One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Saturday, January 21, 2012

How much of personality development is in your hands?

The villager ties the baby elephant's feet with the help of a rope to a tree. The baby elephant is not happy with it and wants to free itself. He tries hard but the rope proves much more strong for its weak body to break. After several tries, the baby elephant give up thinking it is not possible for it to break the rope. Twenty years later, this baby elephant grows to fully grown elephant with massive body size but still when the villager ties it with a rope to tree, it doesn't try to break it, thinking it is not possible for it to break...

This is just an analogy that how culture and installed mindset affect our world perspective as well as our concepts of our potentials and talents. Each one of us may be full grown elephants that are tied to some sorts of ropes that we have long forgotten and even don't recognize any more...

The fact is that we all are in perpetual struggle to use our potentials for growing up to our fullest but as I said there are ropes that work as constraints in our ways. We need to recognize and that may help somewhat to deal with them accordingly. I recognize three constraints,

1. Culture

2. Law

3. Place (Village, Town, City, Cosmopolitan city)

As you can easily notice that if we move from one place to another all these three constraints, Culture, Law and size of opportunities (place) change accordingly. So moving is a way that people try to overcome external constraints. Our age (Globalization) is known for this process as immigration and travels are the highest than any other time in history. These three constraints also change temporally (That is going part of another knol; I am trying to write in pieces and put them together in the last one to conclusion, just to avoid, lengthy and boring reading)...

Why I am focusing on moving here instead of struggles for changing them in the native places? Because, here I wanted to talk about personality and changing these constraints require collective efforts and for an individual developments, moving is a better alternative for a lot of people.

Biologists love to study organisms in terms of traits (a distinguished quality either inherited or environmental that could be measured, like height, shape and size of a body part and so forth). Following Biologists, Psychologists also tried to find set of traits by which they could study human personality and they have found five universal traits that is known as Big Fives... including,

1. Openness

2. Conscientiousness

3. Extroversion

4. Agreeableness

5. Neuroticism

I have posted, BBC documentary in two parts at the end of this knol to illustrate the big fives. You can watch them also on You Tube (Just make green tea and pick a bag of dry fruits to watch them. It takes time to watch them all but worth to watch ;)

These big five traits are universal traits but I want to clarify here though personality makes us in large what we are but human behavior is very plastic. Personality may effect the the levels of our comfort with situations and also our perceptions about others and things but it is also true that an introvert person can become extrovert if it happens that the job or circumstances require so. The same is true about other traits and that is a good news... So, my main point is awareness. As we learn more about ourselves, it becomes more easy to manage ourselves and steer our lives accordingly...

Besides big fives, there are some additional factors that play big roles in making us unique than others and they are including, Identity, Narratives, Life History, Experiences and Values. If I go back to three factors, I mentioned earlier like culture, law and place, you can see these additional factors are tightly tied to them. So, simply by moving we can expand the dimensions of these additional factors greatly, either it is identity, narratives, life history, experiences and values and have more choices to choose better ones for blooming of our potentials.

Day; 1
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Please follow the other 5 parts of Day 1 show on You Tube. I didn't post the rest to avoid making this knol very heavy....
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Day; 2
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Please follow the other 5 parts of Day 2 show on You Tube...
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In this knol, I just tried to tell the importance of moving in personality development. I will try to illustrate, how both personality and moving can be linked to moving vertically across social ladder.

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