In an ideal world, one’s job would fit one’s traits perfectly, but that’s very rarely the case.
- Sanna Balsari-Palsule
We are often typecast as introverts and extroverts. People do have biological propensities to behave in certain ways; some of us are naturally more talkative and sociable while others prefer more time alone. But, according to Canadian-born research psychologist Professor Brian Little, our traits are by no means fixed. Little is now collaborating with Cambridge University PhD candidate Sanna Balsari-Palsule on an in-depth study of 'free-traits'.
In his new book Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, Little suggests that we are often able to override our biological make-up through the adoption of free-traits which allow us to act in different ways to our natural selves. We call on these free-traits to meet the demands of different situations and achieve projects and goals that are important to us.
Little recommends that we might usefully think of ourselves as amateur scientists. We are continually exploring and testing the world around us to discover what works and what doesn’t. We do things, say things, and then we observe the reactions and unconsciously store the results. We apply what we learn from our ‘experiments’ to the advancement of what Little describes as our ‘personal projects’ – a description he devised back in 1983 to describe the goals and pursuits that underlie people’s behaviour.
The personal projects in question might be big ones (such as career ambitions) or small ones (like cleaning the car) but they form the bedrock of our day-to-day behaviour and our relationships with our friends, family and workmates. Sometimes our personal project pursuit requires us to engage in free-traits; other times, we can just be ourselves. Little proposes that the successful pursuit of ‘core projects’ that are meaningful, manageable, supported by others and generate positive feelings can greatly impact our happiness and the quality of our lives.
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Image: Creative Company Conference 2011
Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg (Flickr Creative Commons)
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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