Neuroticism is not the only personality dimension that can cause psychological vulnerabilities. Sauer-Zavala says high levels of conscientiousness can tip into perfectionism, something I relate to. The interventions Sauer-Zavala suggests for this make my skin crawl: “Figure out what 80% of your best job is, do that and stop there and see what happens,” she says. “Or send an email with a typo, or leave work at five o’clock every day this week. It’s usually the most anti-climactic thing.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
I compulsively check and re-check any bit of work or correspondence before I send it off. After Sauer-Zavala’s comments, I try to stop myself before doing a final-final-final check on a bit of corporate work, and just send it. I can’t help opening it once more afterwards and spot what I see as a glaring error, the close repetition of a certain word. I feel a pang \u2013 see! But of course she’s right, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, and I quickly forget about it.<\/p>\n
By the end of my six weeks of experimentation, I didn’t feel radically different, but I did feel pretty good. The moment had come to re-take the test. Early on, I sensed that I might evince some changes. In answer to a question about whether I was “outgoing and sociable”, I felt sure I would have previously disagreed. This time, I had six weeks of unignorable data in front of me. Objectively, I had socialised, often with strangers, and had a not bad time. So maybe I was sociable after all. The researchers were right that acting in a certain way can change your perception of yourself.<\/p>\n
More like this:<\/b><\/p>\n
\u2022 Our 2,500-year-old mania for personality types<\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 How birth order shapes your personality<\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 How your personality changes as you age<\/a><\/p>\n Answering questions like this helped push me from the 30th percentile on extraversion to the 50th. On agreeableness, I also hugely improved, shifting from the 50th to the 70th percentile. It seemed that thinking nice things about people had indeed made me more positively disposed to humanity. On neuroticism, I showed a marked improvement, dropping from the 83rd percentile to 50th. I stayed roughly the same on conscientiousness and openness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Neuroticism is not the only personality dimension that can cause psychological vulnerabilities. Sauer-Zavala says high levels of conscientiousness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-266690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115836695624538645","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}