A few weeks ago, someone asked me — with a mix of humour and hesitation;
“Do you really believe in personality? I mean… aren’t we all a bit of everything?”
It’s a fair question.
And depending on your day, your mood, or your meeting schedule, it might even feel true.
You’re calm one moment and reactive the next.
Quiet at a party, bold in a boardroom.
You can be driven, empathetic, impulsive — sometimes all before lunch and certainly with enough coffee!
So is there really such a thing as personality?
A stable set of traits that defines how you think, act, decide, and relate?
Or is it just a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the mess?
That question — “Is personality real?” — has been rolling around in psychology for decades. But for most of us, it’s less of a scientific debate and more of a personal reflection.
Why do I keep doing that?
Why do I get so drained in meetings like that?
Why do I clash with people like them — even when I don’t want to?
Those aren’t abstract questions.
They’re actually deeply human ones.
And personality — when seen as a lens, not a label — can help us explore them with a bit more grace, context, and understanding.
What Do We Mean by Personality, Anyway?
When we talk about personality, we’re not talking about whether someone’s “bubbly,” “moody,” or “a total Capricorn.”
We’re talking about the patterns that sit underneath the surface.
The deeper tendencies that shape how we:
- Make decisions
- Respond to pressure
- Form relationships
- Seek information, structure, stimulation or harmony
Personality isn’t about what you do on any given day.
It’s about how you tend to operate over time, especially when you’re not consciously trying to manage how you show up.
It’s not your role, your reputation, or even your mood.
It’s the part of you that shows up before that all kicks in.
A Quick (but useful) Detour into the Science
Psychologists call trait-based view of personality a model of consistency and variability in human behaviour — and one of the most widely used and scientifically grounded is the Big Five model.
The Big Five suggests that personality can be understood through five broad domains – like openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism [try using that word in a debrief!] – and that people tend to fall somewhere along a continuum for each. So rather than saying “this is who you are (fixed)” or “you are always different (situational)”, a trait model says: You have a set of characteristic tendencies that are broadly consistent, but how they show up depends on context, experience, and choice.
Facet5 builds from this model — but focuses more on how your personality expresses itself in work, life, and relationships. It gives you a lens to understand:
- How much certainty or flexibility you need
- How you handle structure or ambiguity
- How you recharge (or burn out)
- How you engage with feedback, change, risk, conflict, collaboration — and all the messy stuff in between
But even if you’ve never touched a profile or psychometric report in your life, you’ve felt personality at work:
- When someone doesn’t speak up – but never misses a detail
- When someone else makes a decision in five seconds flat and others take forever
- When your energy rises around certain people… and dips around others
These are expressions of personality. They might be invisible – but they’re everywhere.
But I’m Not Always Like That…
One of the most common pushbacks to personality profiling is:
“But I’m not like that all the time.” “I’m different at home”
And that’s completely true, otherwise we would be more like a robot than a person!
You might be outgoing at work but quiet at home.
You might love collaboration on Monday… and want to hide by Wednesday.
Sometimes you surprise yourself. Sometimes you adapt to survive. Sometimes you just wake up in a weird mood.
So if personality is real, why do we flex so much?
Here’s the thing:
Your behaviour changes. Your personality doesn’t – it simply adjusts.
Trait Stability, Behavioural Flexibility
Personality traits are considered to be relatively stable over time. Not rigid, not fixed, but consistent enough to be predictive.
But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck in a behavioural script.
What changes is how you express those traits depending on:
- The context (Are you at work or at home? With friends or strangers?)
- The stakes (Is this high pressure? Low risk?)
- Your energy (Tired, focused, stressed, excited?)
- Your motivation (Do you care about the outcome? The people?)
For example:
- Someone with a strong drive to be decisive may pause and ask more questions when the stakes are high — but only because they’ve learned to.
- Someone who’s naturally cautious may act quickly under pressure — but it will feel like a stretch, and may drain them more than it would someone wired for speed.
- Someone who thrives on harmony may challenge a colleague — not because it’s easy, but because it matters.
This is why personality insight isn’t about boxing people in. It’s about understanding your default setting – so that when you choose to flex, it’s conscious and sustainable.
Self-Awareness = Freedom to Choose
The beauty of understanding your personality is that it gives you language and awareness, not a script.
It helps you answer questions like:
- Is this really how I want to or need to show up?
- Am I reacting from habit, or choosing with intention?
- What would it look like to stretch — just a little — in this moment?
You’re not always like that, but you’re probably more often like that than you know.
And when you know your patterns, you get to decide how much they define you. When we are on auto-pilot we get default outcomes, sometimes they hit the mark and other times they don’t. When we understand and choose our behaviours we get to create better outcomes for you and others.
Is It Real or Just a Construct?
Let’s get a bit philosophical for a moment.
Because even if personality feels real — the way we show up, the way people describe us, the way we instinctively respond to the world — it’s still fair to ask:
Is personality actually a thing? Or is it just a made-up framework that helps us make sense of ourselves?
And the answer is: Yes. Absolutely To both.
Personality, like many psychological concepts (think: intelligence, leadership, motivation), is technically a construct — it’s not something you can point to on a brain scan. You can’t hold it in your hand, and you won’t find it tucked away in your prefrontal cortex.
But here’s the important part:
Just because something is a construct doesn’t mean it’s not useful, observable, or predictive.
We see the effects of personality all the time:
- In how some people act without hesitation, while others need time to process
- In how some thrive on chaos while others quietly maintain order
- In whom pushes for clarity, who questions the plan, who holds space for others, and who runs ahead with confidence
These patterns are real.
And when measured with rigour (like with Facet5 and other trait-based models), they’re also statistically reliable, globally validated, and meaningful in how we coach, lead, hire, team, and grow.
So no – personality isn’t a “thing” you can bottle.
But it’s a lens we can look through. A way of noticing, naming, and working with the patterns that make us who we are — and who we’re becoming.
What Personality Doesn’t Explain
Let’s be clear:
Personality is not a crystal ball. It doesn’t tell you your whole story. It doesn’t predict your purpose. It’s not your destiny, and it definitely doesn’t explain everything about how you behave.
You are not your profile.
Personality doesn’t know:
- What you’ve lived through
- What matters most to you
- How safe or supported you feel
- Whether you’re running on coffee, adrenaline, or two hours of sleep
- It doesn’t account for culture, trauma, privilege, values, or context — all of which shape how we show up in ways far more complex than any five-factor model could capture.
So yes, personality is a helpful lens. But it’s not the full picture.
It’s a Starting Point — Not a Full Story
Think of it this way:
- Personality gives you a language for your preferences
- Values tell you what’s meaningful to you
- Motivation is what gives you energy and drive
- Experience shapes your reactions and choices
All of these interact in real time. And when they do, you don’t always act like “your type.”
You act like a whole person, in a moment, doing their best with what they’ve got.
That’s why great personality frameworks don’t try to define you or put you in a box with a label.
They help you understand your patterns, so you can be more intentional with them.
They show you:
- Where you tend to go on autopilot
- Where your strengths might overplay
- Where you have room to stretch
- And where you might need to slow down, reflect, or adapt
It’s not a scorecard. It’s a mirror.
So Why Bother?
If personality doesn’t tell the whole story…
If it’s shaped by context, can’t predict everything, and doesn’t account for all the things that make us human —
Why even bother with it?
Because understanding your personality isn’t about boxing yourself in.
It’s about unlocking your patterns.
It gives you:
- A shared language for how you operate
- A way to own your strengths without apologising for them
- Clarity around where you get in your own way
- And insight into how you impact the people around you
It’s not about change for the sake of change.
It’s about noticing your defaults, so you can decide when they’re useful — and when they’re not.
It gives you the freedom to:
- Say yes more consciously
- Say no with integrity
- Stretch without snapping
- And relate to others with more understanding and less friction
A Lens, Not a Definition
So, is personality “a thing”?
Yes — and also, not everything.
It’s not a label or a limit.
It’s a lens. A guide. A gentle nudge to pay attention.
It doesn’t tell you who you are.
But it can help you understand how you are — and give you more choice about how you want to be.
So next time you catch yourself asking,
Why am I like this?
Pause.
Get curious.
And maybe ask instead:
How do I want to show up — right now, in this moment — as me?
Curious Question
What’s one trait or tendency in yourself that you’ve learned to understand (or appreciate) differently over time?
