Monday, April 13, 2009

Personality Development is a key to career development


Many of us wonder if Personality development is possible considering the fact that many personality theories suggest that we are born with our personalities.


Personality is our psychological behavior that affects the way handle people around us and the situations we encounter in life. You hear the term; he has a cool personality or he has a high temper personality. Both descriptions attempt to describe the person’s interaction with people and situations.


In order to decide on the best way for personality development is to understand what determines our personality in general. In line with this site’s way, we will avoid the theories and academic jargons.


Our Personality is decided by three main factors:


1. Heredity of our genes

2. Our Environment

3. The Situation we handle.

Let’s us drill down a little bit.

Heredity of our genes refers to how we were born. The genes we inherit from our biological parents play a big role in our personality and our personality development. Our physical facial attraction, gender, muscle, reflexes, energy levels, hair are all decided in the chromosomes of our genes.


What support the above are many researches. There is a famous study which covered more than a 100 separated twins at birth. This study found these twins drove the same car type and model, names their dogs the same names, take their vacation two thousands miles away from home within couple of blocks from each others! Other research found that children inherit shyness, fear and distress.


Our Environment


It is not surprising that the cultures that we grow within play a big role in our personality and personality development. Think of yourself as an example. If you grow in a religion related culture, your principles in life would be different to a person who grows up in an non-religious culture. Your principles, ideology and way of dealing with other might follow what your religion teaches you.


This is different if religion is not part of your culture where you tend to gauge right and wrong based on other factors that are taught in religions. An interesting theory of personality development shows that the first born child in a family is more concerned with social acceptance, more ambitious, more hardworking, more cooperative, more dependent, more prone to guilt feelings, prone to anxiety, and less aggressive that the second and third child of the same family. This is another evidence of the effect of our environment on our personality development.


You would also notice a certain behavior associated with certain cultures and nationalities.


The Situation we handle


The above two factors of our personality equation might give “stereo typing” people a breathing space. However, it is not meant to should they consider the third factor in our personality development; the situation we handle. This is because no matter what is the culture you were raised within and the genes you have, you personality development can improve if you handle the situation in a well educated manner. By this we mean that no matter who you are, you can be trained to handle the same situation in the same way that another person who has different genes and cultural background handles the same situation.


This is why customer service agents are trained to handle customers in the same way. Their personality development training as a customer agent focuses on certain ways to handle angry customers, answer them in a certain way, learn their name at the beginning of the phone call, learn when to call the supervisor, learn how to manage anger. The language skills of these customer agents might be different, but they sometimes sound the same personality to all of us. This is because their personality training intended to focus them on the same customer handling no matter what their home born personality is.

source:http://www.skills-guide.com/personality-development.html




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