In my first “fancy” job in a big, wealthy company, I noticed something strange. It was about the people who had been at the company a long time, had an amazing job, and made lots of money.

In my mind, I thought this was a perfect life! Yet I had the distinct impression that while some of these people seemed quite content and fulfilled, others seemed very unhappy.

“How is this possible?” I wondered.

I decided then and there, I wanted to be happy with my career and life. And so, I became determined to find the best version of myself.

Along the way, I learned that there is a lot of confusion out there. What does it really mean to be happy, or fulfilled? How do I find purpose and career? And what does personality, Myers-Briggs, and the Big Five have to do with all this?

After several years and a lot of false starts, I finally got through all the noise. I discovered that there are several fundamental and foundational components to ensure career fulfillment. These include my personality development, career mindset, and my attitude.

So today I’d like to share with you exactly what I learned in this journey. And what are the most effective methods and tools you need. These will enable you to achieve your career goals, along with personal fulfillment, in the shortest possible time.

For any stage in your career development or personality growth, I think you’ll learn something advantageous. So let’s get started.

Let’s start by talking about your career since we can ask a straightforward question:

A. Are you already on the career path you want?
B. Or are you looking for a first career, new career, or a career change?

If your answer is “A”, and you’re already in a career you like, how well does your personality type and attitude fit into your chosen career?

Or if your answer is “B”, what kind of attitude and personality characteristics will ensure your success in this new profession?

In both of these situations, I have come to this conclusion:

Uniting your attitude, personality type, & career is absolutely foundational to achieving fulfillment and success with your work.

And today I’ll show you how to accomplish this.

1. People, Personality, and Career Possibilities

Do you know your MBTI or Big 5 Personality Type?

The MBTI and Big Five are practical and effective feedback tools, which you can learn more about in my personality video, linked in the footnotes 1.

Why do we need them? It’s because these personality tools are good at providing objective feedback. This relates to how well you’re fitting in with your work and your relationships.

And while the Big 5 and MBTI are effective tools, they don’t measure all personality factors, just some of them.

Therefore, other “soft” personality factors like your motivation, habits, mindset, and attitude, require a bit of qualitative review. So can I ask you, how is your overall attitude? Is it constructive, or positive? Or you do get stuck in counter-productive patterns?

The reason I ask this is because my personality wasn’t always compatible with my work, or my social groups.

Optimizing your personality takes special attention because we have three social interactive modes. And evaluating your personality is different in each mode:

Social Mode 1: Alone
Social Mode 2: With One Person
Social Mode 3: In a Group of People

In Social Mode 1, the most effective tools to focus on are your self-care, habits, and mindset. I’ll share more with you on these further below.

Then in Social Mode 2, the key tools are active listening and clear communication. For more detail on this, check out my communications blog post or YouTube video, linked in the footnotes 2.

Meanwhile, in Social Mode 3, it’s a different playbook. The key method is to reduce the focus on your needs for a while. Then, ensure the function and joy of the full group as much as possible.

I will be writing about this in an upcoming post on Your Personality Type & Group Social Interaction.

In each of the above 3 modes, you can evaluate your capabilities and your effectiveness. How are you doing in each of these three modes right now?

This reflection is useful because when you optimize these, including your mindset & attitude, it makes your career accelerate. And it lets your personal life flourish. 

And as you fine-tune your personality, you create a positive feedback loop which improves many little things that add up to a big net positive.

For example, I noticed that as I optimized my personality to fit my career and goals, I enjoyed these benefits:

Benefits of Optimizing Your Personality Type

a. Better communications and results at work
b. Higher-quality friendships
c. Enjoying more casual contact with neighbours and other people in public
d. More effective fitness routines
e. Much more time in “flow-states”

There’s just one more question, so you can decide whether the personality expectations of your career are aligned for you. It might sound obvious, but I’ve missed this so many times!

If the expectations of your career don’t match what your personality can provide, then it will make you unhappy, which will affect your attitude, and that is just a destructive downward spiral.

Crashing and burning, I’ve been there, and it wasn’t fun. Finally, after a couple of burnouts, I decided to build a positive feedback loop.

There are a few reasons that career and personality benefit from being in-tune. Have you ever been to a restaurant where one of the service people is always grumpy? It’s possible that they don’t like providing service to people! So it’s not a fit, personality-wise.

With a different staff member, you will really feel it when a person servicing you at the restaurant has the right personality for the job. They seem pretty happy, and you enjoy the interaction with them as well. It makes all the difference in the world, right?

For that reason, mismatched colleagues are not as happy or engaged when they are in the wrong career for their personality: they do not have the personality alignment to enjoy the work.

Thus your attitude and personality underpin your career. Which then affects all aspects of your life.

Most of us want a good life, right? Where most of the day feels good for you… and thus with as little misery as possible. You can accomplish that with personality alignment to your career.

I’ve learned that when you’re either in a career that you love, or making progress to a new career, you can keep developing your personality so that it will provide a solid foundation for your work and life.

You will also see benefits in all the other areas in your life, like relationships, friendships, family, and health.

Here are the steps to accomplish your personality career optimization:

a. Take your personality tests, from the links in the footnotes.
b. Review the personality type & career listings on the web.
c. Notice how well your present personality fits with your chosen career.
d. Is your career personality fit right on target? Or do you need to optimize something?
e. Chose an area to take action. I’ll show you more details further below. 

2. All About Attitude and Your Career

Ever since I adjusted my attitude, I started to attract all kinds of good things into my life.

What if I told you that you have everything right now that you need to change your attitude, personality, and your life, in the direction you want

This is your choice as well… and to make choices is a power that we all have. That choice is crucial not just for joyful times, but to survive hard times and problems that might hurt us either emotionally or physically.

But we shouldn’t wait until a problem comes. We should prepare our attitude before a challenging situation arises.

I noticed in my own life, that when I was unprepared for a difficult situation that came out of nowhere, I often made things worse. So I needed a solution.

That solution is the combination of attitude, mindset, and mental tools. And as I improved the tools in my mental toolbox, I was much more effective at handling challenges with relative ease. 

The reason for that? Good mindset & mental tools allow us to respond calmly and accordingly, or however is suited for the situation.

Rather than focusing on why some unplanned “thing” is happening, effective tools are the way. This is the way.

So how can you learn these tools? The kick-starter is your attitude.

This is the choice to change your attitude.

Learning and applying the right tools requires a healthy attitude, day-in, day-out.

And then, a good attitude leads you to better ways of applying the tools you have learned, managing problems, and solving problems quickly.

You will attract more possibilities from your surroundings than you know existed.

And with a bit of practice, this will define you as a capable and mature adult, because of the powerful blend of your attitude, mindset, and inner dialogue.

What is inner dialog? These are the things you are saying to yourself all day long.

They are seen by the outside world through your physical presence, your habits, and your attitude. And these determine how you represent yourself to the world.

You get to choose what you want to show the world.

And to accomplish this, you choose whether the thoughts installed in your mind are positive, neutral, or negative.

So choose carefully

Therefore, if exposed to any given situation, and you have chosen to have the right mindset, you can proceed with calmness, focus, and effectiveness.

This allows you to proceed with a clear vision of what is needed from you and your environment.

Remember, the right attitude is what gives you the best possible outcome in every situation. This is because your attitude also determines the response of the environment.

For example, am I professional and respectful with a person in a phone call? They are more likely to treat me the same way as well.

Am I having a rough day and taking it out on other people? It won’t be long before someone gives me payback.

What exactly is the right attitude? It is dynamic because my attitude should be in-tune with the situation at hand.

Therefore, the right attitude is not something constant or definitive.

One thing is certain: you can learn control over your attitude.

By the process of elimination, we can conclude that the negative attitude will not do any good. Since we know that the wrong attitude is detrimental, we can strive for some improvement, right?

You might conclude that it is worthwhile to strive for a constructive attitude.

Since a constructive attitude is appropriate for most social interactions and also for the sake of your well-being.

When you are keeping a constructive attitude, you are having a more functional outlook on life, which results in being more inflow.

From a state of flow, you can be calmer with yourself and other people… along with being more grateful towards life in general.

For example, when it’s raining, is that good weather or bad? Is that better or worse than snow? In the end, it all comes down to your perception and view of what good weather means.

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.” – William James

3. How Habits Affect Your Personality and Career?

Remember my story from the beginning of this article, when I decided that I wanted to be satisfied and fulfilled with my career? 

This led me to decide to find the best version of myself.

Of course, we all want to be the best version of ourselves. 

This is so that you can fulfill the potential that lies within you. Yet there is a missing link between your desire and your results…

That is the bridge of effective daily actions, which are your habits.

Given that knowledge, what are the effective habits that will enable me to accomplish my objectives, and how should these habits actually work for my daily life?

This is what I have concluded:

The Personality Goals of Your Daily Career Habits

a. Keep me calm and focused for inner peace
b. Let me be healthy, energetic, and motivated
c. Give me the discipline to accomplish challenging work
d. Enable me to solve problems quickly and effectively
e. Allow me to stay in constant sync with my ideas and inspirations
f. Support me to do and express the good things I want to share with the world.

Is it possible to have a daily habit system that accomplishes all that? The answer is a resounding yes, absolutely.

But depending on where you are right now with your habit routines, this might take a bit of time to build up.

Yet all you have to do is keep investing in yourself.

Focus on adding one new habit each month.

In no time, you will have several powerful and effective habits integrated into your daily routine.

Which are these habits? The words might not sound like magic, but the effects of these practices on your mind & body actually do work like magic. That’s why you hear these tools mentioned all the time.

For me, I have adopted 6 habits that I am forever grateful for since they help me every day to achieve the above-mentioned objectives.

1. Getting up early with a morning routine
2. Exercising for cardiovascular and hormonal balance
3. Stretching to release tension and stay limber
4. Meditating for calming the “monkey mind”
5. Reading for a bit of knowledge and a bit of fun
6. Writing to plan, to process, to release, to dream, and to organize

Based on my experience, I would recommend trying each one of these for at least a month. Stick with the habits which help optimize your personality and make you feel good over time.

Final Thoughts for Putting Your Career and Personality to Work

I know we’ve covered a lot of topics here today. Applied step by step, they will boost your attitude, personality, and career.

The only thing to do now is to pick one thing from this page and get started. Go for it!

Footnotes:

1. Introduction to the Big 5 Personality System [8 min]

2. Six Secrets for Better Conversations [6 min]