You’re not a simple, single individual with one clear core personality. Oh no.
You also contain multitudes. All the time. Right next to each other.
For example, I’ve got an army of different ‘Marks’ jostling together inside my body, taking turns to be the one at the wheel of the ship. Or sometimes they wait patiently — dormant for years before bursting out to put in a surprise appearance.
And you don’t know whether one of your different personalities showing up is going to be the hero that saves the day. Or the unwelcome guest who causes disaster and woe.
But our mission today is to explore how to get more of the former and less of the latter.
The first key is simply being aware that you have different personalities. The second part is then having a strategy for handling them.
Let’s start by looking at who these different personalities are and why they appear.
First, there are different sides of your nature. No-one is simply all one thing. We’ll be kind at some times — ruthless and aggressive at others. Even the people who naturally lean heavily towards one side will always contain aspects of the whole spectrum. It may be small amounts, but the seeds will be there.
Then there’s different environments.
Are you exactly the same person in the office in front of your boss as you are with your friends? Unlikely. And what about your role as a brother, son, father, student, customer, etc? There’s a whole load of different roles we switch between in the space of a few hours.
Then there are other situational changes. Are you hungry? Tired? Ill? Are you doing energising and uplifting things? Or have you spent all day grappling with something depressing and difficult?
In each case, different parts of you are going to show up in the moment depending on the situation, what personal resources you have available, etc.
So now that we understand who all these different personalities are, we’re in a position to think about how to manage them.
You can’t control who shows up in any given moment. But you can recognise the different personalities when they show up. Choose to listen more to the “good” ones. Choose to give them more power and agency in how you shape your life.
A reactive approach to this would be resolving not to make important decisions when you recognise you’re not one of your “best” selves.
That’s a great start. But there’s much more benefit on offer when you get proactive about this and plan ahead…
Take a look back over the past days and weeks. Do you notice any patterns? Do particular selves tend to show up at specific times of day? Or in particular situations?
Recognise when your absolute best self shows up most consistently. And then schedule that time to put them in charge of ‘everyone’ else.
Just like a CEO’s role is to manage everyone else and set strategy (rather than getting stuck in and doing the work themselves), give your best self the task of making the key decisions and managing this unruly bunch of different personalities.
Maybe that’s the time when you want to give some serious thought to how you design your environment so that it nudges you constantly in healthy and good directions — rather than being a distraction or downright temptation.
It’s also the time to assign activities so that they’re likely to line up with complementary personalities.
Who do you want to entrust difficult jobs or decisions to? And who do you want to let off the hook? Plan different tasks so that the right self is likely to be the one who turns up to carry them out.
If “mid-afternoon slump Mark” is always distracted and cranky then I want to recognise that and not throw any work his way that requires serious amounts of willpower.
When you give the most valuable strategic time to your best self like that, you’re letting it run the show.
All your other selves then become “worker bees” following orders that were thought out by the brightest mind in your pantheon of personalities.
You’re going to get solid work out of “lesser beings” often as a result. And you can certainly stave off any disasters by setting the ground rules of which pies your worst selves do and don’t have permission to stick their fingers in.