What does your personality have to do with your energy?
A significant amount, it turns out. Yet, it’s often not something we pay attention to.
To truly understand what replenishes and drains your energy, it’s essential to recognize the connection between your personality and vitality.
I have shared that what brings us energy is different for each person. It’s an individual experience. One core reason is we all have different personalities. We all have different characteristics that come easily for us versus drain our energy.
In this joint blog with Zack Wieder, CEO at Principles, we will dive into the link between energy and personality and how to use a personality tool like Principles to enhance your vitality. The Principles tools provide evidence-based insights around self-awareness and awareness of others in service of individual and team development.
What is Personality?
Our personalities are our tendencies of thought, feeling and action that underlie how we engage with the world around us. Personality can be looked at like your comfort zone. If you were to enter a situation, what would be the most natural set of orientations and tendencies you have? Personality is made up of core characteristics, or traits. Our traits are not our fate though. Each of us manages our behavior from situation to situation in service of our goals and relationships. When we act out of character, which is called free trait behavior, it often requires more energy.
How Understanding Your Personality Improves Your Vitality:
1. There are No Good or Bad Personality Traits, Just Comfort Zones
No personality type is “good” or “bad.” We’ve heard the misconception that certain personality traits are essential to being a good leader, such as being extraverted. But that is not true.
What does happen is introverted leaders stretch to exhibit extraverted tendencies in service of their leadership goals when necessary. The opposite is also true for extraverted leaders.
In actuality, each personality type brings strengths and opportunities to leadership. And, equally, all leaders stretch in certain ways to demonstrate tendencies that don’t come naturally to them in service of leading effectively.
Our personality maps a lot of our behavioral tendencies: how we think, act, and interact. We all see things through our own eyes, often driven by our personalities.
When you have a greater awareness of yourself and your tendencies, it leads to more self-awareness, self-acceptance, and the ability to understand your own energy patterns. You can then engage more productively with others. Instead of being frustrated or confused by how others may think or operate differently from you, you can improve collaboration by using the insights that we are coming from different perspectives.
This approach helps you develop the mutual respect and appreciation that’s needed for good partnerships to exist.
Reflection Questions: What are your strengths? What comes naturally to you? To fully assess, take the free individual PrinciplesYou assessment.
2. Personality is Directly Linked to Wellbeing
What gives you more or less energy?
What fosters and drains your vitality?
Most people don’t have a clear picture of their natural tendencies and why their internal resources get depleted.
What brings you vitality, your inner resource of physical, psychological, and emotional energy, is connected to your personality. Therefore, understanding your personality characteristics is key to fully answering these questions and cultivating your well-being.
We each have strengths, the innate traits that come easily and naturally and don’t require a lot of energy. When we stretch out of our comfort zone into free trait behavior, acting out of accordance with our innate traits, it takes more energy.
We often choose to act out of character in service of important goals and relationships. This can be a drain on our vitality, which we need to be conscious of. If we don’t manage our vitality well during these situations, it can have a negative impact. But, when we do manage our energy in a way that’s sustainable to get us our desired result, then it can drive meaning and value in our lives, short and long term.
By understanding your own natural instincts, you become more conscious of when you are stepping outside of your comfort zone into your stretch zone to learn how to manage your energy effectively.
As we are currently experiencing an epidemic of burnout, one of the most important things you can do to protect yourself is to understand yourself and others.
Reflection Questions: How do you act out of character in service of your goals and relationships? How could you infuse activities throughout your day that replenish you?
3. Understanding each other’s strengths and preferences builds team cohesion and organizational culture
Personality is a core aspect of diversity and inclusion, though often overlooked. Principles gives individuals and teams a way to discuss and leverage preferences and differences to cultivate an inclusive environment.
There’s increased clarity when teams understand each other, how to work together more effectively, and how to lean on each other’s strengths.
Appreciating diverse personalities enables positive leadership and helps positively energize others. When leaders understand their team members, they create significantly more space to listen and cultivate more high-quality connections. Team members feel seen, heard, and acknowledged for what they are bringing to the conversation.
Reflection questions: What different strengths do your team members bring? How could you celebrate the diversity of your team members’ personalities?
About Principles
There is a need for more evidence-based tools that have been proven effective at assessing personality.
Unfortunately, most personality assessments used in corporate America aren’t scientifically valid or reliable. They are based on old, outdated psychology concepts.
Principles is an evidence-based tool grounded in the current science of personality that is both valid and reliable. With the Principles tools, you learn about your tendencies, comfort zones, strengths, and opportunities for growth in an easily digestible, interactive format. Beyond providing accurate insight, the tool facilitates productive self and team discovery to enhance culture.
More information can be found below:
- PrinciplesYou: where individuals can take a free personality assessment
- PrinciplesUs: a subscription product for leaders and organizations around team dynamics
