Have we gone overboard with personality profiling and labels?

Are you INFJ? Or ENFJ? Or an empath? Or a healer? Or a nurturer? Or a thinker? Or a reader? Or a listener? Or your love language is quality time? Or your personality color  is “yellow”? Or green? Or blue?

Do we need so many labels? Do we need to be rigidly defined by them?

There is no denying we are all individuals with varying personalities. Some people are more extroverted, some more introverted, some more dominant, some more passive, and so on. Some people have an “inside voice” (that is, showing one type of personality when alone or not in a public setting; some people have an “outside voice” (showing a public facing personality); some people mix both, depending on the circumstances.

Yes, we humans are complicated! And yet even though we are complex beings, why are we so increasingly hung up on labels? Why do we hold so tightly to them? 

Here is one angle to this: We humans are highly pattern seeking creatures. This can vary some from individual to individual — though because social hierarchies a key component of human evolution, we tend to establish some degree of structure to make sense of our existence and place in the world.  Therefore, we use labels to help identify common patterns of behavior / interactions with other humans, including how we categorize all forms of life, industry, organizations, politics, religion, you name it.

Now, imagine introducing yourself entirely in labels: ‘Hi, I am Cee. I am an introverted-extrovert, thinker, reader, Catholic, bodybuilder, engineer, scientist, empath, artist, classic liberal, carnivore…”. I am sure I could add labels all day long. And while these labels may be accurate – do they make me truly unique? Do they make me more empowered?  Do they help me avoid having an identity crisis?

And when we get to the core of this topic, is personality profiling necessary at all?

That’s not to say that understanding personalities in-depth is not important. Nevertheless, it is influencing people here in the West to hyper-enable personality types and attributes. In other words, let’s say you refer to yourself as an “empath”: Yes, that means that, by nature, or by some form of social conditioning, you demonstrate a higher degree of compassion and concern than, say, your friend, Michelle, who is generally less empathetic. However, perhaps Michelle was once more empathetic, but then she went through some traumatic experience that shook that empathy to the core. Or what if, one day, Michelle read a self-improvement book that is so powerfully resonated with her life, that she once again became more acutely empathetic, and thereby could also be called an “empath”?

In other words, aren’t we more capable of adapting and tuning our personalities than what we assume? And why do conversations often entail so much self-identification? 

Let’s say you are at work: You and your co-workers are in a conference room preparing for a meeting, when one of your co-workers strikes up a short conversation with you: “Hi Tracy, How are you?”  “Hi Ashley, I am feeling a little down.”  Then, Ashley replies, “I know, I am an *intuitive* — I could sense your pain.” 

In other words, like “empaths”, some people are more in touch with intuition. But does that mean everyone else in the conference room did not pick up on any verbal or non-verbal cues about Tracy’s behavior that day?  Or perhaps some people are more subtle about their perceptiveness?

This is not to say that varying personality types do not provide important utility. Just that personality profiling appears to be a crutch for many people. And worse, it can make some people even more entrenched in justifying their actions because of their personality profile: “Well, I am a ‘schedule changer’ – that’s why I am never on time anywhere I go.”

Sadly, the personality pendulum has swung too far over to self-love and distorted self-acceptance: “This is who I am, and this is what I do because of who I am.”

Now, while labels certainly have their place – we need well-organized systems of identification for a whole host of crucial reasons — they may leave little room for personal growth. That is, if we are not actively improving communication, becoming more well-rounded, and fixing shaky personality traits, it can lead more to excuses overtaking solutions.

For instance, What if my love languages are “quality time” and “physical affection”? Shouldn’t I grow in the other love languages as well?

One argument to that is “We are all different; we are all not going to have the same relationship”. True, but some of the self-proclaimed individualistic qualities that often separate are also the qualities we *all* should have to build a more enriching, engaging, meaningful relationship.

We all take that for granted. We are all guilty of expecting others to adapt to our personality attributes, or to give us our space if we are with people who don’t adapt well. We live life as there will be many chances to reform ourselves before the afterlife. We live as if we cannot live without labels.

A simple answer could be *balance, balance, balance*.  Or maybe it’s more than time that we spend more time understanding our similarities, instead of clinging so tightly to our personality and label differences. Yes, it is important to be an individual, to have your own, unique experience in this almost surreal life. Yet it is also important to be as well-rounded and adaptable as possible — which demonstrably leads to better interpersonal relationships and personal growth. And while we can’t be all things to all people, we can certainly build and maintain a shared foundation for how we treat fellow human beings.

Let’s all grow for the better – together.