SNAP!. Gary Small

which specific feature or features of your personality you should focus on changing first.

      For instance, if your number one goal is to become more popular and make new friends, you will next need to discover which personality traits are holding you back. Perhaps your shy temperament makes you too anxious to meet new people. Maybe you are overly conscientious and your instinct to be in control chases away potential friends. If your goal is greater success at work, perhaps your disorganized personality style is stalling your career. Or maybe you have trouble getting along with colleagues and you need to focus on becoming more agreeable. If you’re a person who gets stressed out easily, your high-strung personality may be hindering your advancement. An honest assessment of your current personality is essential before initiating any successful changes.

      Assessing Your Personality

      When Steven, a 41-year-old attorney, first came to see me, he told me he was having trouble sleeping and felt anxious all the time. He suspected his recent breakup with his fiancée was triggering it.

      “I’d been working 60-hour weeks for months, saving money for the wedding, and then last Friday, she dumped me and moved out.”

      “Did she give you an explanation?” I asked.

      “Just some BS about my job being more important to me than our relationship. She thinks I’m too detached and secretive with her.”

      “Do you feel any of that is true?”

      “Just because I don’t like to talk about my work, doesn’t mean I’m keeping secrets. And I’m not detached, Dr. Small. I’m probably the most open and approachable person I know.”

      Sitting at the far end of the sofa with his legs crossed and his arms folded tightly in front of his chest, Steven was not displaying very “open and approachable” body language. He also made minimal eye contact with me, which could be his way of avoiding intimacy. I imagined that this type of behavior might come off as detached to his fiancée. And Steven’s reluctance to talk about his job—which apparently took up most of his waking hours—could understandably be construed as being secretive.

      As I tried to gently point out these observations to Steven, he became defensive and said he didn’t come to see me just so I could take her side.

      Psychiatrists and psychologists can get a pretty good sense of what a person is like through clinical interviews and standardized questionnaires. When mental health professionals evaluates a patient or client, they ask questions to discover how the person relates to others. They also observe how the individual responds during the clinical interview. That information provides the therapist with data that point to patterns of feelings, thinking, and behavior that help define personality traits, specifically in the Big Five categories—extraversion, openness, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. During the clinical interview, patients tell their stories through words and nonverbal cues. In Steven’s case, he thought of himself as open and approachable, but his words and body language conveyed the opposite.

      Although these face-to-face conversations during an assessment can be very informative, they still have limitations. Cultural differences may bias the interviewer’s perception of the patient. Also, a single interview is merely a snapshot of that person at that precise moment in time—the patient may be having a particularly difficult day, so an otherwise agreeable individual may seem testy and belligerent.