PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
Same But Different
In some ways we are all the same. We all have the same human nature. We share a common humanity. We all have human bodies and human minds, we all have human thoughts and human feelings.
Yet in other ways we are all completely different and unique. No two people are truly alike. No two people can ever have the same experience of life, the same perspective, the same mind.
Somewhere between these two — our common humanity and our unique individuality — lies personality.
Personality is about our different ways of being human. How we are all variations on the same themes. How the human nature we all share manifests in different styles of thinking, feeling and acting. It has been said that temperament is something we share with other animals, while character is, perhaps, uniquely human.
Personality Defined
Personality can be defined as consistency in a person’s way of operating — that is, long-term consistency in their particular ways of perceiving, thinking, acting and reacting as a person. Consistent patterns of thought and feeling and behaviour.
The term personality has been derived from the Latin word “Persona” which was associated with Greek theater in ancient times. The Greek actors commonly used to wear masks on their faces during their performances on the stage. The mask worn by the actors was called persona. Personality was thought to be the effect and influence which the individual wearing a mask left on the audience.
When all the personality-describing words in a dictionary are taken and analyzed how people use them, you find they can be separated into a certain number of sets or ‘clusters’. The words in one cluster all have a b-r-o-a-d-l-y similar meaning, but mean something different from the words in other clusters. And what psychologists have found again and again is that there are just five clusters. In