Does personality affect productivity in business? And if so, HOW does personality affect productivity in business — especially when you're a solopreneur?
What is the correlation between personality tests and productivity skills? What patterns in personality tests should you be looking for in order to improve solopreneur productivity?
Let’s talk about personality and productivity through the lens of solopreneurship in this blog post!
Topics we address in this article...
- DOES personality affect productivity in business?
- 5 sample questions to relate this back to your own life.
- HOW does personality affect productivity in business?
- 6 examples for how your personality affects work performance as a solopreneur.
- What personality tests are accurate?
- 2 essential factors to keep in mind when you're learning from productivity experts (or experts of any kind)
- The importance of PATTERNS in personality tests.
- 4 questions to take into consideration when exploring the connection between personality and job performance.
- How to make USE of personality tests for improving productivity as a solopreneur.
- Simple 5-question guide to get started with understanding your personality better — so you can take your solopreneur productivity skills to the next level.
Who am I to speak on this subject? As a Life Coach for Solopreneurs, I specialize in creating anti-hustle productivity strategies, developing intrapersonal skills, and improving personal fulfillment in your business and life.
The work I do with clients helps them use of personality-based productivity methods, so that everything you do as a solopreneur is grounded in who YOU are — rather than forcing yourself to use productivity hacks that aren't a good fit for how your brain works.
A condensed version of this article originally appeared as the September 7, 2024 edition of the Solopreneur Diary Entries weekly newsletter.
Does personality affect productivity in business?
In a word: YES!
Think about how YOU work, compared to how your friends or peers work:
- Do the exact same methods work effectively and in the exact same way for all of you?
- What are some of the ways your brain interprets things, compared to how their brains interpret that exact same thing?
- What comes easy to you but difficult to them, and vice versa?
- What feels enjoyable to you but a slog to them, and vice versa?
- What types of work are boring vs challenging to you — and how does that compare to your friends and peers?
Your personality and who you ARE factors into all of that.
As you can see, personality DOES affect productivity in business as a solopreneur.
HOW does personality affect productivity in business?
I’ve been in business since around 2010 (and I started as a professional blogger prior to that) — and over the course of many years, I’ve met a wide range of small business owners with all kinds of business models across many different industries.
There’s no one-size-fits-all business model… and that’s because there’s no one-size-fits-all PERSON:
The more that you adapt everything in your business to your personality, the more your business can genuinely support YOU, as the business owner.
This is especially important when you have a one-person business as a solopreneur!
You have to juggle a lot of different tasks and projects, so why wouldn’t you want to make that easier on yourself by ensuring that everything in your business is fully customized to your wants and needs, and how your brain works?
Your personality affects productivity in business because it tells you things like:
- How you’re going to react in a given situation.
- Whether you need more time to make decisions (and what goes into your unique decision-making process).
- The task management systems and time management methods that work best for your brain.
- What you’re looking for in business relationships (and therefore how to best cultivate those types of relationships with clients, peers, etc).
- Which business models will — and will NOT — work best for how your brain operates.
- Where you get your energy from and how your energy levels fluctuate throughout the day or week.
- …etc!
As you can see, your personality significantly affects your productivity in business.
In the work I do now as an anti-hustle Productivity Strategist for solopreneurs, I help my clients incorporate personality-based productivity methods into their business.
What exactly does that mean?
As my client, EVERYTHING in your solopreneur business is designed with your individual personality in mind:
- Communication methods with clients and prospects.
- The way you structure your services.
- How you onboard and offboard clients.
- The delivery methods you use for their products.
- The marketing strategies you choose.
- The way in which you design your schedule and calendar.
- Project management and task management methods.
- Time and energy management strategies.
- …etc!
This is the cozy business way — using a lifestyle business model with anti-hustle productivity at its core.
If there’s anything in your business that you do NOT enjoy doing…
Or anything that you’re struggling with…
Then you can benefit from incorporating personality-based productivity methods into your business!
Curious to learn more about this?
Check out my (free!) on-demand Productivity for Solopreneurs training to learn more about personality-based productivity and anti-hustle methods for your business:
What personality tests are accurate?
“Some research indicates that this personality test isn’t actually proven to be accurate…
What do you say about that?”
Someone asked me this question a couple years ago when I was teaching a productivity training. It's a great question!
At that point in the training (when they asked the question), I was talking about how different personality tests can be used to improve productivity: the way in which assessments can be helpful when you’re figuring out your personal productivity style...
Here’s how I responded:
“Thank you for bringing that up — I’m really glad you mentioned it! Whether or not this personality test is ~scientific~ isn’t necessarily the point of taking the personality test.
The purpose of it is to find the *patterns* in what comes up for you when you do various personality tests: What specific aspects of your results do you resonate with, and which do you not?
THAT is the value.
There’s a reason why you resonate with some things more than others. What you see in yourself, what you want to see in yourself, that is all information that can be used.”
Two things here:
1) I encourage you to question the people that you learn from.
Including me!
If you don’t understand something, if what an expert teaches you isn’t clear, if you’re skeptical of what they’re saying, listen to that part of yourself that’s questioning them.
It’s GOOD to think critically about what we’re learning, from any expert.
Plus, when you ask questions, that expert can a) explain themselves more clearly (they should always be able to explain why they’re saying this vs that), and/or b) assess their own ideas through another perspective and explore whether their original concept needs fine-tuning.
This is a great way to assess whether the expert ACTUALLY knows what they're talking about, vs if they're regurgitating something they heard elsewhere or cobbled together from ChatGPT:
If the expert cannot explain themselves clearly, if they cannot elaborate or expand upon what they are teaching you, then that may indicate they aren't TRULY an expert in their subject matter.
Get specific questions to ask experts — prior to hiring them — in my free, no-email-required cheatsheet: What to Ask BEFORE Hiring a Coach.
2) It is the LENS through which we look at things that often matters the most — because it affects the results.
*What* we are looking at has a lot of value, but *how we are seeing* the thing that we’re looking at is equally (if not even more so) of value.
It’s not necessarily the actual RESULTS of a personality test that matters, so much as *which aspects* of those results you resonate with, or your reaction to those results, or the repeating patterns you notice that come up in various personality tests over and over, etc.
- What are you paying the most attention to in a personality test?
- What aspects of the *results* do you feel resistance toward, compared to what makes you think, "I feel seen"?
- How are you reacting to the results from that personality test?
- What kind of repeated messages or results do you see crop up again and again when you're taking different kinds of personality tests?
- What do you resonate the most when you're viewing it through the lens of your personality and job performance?
Those are some of the questions to explore!
The importance of patterns in personality tests
I co-host a hobby podcast with my sister called Can We Talk About? where we discuss movie franchises. Our September 2024 episode was all about the Alien franchise, and we were talking about how it’s fascinating that you can watch the Alien movies through an array of different lenses:
- Entertaining horror movies
- Corporate greed
- Motherhood
- Bodily autonomy
- Class system
- Etc
(It’s part of the reason why the Alien movies are groundbreaking! You can watch them a dozen times over with a different viewpoint in mind, focusing on various aspects of symbolism, and get a whole new experience every time.)
This directly connects back to a key aspect of this question about "How does personality affect productivity in business?" — here's why...
When I do solopreneur coaching sessions with clients, one of the things we often work on is shifting their perspective.
They might be trapped in a particular cycle or mindset, so we work on looking at things through a different lens — which is one of the reasons why they can experience transformative breakthroughs within the span of just a few minutes.
This is also what you learn how to do with the Productivity Powerhouse framework: You complete various assessments to learn more about yourself!
The feedback I've consistently received from the solopreneurs who take that program is that as a result of doing this work, they understand themselves in ways that they never have before.
It’s because you’re not *just* doing the personality (and other types of) assessments…
…You’re learning how to make USE of those assessments.
You’re learning how to parse through the information within it, and what that information says about you, and what to do with that information to improve your solopreneur productivity, work/life balance as a small business owner, progress on your goals (in business AND life), etc.
Personality tests are fun to do, right?
There’s something beautiful about *seeing* yourself in the results, and about BEING seen.
But also…
- What are you doing with that information?
- Do you know how to effectively use it?
- Are you recognizing the patterns across multiple assessments?
- In what ways are you making use of the patterns, once you’ve drawn them out from your results?
These are all important questions to take into consideration!
How to make use of personality tests for improving productivity
Here’s a simple “guide” for how you can take action on this…
- Think of any “personality typing” you’ve taken, where the purpose of it is to learn something about yourself (e.g. Learning styles quiz, Myers Briggs test, Human Design, Enneagram, Clifton Strengths, etc) — What are the top 3 takeaways you got from it? What did that thing tell you about yourself that resonated the most?
- Take another personality typing assessment/quiz etc and do the same thing again. What are your top 3 takeaways from it?
- Do it one more time!
- Now that you have 9 takeaways in total… Can you group those takeaways together into similar categories? Is there a recurring theme, or is the same thing popping up again and again? (For example, I am an INFJ, Libra sun, and Enneagram 9. Something that consistently comes up for each of these types within Myers Briggs, astrology, and Enneagram is the peacekeeper/diplomacy aspect.)
- Analyze it within yourself: What about that theme/pattern resonates with you or does NOT resonate with you? What do you like or dislike about it, and how do you see yourself embodying that theme? What are you making it mean about you? If you are looking at it as a “weakness,” what could you do to transform it into a strength?
As you can see, there are a lot of directions you could go with exploring the patterns in personality tests for improving productivity in real-world scenarios!
There is power in the patterns you see in personality tests ♥
Now that you know how personality affects productivity in business...
Do you want help with this?
Would you like to go a whole lot deeper into this concept and exercise?
You get a full in-depth immersion into how to do this when you join Productivity Powerhouse:
Did you enjoy this article?
A condensed version of it originally appeared as the Sept. 7, 2024 edition of the Solopreneur Diary Entries weekly newsletter.
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