What is your personality, and how does it impact our stress, confidence and composure?
I had the absolute pleasure of hosting a brilliant session with Danny Wareham, who helped us to explore the invisible patterns shaping how we show up at work and in life.
Danny’s knowledge is vast and deep, and the subject left me thinking, yet reassured.
What if we are not “too emotional”, we just process threat differently.
What if we are not “difficult”, we are trying to create safety in the only way we have learned.
One of the biggest takeaways for me, was that personality isn’t a label, even though we have so many labels for our attributes, it’s our default operating system.
The way our brain conserves energy, makes sense of the world, and keeps us safe. I think everything softens when we think of it that way, there is more understanding, and perhaps even more empathy.
The colleague who plans everything months in advance?, That might be their way of creating certainty.
The person who leaves things until the last minute?, That might be how they work best under pressure and stimulation, driven by the deadline.
The HR professional who struggles to challenge?, That might be high agreeableness, a deep desire to keep the peace even at a personal cost.
The bit that will really stay with me “There are no better personalities” only awareness. The attributes whether we perceive them to be good or bad serve a purpose at their root, often linking to survival.
When we don’t understand ourselves and others, we start to:
take things personally
judge behaviours at surface level
create stories about assumed intent instead of understanding patterns
When we do understand more we move from judging “Why are they like that?” to curiousness, “What might feel safe for them right now?”
In HR, we’re often called into moments of conflict, stress, and breakdown. If instead of focusing only on the behaviour we became curious about what made that behaviour feel rational to that person? it may change many more outcomes. As Danny said so powerfully “Everyone is the hero in their own story”.
This session wasn’t about personality models or frameworks. It was much deeper, about self-awareness, compassion (for ourselves and others), understanding difference without making it wrong, and finally how recognising that the diversity in how we think, feel, and respond
is not the barrier to great teams but the magic of them.
If like me you have questioned “Why do I react this way?” or “Why does this person trigger me?”
A gentle reminder
It’s not about fixing who you are.
It’s about understanding how you are wired and what you need.
Then choosing, with awareness, how you respond next.
What’s your take on this overview?
