Try this psychological test

There is a school of thought that suggests that our ‘factory settings’ — the kind of innocence that we possess as children is always at our disposal. Another school of thought suggests that life is rather more deterministic that this and that in fact those settings are generally left with certain dials left turned up or down at specific levels, depending on the individual.

One such theory is the ‘Five Big Personality Traits’ theory or OCEAN as it’s commonly referred to. Ocean is an acronym for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Narcissism. From the 1930’s onwards these five traits have been used to develop personality tests, which have been widely accepted by the academic community as accurate and useful in describing psychological ‘types’.

I recently did a free online test and the results are below. Why not try your own and compare them with mine? The test that I used can be found here: https://bigfive-test.com

To be honest, for me there were few surprises but in this article I am simply going to comment on my most pronounced trait, agreeableness.

People who score high on the agreeableness scale are concerned with social harmony and find it very important to get along with others. Their basic belief is that people are good, decent, honest and trustworthy. They have a very optimistic view of human nature. They dislike confrontation and are willing to deny their own needs for the greater good.

There are obvious advantages to this trait as it relates to team building for example but there can be disadvantages when it comes to challenging the status quo for example because agreeable people will often tend to take the path of least resistance when it comes to potential conflict situations.

It was both interesting and useful to me to recognise this as my dominant trait as it explained a lot. Seeing as openness is my next most dominant personality trait, I am quite happy to be open to sharing how I have had to cope with my agreeableness and what a blessing and a curse it is.

The downside to agreeableness is the avoidance of conflict. This meant that as a young person I would struggle with assertiveness on a regular basis, and with setting personal boundaries.

I became a high school teacher and immediately recognised that my lack of boundaries and passivity in the face of conflict was not helping me to control my classes. Ultimately though I became a trainer in managing behaviour and ran an educational consultancy based on all of the internal and external work that I had to do on myself.

Teaching in many respects was the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of learning to manage my agreeableness and make it work for me. My strategies included all the benefits of being agreeable and creating good relationships, whilst also adding in assertiveness skills to create more balanced ration ships, based on trust.

Looking at these traits as something fixed about you, can be a trap in my view. They may reflect your dominant behaviours but hopefully my experience demonstrates that with awareness, you can manage the downside and keep the upside, if you keep working on yourself.

These traits are an extremely useful guide in my view. However, they don’t define me any more than I allow them to.