good enough, or meet others’ expectations, and we can finally start intentionally building a life that fits the unique shape of us.

What does research say about personality?

Personality is about energy

Personality is as much about the energy it costs us to behave in certain ways as it is about how we show up in the world. I actually did not know that. Our personality shapes a lot more than I expected, including our values, strengths, energy levels, and even the sides of us we'd rather not admit we have. That means that if you skip this step, you can easily design a life for a version of yourself that doesn't even exist, and then wonder why you're not that impressed with the results.

The Five Factor Model (The Big Five)

In the 1980s, two research traditions (one studying the words people use to describe each other, the other studying personality questionnaires) converged on the same finding that human personality clusters around five broad dimensions.

Everyone sits somewhere along each of the five. It’s never that we have or lack any dimensions, but we all have a very specific combination of each, which makes our personality profile distinctive. So, for example, you and your friend can both score high on extraversion and look and behave completely differently depending on where you both sit on the other four dimensions and facets within them.

The model has been tested in loads of cultures and languages, and it's been around for decades. It's currently the best-supported framework in personality psychology (by quite a margin). And while it doesn’t capture absolutely everything about us, it captures enough to be useful for life design.

Character and destiny

Heraclitus thought that our character acts as a guiding spirit throughout our lives. And while modern psychology agrees that our personalities shape our lives in important ways, it also argues that it doesn’t necessarily need to determine them entirely. Only roughly 40-60% of the differences in personality traits between people are heritable. What that means is that we're born with a predisposition towards certain traits, and our experiences and environment (culture, relationships, choices over time) interact with that predisposition and shape how it develops. So two people can grow up in a very similar environment and share very similar experiences, but still develop in different ways and form different personalities.

Personality isn’t fully malleable, and we can’t just decide to be someone else and become it without faking it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s fixed either. While some characteristics are relatively stable throughout life, we can change in fairly meaningful ways, especially if we put in some intentional work to do so. For example, people naturally become more agreeable and conscientious with age because it serves them better.

And here’s the point I’m trying to make: first we need to learn what we’re working with, then we can design our lives around it, instead of constantly fighting ourselves because we desperately want to be someone we’re not. Whatever Heraclitus says, you don’t need to treat your personality as something that determines your future. But I'd treat your Big Five profile as a starting point. It shows you what comes naturally, what takes more effort, and which environments suit you (and which really don't). With that, you can redesign your work, relationships, rest, and how you live.

The five dimensions that our personalities are made of

Openness to experience

Openness is basically how you feel about new ideas and imagination. People who are high in openness chase new ideas, get lost in art or books, question conventions, and feel restless when things stay the same for too long. People low in openness, on the other hand, are more practical, grounded, and prefer things that are tested and clear rather than experimental. Neither is better, as the world needs both types of people - someone to reinvent things and someone to actually keep things running.

Conscientiousness

This is our relationship with structure, discipline, and follow-through. People who are high in conscientiousness pride themselves on being reliable, good at planning, and having enough drive to complete things properly. People with low conscientiousness are spontaneous, flexible, and sometimes even show a strong dislike of systems. The research consistently links conscientiousness to professional achievement, by the way. But it can also lead to rigidity. The driven version of conscientiousness finishes things, which is great, but the shadow version of conscientiousness simply never rests.

Extraversion

This is our relationship with stimulation and social energy. People who score high in extraversion recharge through interaction, seek out excitement, and usually think out loud, whereas people who score as introverts recharge through solitude, prefer depth over breadth, and do their thinking alone, in their mind first. Extraversion doesn’t mean confidence, and introversion doesn’t mean shyness. We can see shy extraverts and outspoken introverts. This is simply a trait that explains where our energy is coming from and what we need to recharge so we can show up as our best selves.

Agreeableness

This is our relationship with other people’s needs. People who are high in agreeableness show up as warm, cooperative, trusting, and wanting harmony. People who are low in agreeableness tend to be noticeably more sceptical, competitive, and willing to create friction in the name of honesty. So high agreeableness can make people great collaborators but also terrible self-advocates, whereas low agreeableness can make people direct but possibly hard to work with.

Neuroticism (emotional stability)

This is our relationship with negative emotions. People who score high in neuroticism feel stress, anxiety, and sadness more intensely and more frequently than low scorers. The low scorers tend to recover quickly and stay relatively even-keeled under pressure, which can’t be said about high scorers. However, highly neurotic people often notice problems earlier, feel things more deeply, and care more. This level of sensitivity can be a gift in certain circumstances and environments, but can also be debilitating in others.

Now, you have probably already noticed that the Big Five doesn’t account for motivation, values, trauma, culture, and specific stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Nor does it explain why we choose a particular career, why we’re drawn to certain people, or what we’re afraid of. We’ll be able to get a better idea of these things as we go through future modules.

The facets matter more than you think

If you’ve never done the Big Five test before, I also want to highlight that it includes facets that add additional nuance to each trait (6 per domain). So, for example, conscientiousness splits into orderliness, dutifulness, achievement-striving, self-discipline, cautiousness, and self-efficacy. You might score high on achievement-striving but low on orderliness, which could mean that you’re driven to accomplish things but don't need a tidy desk or a colour-coded calendar to do that. Facets basically explain why two people with the same broad score can behave very differently in daily life. If you want the richest picture of your personality, look at the facets, their combinations and frictions, not just the five dimensions, as it’ll give you very useful information about how you actually operate.

What to do with what you find

When I was much younger and just starting with personality tests, I’d read the descriptions, feel amazed, and forget about them. So I kept doing more tests, because every profile made me feel understood. You might remember when Myers-Briggs (MBTI) was everywhere and everyone had four letters in their bio. I did it several times and kept bouncing between INTJ, INFJ and even ENTJ. These were supposedly the rarest types, and yet everyone I saw on the internet seemed to have exactly the same results as me! Isn't it adorable?

Anyway, the thing is that I didn’t really do anything with my personality results. I tried to use them to figure out what careers would suit me best, but beyond that, no noticeable progress.

After I became a little bit more serious about life design and started reading actual books about personality, I discovered that psychologists don’t even take the MBTI personality test seriously. Out of all the popular personality tests out there, only the Big Five is considered to be the most reliable and accurate test that exists, which explains why I’m writing about this rather than any other test.

The books I read also allowed me to get a better understanding of how people with different personality traits show up in the world and how their environment affects them, which is why I became seriously interested in designing my own life and environment to fit my personality better.

This also helped me see which strengths I should capitalise on and learn that not all of my weaknesses deserve the same attention and development focus. Similarly, you might, for example, score high on self-consciousness and vulnerability, which could mean that your life is more difficult than it should be just because you have performance anxiety, or are afraid of being judged by people. You can design your life to avoid some triggering situations, but not all of them. So instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you accept it and deliberately design conditions that make surviving certain situations easier.

Some traits are more changeable than others

As I mentioned earlier, our traits are fairly stable and not all of them are malleable. But some, thankfully, are! Recent intervention research has shown that personality traits can be modified through psychological interventions and targeted practice. For example:

Self-Efficacy was found to be one of the most learnable traits on the profile. You can increase it by:

• Actually doing the thing

• Watching someone like you succeed

• Being told you can by someone else

• Managing stress responses

Assertiveness also has strong evidence for change, as it’s not one of the stable personality traits, but a practiced behaviour. Assertiveness training based on CBT has been shown to help with things like negotiating and persuading people.

Tolerance for social evaluation is malleable through reappraisal. When we reframe anxious arousal as excitement rather than trying to calm down, it improves performance in evaluative situations.

Some conscientiousness facets are potentially malleable, with targeted efforts on behaviours like punctuality, responsibility, and orderliness.

Self-discipline is malleable through deliberate practice: skills like persistence and sustained effort can be developed, as they’re not fixed traits. The key is pushing slightly beyond our current skill level and being OK with failure.

Anxiety & depression are malleable but with a caveat. One digital coaching study found that participants who worked on reducing negative emotionality showed measurable changes in anxiety and depression facets. However, "side effects" were such that changing one facet affected others!

As with everything else, we don’t know everything. The Big Five test might be the most reliable personality test there is right now, but that doesn’t mean that the questionnaire captures us perfectly. When I did the additional exercises after my own test, there were some traits that I believe I should have scored slightly differently. But that’s fine; we can’t expect perfection and fully individualised results when we’re testing ourselves without a professional personality psychologist who could potentially give us more insight. But the process still gives us enough data to start designing a life that fits.

And here’s what that awareness can help you design better:

Your work

As you can imagine, certain work environments will match certain personality profiles better than others. If you’re, for example, high in openness and low in conscientiousness, a rigid corporate structure will absolutely suffocate you. And it’s good to know before you spend years at a job you really dislike and don’t understand why. Similarly, if you’re introverted and high in neuroticism, open-plan offices with constant social demand will exhaust you faster than the actual work does, but you could thrive working remotely or somewhere where you can be alone for long periods of time, where you don’t receive random urgent calls from everywhere, and are not expected to speak with somebody every 20 minutes.

When you know your wiring, you naturally stop blaming yourself for struggling in environments that were never built for someone like you. Remember, nothing is wrong with you. We’re all wired a little differently. If you don’t thrive in certain environments, you’ll thrive in others. And similarly, other people can’t thrive in environments you’d thrive in.

Your relationships

Personality differences are one of the biggest sources of friction in relationships, both personal and professional. If your partner, for example, is low in openness and you’re high in openness, it doesn’t automatically mean that they are boring, but they might look like they are to you!

Similarly, if your colleague is low in agreeableness but you’re high, it doesn’t mean that they are unkind and don’t try to be collaborative as hard as you are, they might simply prefer bluntness and directness because they process the world differently.

Your energy

The Energy Audit module, which I’ll cover later, will make more sense after you find out your personality profile, too. Your personality can give you useful clues about your energy patterns. For example, high neuroticism might mean that you need more recovery time after stressful events, whereas high extraversion could mean that solitary deep work drains you faster than collaborative sessions. When you know this, you can design your weeks accordingly and understand why other people design theirs differently.

The hard part is knowing when to be yourself

Don’t treat your personality results as some box you can’t escape. You’ve probably met people who justify all of their actions saying something along the lines of “that’s just my personality.” We all have a bit of everything in us, even the traits we scored low on. And if you have approximately fourteen interests, this probably sounds familiar. By now you've probably accepted that you aren’t one tidy personality profile, but that you contain multitudes (or a lot of people).

The psychologist Brian Little has a useful way of putting it: we have our usual personality traits, and we have what he calls "free traits", so we can act out of character for a while for projects and people we care about. But acting out of character can take its toll, so we need what Little calls "restorative niches" afterwards. For example, for some people it might be an hour in nature, the walk home alone, or a peaceful evening; for others, a cosy afternoon with friends, a gig, or some event where they can socialise with people they like.

So think of your profile as a map of where things might cost you more energy, so you can decide, consciously, when they're worth the effort.

What’s next

Enough of the theory, time for the exercises!

You can get access to a growing Notion library of related exercises, prompts, and templates here👉 https://buy.stripe.com/dRm3cw0DF7lP2nlb6z9bO01

The exercises will start with a free 300-question validated Big Five personality assessment (takes around 30-40 minutes to complete). You’ll complete the test and record your results.

Then you’ll go through some reflection prompts. These will be followed by an AI prompt you can use to go deeper so you can understand what different facets actually mean for you (I highly recommend using the AI prompt, as you’ll get a much clearer picture of yourself and can even “calibrate” your final results accordingly (plus you can continue investigating your personality after the initial exercises, too). This is obviously not professional help, and if you can afford to talk to a professional who specialises in personality psychology, then this would be an ideal option, but if you can’t, then AI can be helpful enough.

Once you have enough clarity, you’ll create your own Theophrastus sketch and a personality snapshot, which, together with future Self-Discovery modules, will help you to formalise your Core Identity.

Finally, you’ll have an option to create your own HTML report, outlining key details of your personality, including useful combinations, frictions/contradictions, and light suggestions for life design.

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