Diagnosing a personality
📅 Mon 8 December 2025 at 05:02 GMT
I’m a terrible judge of character.
It’s probably because I’ve chosen to be an eternal optimist. My default is to think good of a person, until and unless I have incontrovertible evidence of badness. Everyone has good in them, so let’s allow them to manifest their goodness.
Sometimes I hear a person described negatively and I think, “Are we talking about the same person?” I’ve never noticed all these terrible character flaws.
Actually, I’m not sure if that’s due to my positivity or conversely, whether I now have literally zero expectations of people! If someone just smiles at me, I take that as a win!
In any case, if I was to start analysing people, it wouldn’t be with an intention to catalogue their positive and negative personality traits. That’s too superficial and easy. Anyone can do that. I don’t bring anything new to that discussion.
More importantly, a list of character flaws doesn’t help you advise, fix, or improve the person. In medical terms, it’s merely a list of symptoms and signs. It’s not a diagnosis and it doesn’t lend itself to formulating a treatment plan. I didn’t go to medical school to only study symptoms and signs, without learning about diagnosis and treatment as well.
No, if I was going to analyse a person, I’d be working out what their underlying thought processes are. That’s the diagnosis layer. And how did they develop those thought processes? That’s the causation (aetiology) layer.
Because in order to comprehensively treat the symptoms and signs, you need to accurately determine and address the causation and diagnosis. If a patient had an itchy skin rash as a symptom, you need to first work out what’s causing it, and whether its eczema, psoriasis or dermatitis, before prescribing the correct ointment. Same thing with a person’s personality.
Of course, it’s more difficult and labour-intensive than endlessly gossiping about the symptoms and signs behind a person’s back. It requires you to invest something of yourself in them. But if you want to change a person, you do need to dig deeper. Go deep, or go home.
In a future post I’ll be describing one of my most useful techniques for diagnosing a person’s personality and thinking – stay tuned!
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