How To Reach Your Personal Best

Are you getting in your own way when it comes to reaching your goals? Know yourself, and make your personality work in your favor. 

- Emily Delzell

With a fresh new year ahead, you tell your-self that this time you’re really going to toss out some of your bad habits. You’ll clean up your diet, walk every day without fail, drop 10 pounds or accomplish some other goal that seems to dangle just out of reach. Then the new, good intentions meet the old you, and your forward momentum fades into the same old patterns. Sound familiar?

Wherever we go and whatever we attempt, we take ourselves along – and sometimes get in our own way. When we reach for a new goal, our personality shapes the attempt.

“Personality traits, these basic dispositions we have, are something we carry around like luggage; they affect all of our decisions, our behaviors and, ultimately, our outcomes,” explains Ryan Rhodes, PhD, professor of exercise psychology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.

Understanding your personality and how your unique collection of traits affects your ability to achieve objectives can help set you up for success and get you past barriers you’re ready to leave behind.

Defining an Individual

Our personalities consist of a collection of traits that don’t change much over time.

Many systems have been used to classify key personality traits, but the one that has gained the widest acceptance and use among scientists is the “Big Five” model. It divides personality into five major traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and “neuroticism,” which is a loaded term with some outdated connotations, explains Colin DeYoung, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “In personality research, it basically refers to one’s tendency to experience negative emotions,” he says.