Self Awareness: The Big 5 Personality Traits

Great leaders have high levels of self awareness. One element of self awareness is a good understanding of how human beings differ in terms of personality. The big 5 personality traits can be remembered with the acronym OCEAN.

OCEAN

Trait descriptions and impact on job performance.

Openness, inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious; Openness is positively related to proactivity at the individual and the organizational levels and is negatively related to team and organizational proficiency.
Conscientiousness, efficient/organised vs. easy-going/careless; Conscientiousness is positively related to all forms of work role performance.
Extroversion, outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved; Extraversion is negatively related to individual task proficiency.
Agreeableness, friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached; Agreeableness is negatively related to individual task proactivity.
Neuroticism sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident; Neuroticism is negatively related to all forms of work role performance.

If you want to get a quick analysis of your own levels on each of these traits, Cambridge University provide a 3 minute test: Mini-IPIP Big 5 Personality Test

Do you want to know what I am?

Conor’s Big 5 Personality Traits

Here are my results from the Cambridge University test taken 2 December 2019.

Understanding Personality: The 12 Jungian Archetypes

How to Fail at Leadership

The 3 areas you can mess up if you are to fail at Leading yourself and others:

Relationships
Self Awareness
Openness to Change

Check out the video below to understand what it means to not mess up on relationships, self awareness and openness to change.

What is Leadership?

An effective leader is a person who:

Creates an Inspiring Vision.
Motivates People towards the Vision.
Executes on the Vision.
Builds a team to Achieve the Vision.

Read about how to do each of these 4 steps: What is Leadership?

If you liked this post, you will also like A truly compelling vision and 17 Personal Habits for a Fulfilling Life.

Fear of an Ordinary Life

My anxiety: It’s not FOMO but FOOL

Last week, I was given the thoughtful gift of a book “How to be Bored“.

It describes the anxiety arising from the Fear Of Missing Out, made famous as FOMO. I have a hard time sitting at home doing nothing productive. I have a sense that I am wasting my time. Classic FOMO. (I won’t mention the clues of social media addictions… I had to delete facebook from my iphone… it was becoming too consuming).

Summer amplifies this anxiety as I have too much time to think. I don’t teach too many classes and spend a lot of time reading, reflecting and thinking.

As I reflect, I think my fear is less FOMO – fear of missing out, and more FOOL – Fear of an Ordinary Life.

I am a F.O.O.L.

…it does cause anxiety late at night, through the morning, before lunch, after lunch… etc.

Fear of an Ordinary Life

It strikes me as supremely arrogant to believe that I deserve a greater than “ordinary life”, but there is definitely a striving inside myself pushing me to live a meaningful life. I have the feeling that I was given great gifts in this life: where I was born, when I was born, the brain I had, the health I had, the options that a good education has opened for me.

As a meditative exercise I sometimes reflect upon how tiny I am in this universe. It is 11 billion years old, and more enormous than I can imagine. I am miniscule. In 100 years I will be forgotten. In 1 million years… why does any achievement or lack of achievement matter?

This meditation takes away the rational questioning about whether I should care about doing meaningful things or not, but it doesn’t take away the underlying unease with myself.

The Buddhists say that this is an itch I should not try to scratch. I should learn to observe the itch without being driven, moved, affected by it.

I am a poor observer of the itch. FOOL is running like a clogged back-end server process on my brain’s CPU.

Where’s Ctrl-Alt-Delete?