An individual’s ‘personality’ is their unique and relatively stable patterns of behaviour, thoughts and feelings. The key word is ‘relatively’. It implies that there is scope for change, that one’s personality is not necessarily constant. The influence of various aspects of our environment may affect our inherent behavioural traits, and can modify our personality. Personality development, therefore, is to allow new ideas to influence our personality, and to allow introspection to bring to the forefront latent qualities, effecting a change for the better.
There are four aspects to an individual’s personality: body, mind, heart and soul. Several factors contribute to one’s personality, to the development of one’s personality. These are all
Our relationship skills are also influenced by our prejudices – opinions or judgements, frequently unfavourable, based on irrelevant considerations, inadequate knowledge or inaccurate stereotyping, and the consequent discriminations we make. People have prejudices for diverse reasons and these biases affect many spheres of their lives; they are negative manifestations of integrative power: instead of bringing or holding people together, they push them apart. Ironically, even prejudice and discrimination imply some sort of relationship, however. If there is no relationship people would be completely unaware of another person's or group's existence. The act of discrimination is an unjust practice or behaviour, whether intentional or not, towards a category of persons. These categories range from sex, ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, to class, and more recently, age and physical disabilities. Prejudices and discriminations are deeply imbedded at both the individual and societal levels, and will eventually result in the dissolving of society.
The next important aspect that needs to be attended to is our academic and career requirements. We should adopt some basic “study skills” to successfully remember what we learn from an adequate period of time. The following is an example:
P – Preview: get the overall picture of what is to be studied before doing