The handiest perspective of yours — Personality as a psychological device

Take control and flexibility back, then the future will be yours.

There are multiple lenses in my pocket that I can use to see myself and see the world.

Personality & ego & self-identity & self-image are roughly about the same thing — The psychological device to shift your experience from one state to another.

And they are the handy and familiar ones compared to all the other perspectives or outlook. They are specific to you because you’ve used them a couple of times and found them useful. You might feel like your livelihood depends on it, or even have been using them to experience the world since childhood and never took them off.

Perhaps it’s time to take the control back. Simply know that taking on a personality at a moment is your choice. There’s no need to drop it in order to prove it. Just simply be aware of these devices that have always been there at the core of your experience.

Sometimes you even use two lenses at the same time and it becomes confusing. The two ways you feel about what you experience are contradicting and you have no idea which is true. And the funny thing is, neither is true. But many choices stem from there. You can leave the contradiction and pay attention somewhere else that feels more important to you; You can speculate which lens is a better choice; You can roll a dice and deal with the instance from there; You can try to find a third or a fourth lens to look at it… The possibility is endless — When you can switch from one personality or another.

What is BETTER, by the way? For now, my personal question to tell is:

“Will seeing from this personality lens in this situation lead to my lasting pleasantness?”

Not just now, but lasting pleasantness. Only through experimentation with the lenses and with time I can become wiser about these choices. What is your definition of better? And how will that influence the personality of your choice (for that moment)?

For coherence and control

I am one. I am not many.

The way to look at personality described in this post is an approach slightly different from the common psychological view that humans are split into many small people who all see and think differently, and have different needs and aspirations.

The possible disadvantage of this is you will soon discover there are hundreds or thousands of subpersonality of yours. And the more you think “they are all you” the more difficult to put them aside or eliminate them completely even if you found them destructive to your well-being.

When you are identified with something, you cannot kill it.

Looking at personalities as lenses has no such downsides. They are simply tools you can choose to serve you, and that’s the whole point of using any tools.

Part of the One-Minute Series.
Inspired by Coaching for Performance on sub-personalities