The Self, Beyond Personality

For one of my psychology assignments recently, I completed the Big Five personality test. The results were familiar: high openness to experience (92%), high extraversion (85%), and low neuroticism (17%). It was tempting to read those scores as an explanation for my life. They seemed to account for why I moved alone to France, why I enjoy teaching, why I am always beginning something new, and why I decided to return to university in my thirties.

But personality tests can quietly encourage a particular belief: that who we are is already written. The more psychology I study, and the longer I spend practising yoga, the less convinced I am by that idea. Personality matters. It shapes our preferences, our habits, and the situations we are naturally drawn towards. Yet it is not a fixed blueprint. It describes tendencies rather than destiny.

That distinction has stayed with me because it changes how I think about well-being.

Personality gives us tendencies, not instructions

The Big Five model describes personality across five broad dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Costa & McCrae, 1992; McCrae & Costa, 1997). Rather than placing people into fixed categories, it measures tendencies that influence how we typically think, feel, and behave.

The trait that stood out most in my results was openness to experience. Openness is characterised by intellectual curiosity, imagination, creativity, and a willingness to engage with unfamiliar experiences (McCrae & Costa, 1997). Research has found that openness is associated with greater life satisfaction and a stronger sense of meaning because people high in openness tend to seek exploration, learning, and experiences that broaden their perspective (Steel et al., 2008; Steger et al., 2008).

Looking back, I can recognise this pattern throughout my own life. Moving to France to teach English, learning French from scratch, rebuilding WIY YOGA after returning to Singapore, and beginning a psychology degree at thirty-three all required stepping into uncertainty. I rarely interpreted those moments as reasons to retreat. Instead, they felt like invitations to grow.

What interests me, though, is that growth rarely arrived disguised as happiness.

Growth doesn't always feel good

Not every practice feels peaceful. Sometimes practice simply reveals where we are, and that awareness becomes the beginning of growth.

We often talk about well-being as if it should feel comfortable. Positive psychology offers a more nuanced view by distinguishing between hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. Hedonic well-being refers to happiness, pleasure, and life satisfaction, whereas eudaimonic well-being is concerned with living in alignment with one's values, purpose, and potential (Ryan & Deci, 2001).

Living abroad gave me beautiful memories, but it also brought loneliness, financial uncertainty, and cultural adjustment. Building a business has been deeply fulfilling, yet it has also involved periods of instability and self-doubt. These experiences did not always increase my happiness in the moment, but they strengthened my sense of autonomy, competence, and direction.

This is what I find so compelling about eudaimonic well-being. Sometimes the experiences that shape us most are the ones we would never describe as easy.

It's also something I see reflected in yoga practice. Not every class leaves us feeling light or peaceful. Sometimes practice simply reveals where we are, and that awareness becomes the beginning of growth.

The gift and cost of being open

Every personality trait comes with trade-offs.

My openness has encouraged me to pursue unfamiliar opportunities, but it has also made me surprisingly comfortable sitting inside uncertainty for longer than many people would choose. Leaving stable employment to teach independently aligned with my values, yet it also meant inconsistent income and difficult decisions about security.

This reminded me that personality traits do not guarantee well-being. Openness may create opportunities for growth, but whether those opportunities become meaningful or overwhelming depends on context, resources, and the choices we make (Steel et al., 2008).

In other words, the trait creates a tendency. It does not write the outcome.

Extraversion looks different than people think

Another high score was extraversion.

Research consistently links extraversion with greater positive affect and subjective well-being because extraverted individuals tend to seek rewarding social interactions (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998). I recognise this part of myself whenever I teach yoga or coach gymnastics and touch rugby. Watching someone discover confidence in their body or realise they are capable of something they once believed impossible remains one of the most rewarding parts of my work.

Teaching gives me energy because it is rooted in connection.

At the same time, I have learned that connection is only one half of what sustains me. I also need solitude. Journaling, reading, meditation, long walks, and studying psychology are not escapes from people; they are how I process my experiences with them.

Ryff (1989) describes psychological well-being as including both positive relationships and personal growth. That feels deeply true in my own life. My well-being depends less on constantly being around people than on moving rhythmically between connection and reflection. Extraversion explains part of that rhythm, but it does not define it.

Emotional resilience is practised, not just inherited

My low neuroticism score was perhaps the easiest result to misinterpret.

Neuroticism is associated with greater emotional instability and lower subjective well-being (Steel et al., 2008), so a low score might suggest resilience comes naturally to me. I do not think that tells the whole story.

Yoga has taught me how to breathe before reacting. Sport has taught me how to recover after setbacks. Therapy and reflective writing have taught me how to sit with difficult emotions instead of avoiding them.

Looking back on significant moments of grief and heartbreak, I do not think resilience appeared because my personality protected me from pain. It came from practices that helped me respond to pain differently.

Personality may influence our first emotional response. Practice shapes what happens next.

A third kind of well-being: psychological richness

One concept from this semester has stayed with me more than any other: the idea of a psychologically rich life.

Oishi and Westgate (2022) argue that a good life is not defined only by happiness or meaning, but also by experiences that are interesting, perspective-changing, emotionally diverse, and intellectually expansive. A psychologically rich life includes novelty, uncertainty, surprise, and complexity.

I immediately recognised myself in that description.

Living abroad, changing careers, rebuilding a business, returning to university, falling in love, experiencing heartbreak, and beginning again have not always made me happier in the moment. They have made my life feel fuller and more textured.

Perhaps openness is especially connected to psychological richness because it encourages us to engage with unfamiliar experiences even when they temporarily reduce comfort or certainty (Oishi & Westgate, 2022).

I wonder if this is another way of describing what many yoga traditions point towards. Practice is not always about feeling calm. Sometimes it is about becoming more available to life in all of its complexity.

Can we change our personality?

This is where psychology becomes hopeful.

Personality is relatively stable across adulthood, but it is not completely fixed. Longitudinal research shows that personality traits continue to change gradually across the lifespan (Roberts et al., 2006), and interventions can produce meaningful changes in certain traits over time (Roberts et al., 2017).

The important distinction is this: I probably cannot wake up tomorrow and decide to become an entirely different person. But I can become more aware of how my existing tendencies show up.

I can notice when curiosity becomes avoidance.

I can notice when independence becomes isolation.

I can notice when ambition becomes exhaustion.

Awareness creates options.

That feels very close to the purpose of yoga practice. We observe our patterns not to judge them, but to create enough space to choose differently.

The practices that changed how I experience well-being

The second half of my assignment invited us to practise four positive psychology interventions over one week: affirmations, Three Good Things, acts of kindness, and writing a gratitude letter.

What surprised me was that none of these practices changed my circumstances. Instead, they changed the quality of my attention.

Three Good Things

This became the practice I was most likely to continue.

Each evening, I wrote down three moments from the day that I appreciated. Most of them were remarkably ordinary: cooking dinner, reading a book, exercising, spending time with family and friends, or simply resting.

Research suggests that the Three Good Things exercise improves well-being by helping us notice positive experiences that might otherwise pass unnoticed (Seligman et al., 2005).

Its greatest lesson for me was recognising that rest counted as something good. It did not need to be earned through productivity.

I've quietly kept one addition to the practice since finishing the assignment: Why is this important to me? That single question slows everything down.

Affirmations

I was familiar with the idea that our thoughts shape our reality, yet I found this practice surprisingly difficult because it felt so open-ended.

Rather than writing qualities I wanted to develop, I kept returning to the same intentions: feeling grounded, loved, and safe. After a few days, I noticed I was writing different versions of the same affirmation.

I began wondering whether the practice needed a little more structure. Organising affirmations around different areas of life, such as relationships, well-being, work, or physical health, might have helped me notice where my attention was naturally drawn.

This brought me back to the idea of person-activity fit. Positive psychology interventions tend to be more effective when they align with an individual's personality, habits, and motivations (Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013).

That feels like an important reminder beyond affirmations themselves. If a practice feels repetitive, add structure. If writing doesn't feel natural, speak your affirmations aloud or pair them with movement or breath. The practice should support you, not the other way around.

For me, affirmations needed more structure than I instinctively gave them. For someone else, they may need less. The more useful question isn't whether a practice works, but how it works for you.

Acts of kindness

Acts of kindness felt less transformative because kindness is already something I try to practise in everyday life.

Instead of changing my behaviour dramatically, the exercise made me more aware of moments when I intentionally offered someone my time, attention, or generosity. Visiting a family member, checking in on a friend, or sharing a meal became conscious choices rather than routines.

Research suggests that acts of kindness benefit the giver as well as the receiver (Curry et al., 2018).

The shift wasn't a sudden feeling of happiness. It was a reminder that relationships are part of well-being, and that care is often expressed through ordinary moments.

The gratitude letter

The gratitude letter became the most emotionally significant practice.

I wrote to someone who had played an important role in my life. Rather than writing with the hope of receiving a response, I wrote simply to express gratitude for what had been. That small shift changed the experience entirely.

The letter stopped being about what might happen next and became an opportunity to acknowledge something meaningful without asking it to become anything more.

Seligman et al. (2005) found that gratitude interventions can improve well-being. What I experienced was slightly different: gratitude can still be valuable even when nothing external changes. Sometimes expressing appreciation is enough. The outcome doesn't always need to belong to us.

Beyond personality

Reflecting on both the personality assessment and these interventions, I arrived at the same conclusion.

Well-being seems to emerge less from changing who we are and more from becoming aware of how we move through the world. Personality influences what we notice, seek, avoid, and value, but awareness creates space between our tendencies and our choices. That space is where practice lives.

Perhaps that is the self beyond personality.

Not a different version of ourselves, but the quieter part that can observe our patterns without becoming confined by them. Psychology offers language for those patterns, while yoga offers practices for meeting them with curiosity and compassion. Together, they remind me that personality may shape the path beneath our feet, but we still participate in how we walk it.

References & Further Reading

Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual.

Curry, O. S., Rowland, L. A., Van Lissa, C. J., Zlotowitz, S., McAlaney, J., & Whitehouse, H. (2018). Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 320-329.

DeNeve, K. M., & Cooper, H. (1998). The happy personality: A meta-analysis of 137 personality traits and subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 197-229.

Lyubomirsky, S., & Layous, K. (2013). How do simple positive activities increase well-being? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 57-62.

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1997). Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. In Handbook of Personality Psychology (pp. 825-847).

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790-811.

Roberts, B. W., Luo, J., Briley, D. A., Chow, P. I., Su, R., & Hill, P. L. (2017). A systematic review of personality trait change through intervention. Psychological Bulletin, 143(2), 117-141.

Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E., & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1-25.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141-166.

Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069-1081.

Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.

Steel, P., Schmidt, J., & Shultz, J. (2008). Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being.Psychological Bulletin, 134(1), 138-161.

Steger, M. F., Kashdan, T. B., Sullivan, B. A., & Lorentz, D. (2008). Understanding the search for meaning in life: Personality, cognitive style, and the dynamic between seeking and experiencing meaning. Journal of Personality, 76(2), 199-228.