Your Personality is Holding You Back

I love personality tests / typologies / frameworks / categorizations.

I love the way I feel more seen / understood / clear when I have a label for myself.

And I’m learning that identifying with my current personality can limit my future.

Gabor Mate, the trauma/childhood development physician, says that "What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and conditioned coping styles, including some that do not reflect our true self at all but rather the loss of it."

Your personality is actually what is covering over your True Self!

For most of us, our personality has been shaped by our past - a reaction to our traumas and early life experiences.  We needed to develop a personality to get through the first part of our life.  It was our answer to navigating this weird and often dangerous world.

Our personality is needed to get us started on our journey.

And then it holds us back from continuing the journey.

“Labels make you dumber”

How often have you thought, "I can't do that because... I'm shy / undisciplined / too anxious / not like them."

Or: "I'm the kind of person who does this."  "People like me just don't do that."

It seems there's a lot of people like me who love personality categorizing, typing, labeling.
What's your Meyer's Briggs?  What are your top 5 Strengths?  Jungian archetype?  Love language?  DISC profile?

Paul Graham, the investor/co-founder of Y combinator, has said that "The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you."

To be fair, I believe these frameworks can help at times - but more for naming what is currently true about our personality, and not to define our True Self.

Try using personality stuff as a way to name your past more, and not to limit your future.

Defending our limitations

My friend Abi Robins said on our recent podcast episode about personality and spirituality, that "A strong personality is needed for essence to feed off of."

Personality is what protects our essence, our True Self, when we are young.  It gets us started on the journey.

But often we mistake our personality for who we really are - our authentic essence, our True Self.

There’s a great allegory by Michael Singer about a person with a painful thorn in their arm.  Instead of facing the short term pain of removing the thorn, they opt for a life that revolves around not letting anything touch the thorn.  They change the way they sleep, where they work, how they walk, who they are friends with… all to protect their trauma instead of dealing with it.

We often spend our life protecting our personality, instead of seeing that our personality was trying to protect us.

We defend our personality.  We define ourselves by our current traits.  We limit ourselves by our coping mechanisms.

All the while, our True Self lies in wait, ready to be unwrapped from our packaging of personality.

Shaped by past vs future

We are either being shaped by our past or our purpose.

Our personality is shaped by our past - our traumas and early life experiences.

But our True Self emerges when we allow ourselves to be shaped by our Purpose (our true desires, goals and ambitions).

It starts with first being honest with ourselves about what we actually want.  (I love that the word "desire," or de-sire, literally means "of the Father.")

And then we commit ourselves to that desire, goal, purpose.

We admit.  Then commit.

When we commit ourselves, our thoughts/feelings/actions stop coming from our past and begin to be shaped by our purpose.

The True Self emerges when we are shaped by our deepest desires.

In spiritual traditions, this is called conversion.  The old is gone and the new has come.  We are no longer identified with our past and we find our identity from our new commitment.

Personality is a reaction to the world.
True Self is our gift to give to the world.

Identify what you want.

Let that purpose shape who you are becoming.

Question for the week:  What would I think/feel/do right now if I was being led by my Purpose?