How to Groom Your Personality

argyle
4 min readJul 27, 2018

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Grooming your personality is just as important as grooming your outward appearance. When you regularly work on developing good personality traits and minimizing bad ones, you’ll make more friends, do better at work, and feel happier overall. Your personality isn’t set in stone, even as an adult, so it’s completely possible to make some changes for the better. To groom your personality, first set some goals for yourself. After that, work on strengthening your positive traits and sharpening your interpersonal skills.

Setting Personality Goals

1.Become self-aware.

You are a complex human being who is faced with many complex experiences daily. Because of this, you may forget to focus on your inner-self, and pay attention to how your words and behaviors not only affect you but others as well. Becoming more self-aware of your current personality traits and how they affect you and others will help you to identify areas you may want to change. The primary areas of self-awareness include personality traits, values, morals, and beliefs, habits, emotional and psychological needs. Self-awareness of your personality can help you navigate your world better by gravitating towards situations that provide you with positive experiences and rewards and avoid those situations that can be destructive and cause you too much stress. In other words, self-awareness of your personality will help you analyze how you react and feel about things to help you make better choices in life.

2.Make a list of personality traits you want to develop or strengthen.

These can be traits you already possess to some degree. They can also be traits you don’t currently have, but wish you did. For instance, you might be a naturally shy person who wants to become more outgoing. If you’re already a creative person, you could decide to work on applying your creativity in more areas of your life. Don’t work on too many personality traits at once. Choose just one or two at first, so you don’t get overwhelmed.

3.Create a plan.

Look at your lists and think about how you can make them a reality. Make a new list of specific actions you can take to improve your personality. Make sure your actions are focused on everyday situations you deal with frequently.

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Developing Positive Traits

1.Be attentive to your needs.

Just as Maslow discussed in his hierarchy of needs, humans have a variety of psychological needs that determine their behaviors and how they may react or respond in various situations. These are needs such as power and control, belongingness, affection or love, esteem, achievement, and self-actualization.Becoming aware and attentive to your needs and how they affect your behaviors will help you with understanding how this affects your interpersonal relationships. Your needs drive your motivation. If your needs are not being met, you may experience a decrease in motivation, become more frustrated, and have more conflict and stress in your life.

2.Adopt a positive mindset.

Positivity is an essential trait for a well-groomed personality. To become more positive, get into the habit of looking for the good in people and situations, instead of finding reasons to criticize them. When things go wrong, focus on the things you can change, instead of the things you can’t.

A positive mindset will attract people to you, while a negative one will repel them. Having a positive mindset doesn’t mean you have to be happy all the time or enjoy bad situations. Rather, it means looking for the silver lining and doing what you can to improve things.

3.Develop your interests and hobbies.

Maintain a balanced personality by exploring a variety of interests and activities. If you already have hobbies, set aside some time daily or weekly to work on them. If you think your personality could use some rounding out, teach yourself a hobby or two you’ve always wanted to learn or look for a class or a club you can join.

4.Have a purpose.

Most people with strong, appealing personalities have some kind of mission in life. Think about what you want to achieve, and then set goals that will help you get there. Avoid squandering your time on things that don’t really matter to you. Your life goals don’t have to be big and grand, as long as they’re meaningful to you.

5.Learn as much as you can.

Staying well-informed is an important aspect of grooming your personality. Keep yourself up-to-date on important events in the world by reading newspapers and magazines. If you’re particularly interested in a field like a history or technology, read books and watch documentaries on the subject.

Strengthening Your Interpersonal Skills

1.Smile.

When you smile, you immediately appear friendlier, more likable, and more trustworthy to other people. Smiling can also improve your mood and help you stay in a positive frame of mind, both of which will improve your interactions with others. Don’t try to smile all the time — that will look unnatural. Focus on smiling when you greet people and during conversations.

2.Connect with professional support for guidance.

Sometimes you may need a little extra coaching to help with developing improved interpersonal communication skills. For instance, people with mental health concerns such as social anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and others may require the assistance of a professional therapist or coach to help them effectively interact and develop stronger relationships. How you communicate with other people has a significant impact on the quality of your relationships.

3.Use good listening skills.

Be interested in other people, and focus on what they have to say. Take their body language and tone of voice into account as you talk. Ask questions to guide the conversation and find out more about them. When you’re genuinely interested in people, you’ll have more fulfilling conversations, and others will instinctively like you more.

Source: wikihow

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