Personality development is a process pattern of thinking, behaviors, attitude which drives the emergence of the personality of an individual as they interact with internal and external influencing factors.
A clear instance of the internal factor can be seen in a person’s individuality – a unique quality (the core self) of a specific person that speaks of their aloneness in character, thinking, or behavior that distinguishes them from others of the same kind.
Everything we do in life including our actions and reactions is as a result of one reason or another. The way we perceive and see life is also dependent on these same reasons.
These reasons can be seen as factors that come into play to affect one’s personality development from infant age to adulthood.
What is personality?
Personality is a broad manifestation of an individual’s character as a person which is mostly acquired externally through the process termed personality development.
Personality is the wholeness of a person – the totality of an individual’s life considering their belief system, pattern of thinking, qualities or characteristics, which all come together to form their character. It is the face representing how a person is perceived externally by others.
It is more like an externally acquired mode of perceiving the world as a whole… in our thinking patterns, our behavior, and approach towards life, which is also influenced by our interaction with the outside world.
As a result of the fact that our interaction with the outside world can breed either positive or negative feedback, we tend to manifest personalities that are either healthy or sick.
Sick Personality
A sick personality is a situation where an individual has a mentality of not being enough which is evident in their character and outward expression. The person doesn’t feel confident in who they are or what they are. They feel low self-esteem, low confidence and would always seek other people’s approval to feel safe, happy and accomplished.
These most times are caused by psychological factors, we will look at an instance considering a problem…
Healthy personality
Healthy personalities are individuals filled with confidence. It might be that they have gone from being sick to treating their personal weaknesses and then becoming healthy.
This set of people understands that they are responsible for their lives and wouldn’t give anyone the opportunity of making them feel less of who they are. They know and have accepted themselves, they love themselves and careless of what other people’s opinion of them maybe.
They know that they have the power within them to do whatever they want and to be whatever they want to be. They just have an understanding of their self-essence.
Personality development is affected by various factors that come together to form a person’s personality.
Factors that determines and influences personality development
The following are the list of the major factors that tend to determine a lot of who we grow up to become in our character and mindsets as we go through the personality development process.
- Our core difference (inherent )
One of the most deciding elements that affect our personality development in life and how we live is our individuality – an inner-self belief. These personal beliefs can be that –
- things should be done in a particular way,
- life should flow in a particular pattern or direction,
- people should respond in a certain way etc.
These beliefs most at times are inherent and can be as a result of the effect of hereditary which is evident in a person’s temperament.
At an early stage in life, a person has no power or control over how they will turn out. Temperament and any genetic affiliated behavior is core within a person. It is more of the individuality in a person influencing their personality development.
For instance, a choleric, sanguine, melancholy or phlegmatic all have a distinct inherent way of thinking which isn’t by anyway affected by the environment where they find themselves.
Each one of the temperaments believes that life should go in a certain direction even without parents influencing their thoughts. This is a natural behavior that every human being exhibits.
It stays within us even when we try to change and improve on it. We only get to modify them as we grow and mingle with different people and different environments.
In other cases, we modify them when we work on some of our weaknesses in other to find a way to get better character-wise.
Still, inside the core, we still remain who we are – Some direct, analytical, social, and conceptual individuals, etc
- The effect of paradigm (How we were conditioned to think from infant)
The effect of Paradigm, in this case, is like is a belief system accepted by people close to us as the right way to think or approach life. For instance our parents, siblings etch
Paradigm effect on us is more is like a pattern of thinking which works more like from the outer environment than in the inside. It’s usually an effect of how we are wired within from the outside.
An internal programming that is consciously or unconsciously built inside us from the outside as we begin to grow from birth. Personality development is affected by the patterns instilled into us by people we associate with.
Here, the effect of people we spend most of our time with affects us especially our parents.
We tend to be affected by the effect of the behavior of our parents, our siblings, our friends, and relatives, etc. We tend to be receptive to what our teachers in schools, mosques, churches teach us.
We build our lifestyles based on it, and the more we stay close or interact with such gathering, it unconsciously gets instilled into us and without our prior knowledge, we begin to act accordingly. Paradigm is closely related to our core value differences, but it isn’t inherent as the core values are.
These paradigms can also be seen in the birth order of a person. Just like firstborn children tend to take more responsibilities at home than the last born children. This is evident in their ways of life except in the family due to the fact that they were born first and so are sometimes given the responsibility of taking care of their younger ones.
When you consider the power the mother who is the closest to the child from birth has on the child, and also the child’s position within the birth order, then you can begin to understand what factors would have affected their personality development.
All these come together to form our life view which we exhibit through our attitude. The effect of paradigm can determine if a person will turn into a sick or healthy personality. Also, the environment can also determine that too.
- The effect of our existing Environment (The state/condition of our living surrounding)
The environment where we find ourselves can have a lot of impact on our personality development.
This is a very strong factor that can determine how we form our personality.
A bad environment can cause us to have a negative view about life except for situations where one’s core value difference is deeply rooted to resist its effect on the mind, and so also will a good environment have a positive effect on our minds.
Even if it doesn’t change one’s way of behaving, it would still affect one’s way of seeing life in one way or the other. It can affect one’s big-picture thinking of life which is why most people travel the world in other to gain inspiration.
So the environment is a big player in determining the personality of people.
Someone born in the USA will have a distinct way of thinking and seeing life which is different from someone born in France, China, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, etc.
The environmental effect on people born in these different areas is not the same. Imagine the effect on your personality development if you were being born in a slum. Your reasoning will be quite different from one who is born in a learned and developed environment.
This factor helps to shape an individual’s personality. How they talk, how they carry themselves, how they behave and how they approach life will differ.
It can go as far as determining if they will turn up with a sick or healthy personality depending. The situation of things and the caliber of persons, buildings, structures, schools, hospitals, government, etc. within these areas all come together to influence a person’s personality.
No wonder when a person is born in a country and suddenly at a tender age is taken to another country, the child tends to think like people who live in that new country where s/he was brought up.
The child will be more conversant with the Cultures and traditions, the system of government of that new place s/he grew up. And more the child thinks more like the people in that area s/he is born and will expect life to be just the same for them where ever they go or travel to.
These three factors in one way or the other go a long way to dictate our personality.
Being aware of them, understanding and keeping hold of these factors can help us shape our lives – by so doing we help shape the lives of people around us especially the younger ones who are at an early stage in their personality development.
Finding a solution to a problem is dependent on identifying and finding the problem.
If the environment is bad, we must first understand and accept that it’s bad before we try to find a solution, so also is our core beliefs and paradigm, which come together to help in personality development.
If we have not identified the effect and impact they have on our lives, we cannot find a way through which we can overcome the challenges that come with them.
Finally…
You might want to consider how personality development affects your life and that of people around you so as to know if it requires you to adjust a little.
Always remember that the way you view life can affect how far you can go and how far others around you can go in life. Your personality development plays a huge role in determining your input to life.
What other factors do you think can affect one’s personality development? Tell us by using the comment section below.
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