Different people have different personalities and cognitive traits, and styles.
In Western psychology, the Five-Factor Model explains that people's personality tends to cluster around 5 different factors:
Conscientiousness is associated with impulse control. This trait is known to govern the impulses and help keep one disciplined and organized. People who are conscientious follows-through with their tasks diligently. They are often more likely to display delayed gratification in working towards their goals.
Here's an example of a person with low conscientiousness:
A student just finished classes for the day. He has a test next week that he can study for or avoid by playing a video game instead. Someone with high conscientiousness will find it easier to study than playing a game.
To put it simply, if we have low conscientiousness, we tend to give in to the thing we want to do. On the other hand, if we have high conscientiousness, we tend to choose something we don't want to do.
Today's society usually rewards people exhibiting high conscientiousness.
What does this mean for people who are low in conscientiousness? Is there anything we can do to boost this?
Can we train ourselves to set aside what we want in favor of what's good for us?
The good news is you can do it! We can improve conscientiousness.
Conscientious people are often described as aware, hard-working, caring, and thoughtful of other people. Given this, to develop conscientiousness, we can just strive to be a nice person.
Consider thinking about helping other people. Know that we will definitely need to put the time and effort into this and this will almost certainly come at a cost to us.
What's important here is restraining our impulses for benefiting ourselves. In doing this, we can train our conscientiousness.
Conscientiousness shouldn't be confused with empathy. Helping people does not necessarily mean empathy right away.
Empathy is the capacity to feel what someone else is feeling. So naturally empathic people will naturally be helpful to other people.
There are a lot of people who are good but are not empathic. They just choose to be good people.
Examples of these are C Suite executives, psychiatrists, surgeons who commonly test highly on the sociopathy scale. Having low empathy allows them to face the high stress that their job entails.
The altruistic sociopath does things to help people but doesn't do it due to empathy. They do not help based on a feeling, but because they choose to set someone else above them due to a cognitive process.
We can practice and develop our conscientiousness through altruism.
If our conscientiousness is low, we need to set aside parts of ourselves in favor of others. As a result, we will train our minds to set aside what we want.
In Eastern religions, there is a term called karma. It is often captured in the statement, "What goes around comes around."
Conscientiousness seems to be the worldly observation that supports this theory of karma. In doing things for other people, based on the theory of karma, we are also training our conscientiousness. We are training our minds to become more restrained and free from our desires.
People who consistently do things for other people find that their lives start to improve too.
Interestingly, the only way for karma to work is through a common element, and that is through us. So we, the individual, are the only common element and the medium of action for karma.
There has to be a change in your brain that connects helping a lady carry her groceries with improving our lives. This missing link is the piece of conscientiousness that we can work to improve on.
To improve conscientiousness, become hard workers, and ultimately improve our lives, we need to recruit an amount of altruism.
The more we set aside what we want and what benefits us to help someone else, the more conscientious we become.
Coaching is also a helpful way that people try to improve conscientiousness. A professional coach can help overcome laziness and implement changes in our lives.