Is Your Personality Determined by Birth, or Can It Change Over Time?

Your ability to understand how the different people in your life are motivated is extremely important if you want to navigate the river of life effectively. I have already posted several articles about personality types and behavioral masks on this website, including a two-question personality test that you can send your friends, because these tools are so important. Unfortunatly, people keep misunderstanding how to take the test correctly and getting imperfect results.

Only the the other day, I watched a friend of mine take Navigating Life’s Two-Question Personality Test, which I have been told is “disturbingly accurate,” but it did not work very well because, like so many others, she insisted on answering the questions based on her behavior now rather than her behavior as a child. She told me straight out that she had changed a lot since a child, and she was more interested in what her personality said about her now than what it might say about her as a child.

Understandable I guess, and had my role been teacher in a class rather friend having fun, I would have told her that personality tests don’t work that way because while our behavioral strategies and how we interact with others might change over time, our personalities–what motivates and/or irritates us–do not really change over time.

So if you want a personality test to work, you need to think back to what you were like in kindergarten before society had a chance to teach you how to behave.  Click here if you would like to try Navigating Life’s Two-Question Personality Test yourself.

Now that I have cleared up one misunderstanding, let me add a few words about behavioral masks before signing off.

Too meany people seem upset by the idea that they might have a behavioral mask. Well, unless you are a spoiled brat of an adult who never learned how to behave in Kindergardern or anywhere else for that matter, you have a behavioral mask. We all have behavioral masks. Your mask is comprised of all the behaviors–good and bad, effective or not–that you have learned over time in order to function in a world filled with individuals. The important point to make is that while personalities (what motivates and/or irritates) are born into you and don’t change over time, behaviors are learned and can be unlearned.

In other words, I can change behavioral masks, but the personality beneath the mask remains the same. If you would like to read more about behavioral masks click here.

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