Personality is the sum total of ways in which an individual reacts and interacts with others. Or Personality is generally defined as the deeply ingrained and relatively enduring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. In fact, when one refers to personality, it generally implies to all what is unique about an individual, the characteristics that makes one stand out in a crowd.
Personalities is the sum total of individual’s Psychological attitudes, beliefs, characteristics, habits, motives, outlooks and traits.
Personality Determinants:
Heredity:
Heredity refers to those factors that were determined at conception. Physical structure, biological rhythms, facial attractiveness, temperament, gender, muscle composition and reflexes, energy level, and are characteristics that are generally considered to be either completely or substantially influenced by who your parents were, that is by their inherent psychological make up, physiological and biological.
Environment:
The environmental factors that exert pressures on our
personality formation are friends and social groups, the norms among our family, the culture in which we are raised, our early conditioning, and other influences that we experience. The environment to which we are exposed plays a substantial role in shaping our personalities.
Situation:
A third factor, the situation, influences the effects of heredity and environment on personality. An individual’s personality although generally stable and consistent, does change in different situations. The demand of different situation calls forth different aspects of one’s personality. We should not therefore look upon personality patterns in isolation.
DEVELOPING POSITIVE PERSONALITY
1. Subconscious Programming:
Most of us sometimes get programmed by a wrong messages that “do not do that”, “don’t take the risk”, “you can not do that” you are not good in and so on.
You can imagine the bad effect such message can have on any person.
Assume you tell yourself that “you are good at Public Speaking”. And the store has stored based on peoples comments and experience that “you are poor in communication” “you can not speak well in public”, “you don’t have an impressive body language”.
The watch man sees your sentence and compares it with the knowledge in its store and says “this information is wrong”. The watchman throws the new information away. He does not allow the new positive information into the store. This is the fundamental difficulty in changing personality & behavior of a person.
Now the question is how and when we could programmed our mind for positive personality trait with out the obstruction of watchman.
The answer is we can programmed our mind for positive personality traits during the Twilight period just before sleeping and just before waking up. This is the time when the conscious mind is active enough to generate the positive traits for entering into store but inactive to judge/compare and will not obstruct to the positive traits to enter into the subconscious store house.
2. Conscious Programming:
Self suggestion and Repetition of the positive traits despite negative response from comparison with the store house also gives success in programming for personality traits.
Auto-suggestion is a statement made in the present tense, of the kind of person you want to be. Auto-suggestion is like a commercial about
“Super you”, or
“Future Super you” for yourself what you want to be or achieve. They influence both your conscious and subconscious mind in the long run shaping your personality and attitude.
Auto-suggestions are the conscious way to program the subconscious mind for positive traits. It is the effective method of voluntary development of positive traits and attitudes.
Our subconscious mind resembling a fertile garden spot, in which weeds will grow in abundance if you the seeds of more desirable crops are not sown therein. It is the agency of control through which an individual can voluntarily feed his subconscious mind on thoughts of creative nature or by neglect permit thoughts of a destructive nature to find their way into the rich garden of mind. So, Caution should be taken while programming your mind for positive traits only.
3. Defensive Approach:
One of these types of approach is protest the negative traits at its very beginning of the entering in the subconscious store. And the second is to consciously avoid this type of environment or situation. In real life situation it is very difficult because it may lead to confrontation and argument.
Another problem is that most of us have some negative traits previously in our store house due to our past experience and conditioning.
4. Invisible Counseling Committee:
While watching a picture we anchor the Hero, placing ourselves in place of hero. Likewise, we can anchor Great men in imagination and let them shape our personality.
Another is the
Invisible Counseling Committee comprising of great personalities of your choice. We can counsel from these great minds at times or situation. What decision or action he would have been taken in my situation.
Winston Churchill the war time British Prime Minister was following this principle. He had his Imaginary Counseling Committee by the side of his Chamber. Many great decisions he used to take by following these principles.
I follow the habit of reshaping my Character by trying to imitate some great personalities whose lives and life works have been most impressive to me. These personalities are Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein, Shiva Khera, and Napoleon Hills & Bill Gates. I held an imaginary council meeting with this group whom I called my “Invisible Counselor”. In this imaginary council meeting I called on my cabinet members for the knowledge I wished each to contribute addressing myself to each members in audible words as follows:
Mr. Abraham Lincoln,
I desire to build into my own character the keen sense of justice, the untiring spirit of patience, the sense of humor, the human understanding, and the tolerance which were your distinguishing characteristics.
Mahatma Gandhi,
I desire to acquire from you the ideology of truth and Non-violence and devotion towards practicing these in every odd hour’s and to acquire the magnet leadership to attract millions to join in the peaceful struggle for freedom and Humanity.
Mother Teresa,
I desire to acquire from you the ability to provide relentless humanitarian services to the most unprivileged, poor diseased and intense spirit to serve the mankind despite all odds.
