Personality, we mean, is the visible aspect of one’s character as it impresses others. For example, Mr.X has a pleasing personality. When we meet a person as an embodiment of a collection of different qualities, we say that he is a curious personality. In Psychology, personality means the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual or you can say it is an organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual. It is also called as the quality of being a person; existence as a self-conscious human being; personal identity, an essential part of the character of a person, something apprehended as reflective of or analogous to a distinctive human personality, as the atmosphere of a place or thing. We can say that this house has a warm personality. We use the word personality for reference to a famous, notable, or prominent person; celebrity, sometime in disparagement or hostility also like the political debate has deteriorated into personalities.
Though Personality has different forms, it is an important part of our character, image, and status in the society. For example, Mr. Y has got a towering personality. How a person behaves, feels and thinks, how he conducts himself in a given set of circumstances is largely determined by the state of his mind. External appearance of a person, his speech or act of mannerisms is only fringes of the personality which can not leave behind, permanent impressions of his personality. If we need to adjudge personality of a particular person in totality, we may have to understand the deeper levels of his mind too.
Why is it necessary to know about the mind?
Sometime, we intend to do many things – we wish to cultivate good habits, give up the bad ones, study something with concentration, decide on some other matter, and with so many tasks in mind at single time, our mind too gets perplexed as to which task should be taken first. Very often, it rebels by forcing us to beat a retreat from our efforts which are already under way. A book is open before us and our eyes are open. After reading a few words, our mind starts wandering somewhere else. It is indiscipline. The undisciplined mind is our enemy. To control its activities, we must study its mechanism how it can contribute to our desired working.
Our mind has primarily four sections. First one is Memory. This section keeps records of our past experiences – good and bad. If we meet some one after a period of ten years, our mind would immediately try to go through its records of memory when we met last time, how and where. If the details are still there, we can immediately recognize. If you recognize immediately, it would leave a good impression of your personality.
Second, that is deliberation and conceptualization. You know, as soon as any issue comes up before us, our mind starts to examine that issue from various angles, compares with other factors and thereafter, makes out a concept about that issue. When it completes the process, it expresses its views and asks us to speak about. The process may take its own time. Sometime, immediately or sometime, it may take hours or days to frame up the views to express.
Thirdly, our determination and decision making process is there. In other words, it is called our intelligence, the faculty responsible for decision making. It determines upon one amongst many options available, decides, and discriminates between right and wrong. This is seat of our will-power and signifies the most important aspect of our personality.
The fourth section relates to our consciousness. It appropriates all physical and mental activities undertaken by us like we eat, go, meet, hear, and think. As much this consciousness controls us as ‘I am doing it’, we get happy with the material pleasures and swayed by any event, greed or circumstances of life. If we give up the “I”, we tend to move to spirituality and our activities do not remain self-centric any more. It can give you eternal peace of mind.
Another important function of our mind relates to our emotions, though first they are noticed and promoted by our heart and finally our mind gets impressed soon if we do not have strong will power to prevail upon our emotions. Emotions can be broadly classified as attraction and repulsions. Love, admiration, aspiration, sympathy, joy and pride etc. attract us whereas jealousy, disgust, shame, hate, anger, fear, sorrow etc. are part of repulsion. When we get mature, we learn to control our emotions and express them very judiciously. More the emotions are under our control, so better would be our personality.
Our character vs. our personality:
Every action and thought leaves impressions on our mind. These impressions determine how we react to some issue at some particular moment and indicate the level of our personality. If we are maintaining moral character, our thoughts and actions would definitely be replica of our standards. We won’t need to give any testimony as to what extent we would be honest in our working with other people.
Our character has the following five dimensions:
1. Physical dimension 
consisting of our body and senses. How we maintain our body, our dress and accessories and how we smell out to others play an important role in framing the views about our personality. If we do not have proper dressing, exercise etiquette appropriate to the occasion or have bad odor while meeting someone else or attending some meeting/social functions, it may leave a bad impression about us. It is therefore necessary that we must have proper dress and accessories well before going to meet someone or attend any function/ gathering. It is essential that our expression of choice must be appropriate to the occasion.
2. Energy dimension performing digestion of food, circulation of blood, respiration and other activities in our body – relating to our health. We need to keep care of our digestion system of food, circulation level of blood and other activities so that we are able to maintain sound health. If health is lost, we can not meet the expectations of the people timely and properly and that may be termed as bad impression. For example, we are not able to maintain good health; we may perhaps not be able to be punctual in our meetings. The first impression will get affected by the notion that we are lazy. If we are healthy, we would be able to keep up our promises.
3. Mental dimension characterized by our activities like thinking, feeling and expressing of our emotions. How we think, feel and express our emotions on some issue matter a lot and some time, the other person makes out his opinion based on the past experience if ever he had met to you earlier. Hence, it is very much required that we must be alert and have clarity in our thinking, our feeling and expressing our emotions individually and publicly.
4. Intellectual dimensions represented through our faculty of determination, discrimination and will power. This is the real base of our character. In this fast moving world, we may not be able to contact each and every person personally and our communication expressing our determination or reasoning of discrimination can help a lot in their guessing regarding our character. If people know us due to our strong will power, they can assure about our activities as well.
5. Spirituality dimension leads us to our attention to divinity, our quest how we come in form and what is the ultimate reality. This process helps us to develop well-thought reasoning, thereby creating a lot to decide something in absence of the relevant data. Though this is not counted as an important part of our character in the materialistic contacts, our spiritual approach to the issue can give us in-depth enlightenment why anything particular is happening, what should be the recourse and how we can turn around. Here, the third eye concept works well when we decide something on the basis of our perception, instincts or assumptions only due to non-availability of the relevant data.
Good personality charms everyone – your friends, your girl/boy friends, your employer, your colleagues and all those who come in contact with you. You may take a little period to convince everyone if you have good personality. Since it plays a vital role in improvement of our health, incomes, job-elevation, social status, our educational levels etc., we need to attach due importance to this virtue. For its further development, we need to discuss further in depth in the next post. For the time being, we may concentrate on the above details in this process.
Be Happy – We may develop our Personality for happier life.