A great way to get people to think about each other’s lives is to look at the average person’s personality, and see how that person thinks.
That’s the process of “personality psychology.” Psychology is the study of how personality and tendencies affect our behavior. In other words, how our personalities are formed and how they develop throughout our lives.
The process of personality psychology is really two dimensional. It’s in its formative stage and often refers to the “personality” of a person, not the personality of his/her parents or siblings. In other words, the person is someone who has a personality and has a tendency toward doing things that he or she doesn’t like.
Now you can kind of imagine the psychological concept of a personality having a tendency toward whatever we want. Our personalities are formed from our genes, so in theory they should be stable and static.
The question is, what do we do when we’re not doing our jobs? We don’t just sit around for hours, do nothing, get up to get dressed, walk around, and all this fuss about how we’re supposed to be doing things, how we should be doing them. We get up to get dressed and do nothing. We do nothing. So your personality is the person’s problem.
Personality is the sum of your actions. So if someone has a tendency toward drinking and being an alcoholic, you can ask them to change that tendencies. If they refuse, you can suggest they get a new job. The problem is, they might change their job to make the drinking less of an issue. Or they might not. As long as the drinking is still an issue, you might as well try to make your personality less of an issue.
And that’s the problem. There are people who drink less because they are more aware of the consequences. Those people are less likely to drink. But others are still drinking. So how do you get out of that? Changing your personality is a little like changing a habit. You need to create something that has the potential to make it happen and then you need to stick to that. It’s not a matter of working around your problem.
When it comes to the problem of being aware, we often focus on the problem we have. And that’s a problem. But we also know that we can choose to change. By thinking about our personalities, we can make them less of a problem. When we take this kind of approach, we are less likely to drink, and when we do drink, we are more likely to change our behavior, and that makes the problem go away.
I’ve talked to people in other work groups who’ve said that they’ve seen a similar phenomenon with people who’ve gotten drunk and changed their habits. For example, if you’re a smoker, you might be able to stop smoking by becoming a non-smoker for a few days. But if you want to quit, you have to quit. But if you stop smoking, you can easily relapse and have to start over.
In other words, the same thing works for drinking. If you want to quit drinking, there are a number of things you can do to help. But if you stop drinking a lot, you can easily lapse and have to start over.
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