Personality and Impression

Identity

Personality is not constant.  Depending on my mood, I will have a different personality, therefore giving people different impressions of me.  One day I might be very inquisitive, leading the conversation with new questions or asking follow-up questions to dive deeper.  Another day I might feel like letting other people take control of the conversation, and just comment on bits and pieces here and there.  I might be in the mood for light conversation sometimes, and serious ones other times.  Or I might just not talk and just listen.

Personality influences people around you unequally.  By going to a lot of social events, I have developed separate personalities based on my mood and the situation I am in, and by becoming more self-conscious about these moods, I’ve started to notice the same moods and personalities in other people.  This lets me see from a 3rd party perspective, what the impression on the group such a personality has, and it has been very informative.  What I learned is that some personalities cause certain kinds of people to instantly gravitate toward you, and others to instantly begin avoiding you.  What this means is that the age old saying that you can’t please everyone holds true.  Also, now that you don’t have to worry about pleasing everyone since it’s impossible, you can focus your attention on what you should be doing all along: being yourself, and not what you think others want you to be.

How impressions are made: people are consciously or sub-consciously judging all the time, and in the end what they think and remember about you is a combination of the impression you give with how long you give it (impression X duration) and how interested they are in it (impression X interest).  If they get the impression that you are not talkative, and that impression lasts for an hour, then their impression is that you are not talkative.  If you follow up with an impression of 3 hours of talking, they may change their impression to believe you are talkative.  If during these 3 hours you mention liking Hamburgers, and the person you’re talking to loves hamburgers, that piece of information is going to stick out more because it’s a common interest.  An impression is strengthened by time, or by interest.

However, the longer they hang out with you, the more opportunities you have to show them who you really are, and the more likely you two can become comfortable friends.  Read more about Getting Comfortable With a Friend.

More on Friendship and Social Skills

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Getting Comfortable with a Friend

Friendships

I used to think the comfort level I had with someone was based on EITHER the depth of knowledge I had about their personal life OR the length of time we’d spend together.  However, it has come to light that the friends who I feel most comfortable with have simply been the ones I’ve spent the most time with, and not necessarily the ones I know the most about, or have shared the most with.  People who I spend a lot of time with but I don’t know much about, aren’t really friends because they’ve just been in the background—no connection had been made.  As such, I now know it’s based on both.

This explains why it is hard to have many friends—I thought that with the appropriate “interview” skills, I could sustain a friendship at a cognitive level with minimal time input.  I am finding out a friendship based on cognitive connection alone is not possible—the list of people I have knowledge about has never been so large, the list of people whom I can call request to hang out has never been so large, and yet the list of people who consider me a friend—since friendship must be mutual—is not as large.

From very valuable feedback, I have learned that my once per month or more frequency of contact, slow response time to requests on the order of days to weeks, and priority based on time since last contact rather than strength of relationship, gives the impression of inconsistency, a lack of care, and generally not the behavior you’d expect from a true friend.

This concept has been difficult for me to grasp because while time is an integral part of developing a relationship, I have always believed that the strength of the relationship is not dependent upon the frequency of contact, and the reason I believe this is because I have some friends whom I rarely talk to ever now, perhaps a couple times a year, and yet they are friends for sure.  However, when I think about it now, I realize it’s because at some point in the history of the relationship, a very large investment of time was made—there was a period of time where the frequency of information exchange was high enough that it was not just a shared experience cognitively, but a shared experience period—a friend experiences your life with you, not just knows about it.

More on What I Learned About Friendship in 2013

Needs vs. Wants

Depression, Staying Grounded

I want the new *item* so much, I need it.  I want to see a movie so much, I need to.  In our everyday conversations, we often exaggerate our desires with the word “need,” but sometimes we forget that it is in fact an exaggeration and not the truth.  When that happens, when you lose sight of  the difference between what you need, and what you only want,  you create a warped reality that may cause depression, or at least keep you from thinking clearly.

What is an actual need?  It is something without which you cannot live.  You need food and water.  Shelter, is a want–you can survive without it, but we all would prefer to have it.  Money, power, , these are all wants: your life may be different with them, but without them, you will still live.

I bring this up because it interfered with both my decision making, and my mental health (happiness).  I have many interests, and I had been feeling extremely stressed and overwhelmed by the activities I was involved in, and all the trade-off decisions that I kept making to try and fit everything in, because I felt like I needed to fit in as much as possible.  Once I took a step back and realized that these were all hobbies and not critical to my life, I no longer stressed over the activities because if I fail at something I just want, it’s OK: I’ll live.  By knowing what activities are actually necessary, like my job, I can feel more secure in my free time knowing I have all my needs taken care of.  I can allow myself to be happy about doing things I want, instead of being stressed at all the things that I want to do but aren’t able to.

Other examples include sacrificing sleep for time for any reason.  Eventually, we all realize the truth that we need sleep.  We can reduce sleep, sure, but only up to a point: past that point and we begin threatening our well-being with the effects of sleep deprivation.  One dangerous result of sleep deprivation and insomnia is depression.  In fact, what I’ve found is that the best cure for a bad day is a good night’s sleep.