Understanding yourself is a fascinating process… but it’s also a devastating one.

Like many of my fellow Millenials & psychology nerds, the Myers-Briggs and Enneagram have granted me some cool personal insights. Recently, however, the Big Five has superceded them.

An atheoretical scientific model of personality? Count me in.

One problem: self-discovery isn’t always pretty. Not if it’s honest.

As I dove into the Five traits, I discovered the good – and the not-so-good – of my own profile. But that’s just how it is. If you want to grow, you have to wade through the ugly parts of yourself.

What are the Big Five Personality Traits?

First, here’s a quick primer on the Big Five. Skip ahead if you’re familiar. I’ll lay them out in the OCEAN acrostic for convenience. These 5 traits have their own subdivisions if you want to go deeper.

OPENNESS – Includes things like creativity and openness to experience. In a way, it’s a kind of open-mindedness.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS – Doing what you say you’ll do, reliability, or to use a popular term, grit.

EXTRAVERSION – Being assertive or enthusiastic, basically what you tend to think of when you hear the word.

AGREEABLENESS – Politeness and compassion are in mind here. If you’re high in this trait, you probably like to keep the peace and show care to others.

NEUROTICISM – Negative emotion like volatility and anticipatory anxiety. Think the fight and flight responses. If you road rage hard or find yourself easily freaked, you might be higher in this trait.

Wanna know where you stand on these traits? My favourite free test is this one; but I really like this one for a more in-depth assessment (cost is just $10).

The Hard Truth

With any honest personality assessment, you’ll likely end up disappointed with something. Take, for example, my lower industriousness (a sub-trait of Conscientiousness).

Essentially, low industriousness means I’m not very hardworking or persistent by nature.

Yay me.

I’m tempted to justify myself, but this blog post is less about my traumatic self-discovery and more about helping you. Fact is, some of what you discover will feel wrong since, like me, you’re so damn good at denying your own flaws.

Embrace them instead.

Thankfully, personality is not a box we are placed in, never to escape. While personality traits don’t change much over the course of life, that doesn’t mean people can’t grow or optimize. One of the major tasks of life is dealing with your apparent strengths and weaknesses. (More on these later).

Whatever beautiful and ugly you end up facing, that is the first task of self-discovery: you must actively discover yourself. How exactly you do it is up to you, though the Big Five is a great place to start. Then, be brutally honest. Otherwise, self-discovery will be an exercise in futility.

While you’re at it, keep a record of what you discover and reflect on its significance. Do it in writing or a voice memo – somewhere you can crystallize and store your thoughts.

What is weakness anyway?

But hold the phone.

From a genetic perspective, trait variation exists for a reason. That there are people with high, medium and low conscientiousness (etc.) must mean that there are benefits to each.

That’s good news!

Turns out lower industriousness means I’m good at doing things on the fly. I’m adaptive and spontaneous.

This is the next task of self-discovery: Understand and prioritize your strengths. Furthermore, ask yourself: how might apparent weakness be a strength?

Perhaps you’re high in disagreeableness (i.e. low in agreeableness), for example. That means you have a tendency to see people as a means to an end. That might sound bad, but it doesn’t have to be. Disagreeable people are good at standing up for themselves, and such a temperament can be great in competitive business environments.

The same can be said of any trait, wherever you find yourself on its spectrum. You just need to do the work of discovering what the benefits might be and how you can utilize them.

At this point, it might be helpful to begin reflecting on how these traits suit your career, for example. That’s a whole other post (maybe series) on its own, but I recommend doing some research and reflection so that you can match your ambitions to your temperament as well as you can. (Some of you know some doctors who should have gone into business… not a compassion-career!).

The task of transformation

While a strengths-focused approach to life/work is wise, we ought to develop our whole personality arsenal, including the traits to which we are less inclined. Interestingly, there’s evidence that this personality balancing can at times treat depression.

My lower industriousness might be a bad thing if, for example, I never learned to keep a schedule or to stick with anything of significance.

Thankfully, I’ve been working on this final task of self-discovery for years.

I’ve read productivity literature and learned how to use tools like Google Calendar or ToDoIst to organize myself. I’ve been rigorous in my routines to conserve energy, and I try and apply myself to only a few important things at a time to avoid burnout.

Maybe you’re an extrovert who needs to learn to spend time alone, or a highly-agreeable person who needs to learn to contend for themselves.

In discovering weaknesses, you may need to commit to working on them. But you may also need to accept them and then seek the necessary help. My more spontaneous brain may be forgetful at times – but my phone isn’t. Thanks to the above tools, I’m taking the conscientious side of me to a whole new level, even if it’ll never be my strength from a personality standpoint.

Learning that I was low in industriousness was as strange as it was embarrassing. It was strange because I absolutely love productivity and productivity literature, and there are a lot of areas in life that I really push myself and have discipline (thanks, Dad… and maybe Goku). But being lower in the trait is precisely why I was addicted to that literature. It fed that hungry part of me that is somewhat underdeveloped, somewhat missing.

In areas you need to grow, you’ll probably have that same craving. Let it be fuel to the fire!

In summary, here are the main tasks of the adventure that is self-discovery:

Discover your personality. Discern strengths & weaknesses.
Prioritize your strengths.
Develop areas of weakness. Transform.

Implicit in all of the above is, once again, the brutal honesty and acceptance of whatever you discover. Rather than trying to be someone you’re not, embrace who God has made you to be. You’ll thank yourself for telling the truth!