The Importance of Your Personality Type and Your Values
Your personality and values help shape your life satisfaction and are important to your overall health.
Why do personality types and values matter?
Personality is unique to each individual, understanding more about the self can help to identify personal values and importance.
Using these skills is beneficial in life direction and feeling a sense of purpose or fulfillment. Feeling a sense of purpose is correlated with increased life satisfaction, good mental health, and social interactions.
How do you find your life satisfaction?
Life satisfaction is an ever-evolving process. Finding life satisfaction is made up of multiple aspects of health, including but not limited to; social health, work-life balance, mental, and physical health.
Measuring satisfaction in life is based on personal perception and is often influenced by a person’s mindset. “Generally, fitness activities and good health have a positive influence on life satisfaction, whereas individuals suffering from a disease usually show lower levels of life satisfaction” (Lachmann et al., 2017).
Working towards establishing healthy routines can inspire feelings of accomplishment as well as striving toward personal purpose. “Having a purpose in life is one of the most fundamental human needs” (Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).
Striving to figure out what your purpose may be, can be a process of self-realization and may not seem like the most obvious choice. Modern life is full of many distractions and overlapping factors that can interfere with the process of self-inquiry and reflection. “Discovering one’s passion has two sides: doing what you “like” is often said to be important, but it seems that discovering what you find “important” is more helpful in igniting passion, as this is more values-based and will contribute to self-concordance (Sheldon and Houser-Marko, 2001; Ryff and Singer, 2008)” (Schippers & Ziegler, 2019).
When considering what a personal passion is, it is helpful to use self-reflection as well as curiosity to explore different avenues. Consider looking into finding out what values are involved with your current lifestyle or values you want in the future. “While it is important that people discover what they feel passionate about, ideally this passion should also be aligned with values that they hold dear, such as collaboration, equality, and honesty (Sheldon, 2002)” (Schippers & Ziegler, 2019). When actions are aligned with personal values a higher sense of life satisfaction will be noticed.
Influences on personality and life satisfaction
Personality can also play a role in the types of values a person holds or the type of environment someone can find the most benefits from. “Current findings suggest that both personality and life satisfaction variables are associated with overall life satisfaction” (Lachmann et al., 2017).
Personality traits are generally considered stable throughout the lifetime or for longer portions of time, there also have been various studies that indicate variables that may change or shift in one’s personality (Lachmann et al., 2017). These shifts can be due to a number of different factors including life events, social or intimate relationship influences, community or location changes, etc.
Familial relationships can also have a large influence on perceived life satisfaction, this can be more or less influenced culturally as well. In a study comparing Chinese and German culture, familial relationships and life satisfaction seemed to point towards the quality of familial relationships weighing heavier on life satisfaction for Chinese people than for German people, this may be due to a cultural influence and how particular values are held in those countries (Lachmann et al., 2017).
The indication of familial relationship importance does not reflect they care more or less about their family; however, to those individuals, it may affect how they perceive what the personal variables of life satisfaction are built of, this could be personality-based or culturally influenced. “Satisfaction with family could therefore have a higher impact on overall life satisfaction than satisfaction with leisure, or on the other hand, in a more individualistic culture as Germany, individual and personal interests are of immense importance” (Lachmann et al., 2017).
“With respect to mental health and well-being, well-being variables such as gratitude are positively correlated with extraversion, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness, and negatively correlated with neuroticism” (Srivastava & Das, 2015).
Personality traits can play a role in the way a person perceives their life satisfaction as well as mental health. Certain attributes can be practiced or learned such as increasing gratitude. “Understanding of these dimensions will help in identification and modification of the personality, thereby enhancing mental health” (Srivastava & Das, 2015).
Personalities, in general, do not shift completely, and nor should they, but there can be areas in which they can increase or align with values to better support mindset and mental health. “Optimism is considered to be instrumental in problem-focused coping strategies; optimists turn to adaptive emotion-focused coping strategies such as acceptance, use of humor, and positive reframing” (Srivastava & Das, 2015).
If a person is not generally an optimist they can still use certain techniques to bring more positivity into situations of hardship. Being honest with personal emotions is a great way to notice where it is appropriate to choose a more positive approach. Honoring genuine feelings is a good way to guide a person to feel more aligned with their values and purposes in life. An example could be; if something is causing discomfort and upsetting feelings not to try and bury it with positivity but honor those feelings and do the best to cope with what is happening. In the same regard, if there is a choice to use positivity to help cope and see the glass half full, this can help to practice bringing more positive attributes into daily situations.
Overall Tips
- Identifying personal values can help guide a person towards discovering their purpose and what they find satisfying in life.
- Focusing on bitter and sweet moments of previous experiences can help show the strengths and values of prior circumstances
- Observing and learning from current or previous experiences, journalling or recounting areas that you have grown from or would like to bring more of in current life
- Finding personality or values assessments can help to give words or explanations to the traits you have
- Follow what makes you happy!
- Surrounding yourself with people who support your goals and values, people who bring out the best of your unique personality
- Use positivity when appropriate and honor genuine feelings
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