Personality Evolvement

People have the tendency to cling into one type of personality in a specific type of environment unless the environment itself encourages growth.

Life is divided into three areas:

• Work
• Relationship to others
• Relationship to self

People are selectively agentic. Agency means the capability to act and actively shape your circumstances. There are people who are high agency and low agency.

People have the tendencies to excel in some areas (high agency) but stuck in another (low agency). For example, you have an anxiety you can’t resolve when you’re 15. When you are 25, you can overcome all the fear you face at work while you still can’t fix your anxiety. You’re stuck. That persistence don’t get applied to your anxiety.

I think relationship to others is the hardest to change. We always carry the weights of social expectation in our back. We always stuck on whatever resourcefulness we have when we encountered at the first time.

You grew in a family that never teach you to say thank you. Saying thank you or any appreciative word will make you feel awkward in that circumstance. Finally, when you’re an adult, you feel normal saying thank you to the new environment—your new friends, new colleague, strangers. They don’t have any expectation to you, so saying thank you is easy, rebuilding your image that you are a appreciative person. But you can’t still say any appreciative word to your closest people. It is very hard, they always had the expectation that apprecation in the circumstance feel weird.

It’s also the same with language. One may have high agency in a language but low in another. It is easy to show compassion and love in English rather than in Indonesian language. It might be influenced by culture and norms that exist in the language. Two different languages, two different personalities.