Episode 64: What Your Personality Says About You with Kimberly Mueller

Mar 11, 2021 | Podcast | 0 comments

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In this episode, Dr. Toni chats with registered psychologist Kimberly Mueller about how your personality shapes your life, especially your experience of this past year. Knowing more about the Big 5 personality traits can reduce stress and improve your understanding of yourself, your kids, your partners and other important people in your life. 

You can find the 2 previous episodes from last year featuring Kimberly Mueller here:

Episode 7: Anxiety, Mom Guilt and Getting Out of Your Head

Episode 14: Testing Positive and Recovering from COVID-19

Kim has a passion to help individuals understand how their own unique personality, life experiences, and social conditioning are impacting the quality of their relationships and lives. In addition to being an active mom of 2 young boys, Kim is also the co-founder of www.sheworth.org which is a movement to help women improve their self-worth and ultimately the quality of their lives.

In this episode, we cover:

  • Kim’s reflections on the past year, as someone who experienced COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic one year ago 
  • How every individual’s response to the pandemic can fit along a bell-shaped distribution curve 
  • The importance of giving yourself, and others around you, grace and compassion with whatever you are feeling right now
  • How your unique personality provides the lens that you choose and view your relationships can be seen through the Big 5 Personality Traits – OCEAN
    • Openness to experience
    • Conscientiousness
    • Extroversion
    • Agreeableness
    • Neuroticism 
  • If you can change your personality over time
    • Spoiler: while you can build in environmental structures and intentional commitments to impact personality tracts that you feel aren’t serving you, you will always default back to who you are 
  • The impact of genetics on your personality – good news for moms?
  • Personality traits are not good or bad; there is value on both sides
  • How you can think of neuroticism in terms of emotional stability or sensitivity to stress and negative emotional triggers 
    • If you are high in neuroticism, you tend to celebrate or medicate
    • If you are low in neuroticism, you are more emotionally steady
    • Women are generally more neurotic than men
  • Women are also slightly more agreeable than men (due to social conditioning?)
    • If you are more agreeable, you are easier to get along with others, friendly, likes to go with the flow, more of a people pleaser
    • If you are more disagreeable, you like people to know your opinion and don’t care what others think
    • Like Kim, you might experience resentment if you are naturally disagreeable and work hard on being agreeable with your kids
    • You may need to be more intentional with boundaries and saying no to others if you are high agreeable
  • Why the world is generally more suited to extroverted people, though they tend to struggle more during the pandemic
    • The book Quiet explains how introverts tend to be undervalued 
  • How conscientiousness is the greatest predictor of success in the workplace and long term romantic relationships
  • What you can do if your child is low in conscientiousness
    • Low conscientiousness may lead to more procrastination and less goal-setting and goal-achieving
    • If there’s enough pain, you may work hard and be able to shift where you fall on this spectrum
  • How you can conserve your mental energy be recognizing someone else’s openness to new perspectives and experiences
  • The importance of non-judgement when looking at the personality traits of other people in your life

Do the free personality test and check out SheWorth’s free monthly events.

Connect with Kim at psychologycalgary.com 

This Week’s Mama Must Have: 

Dr. Toni has been relying on her neti pot to deal with dryness and environmental allergies

Kim highly recommends Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart

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Stay safe and healthy everyone!