Knowing Your Personality Helps You Better Handle Stress – Everyday Fulfillment
No Vacation Required
There is a distinct difference between pressure and stress.
Pressure is external – it’s the deadlines, the expectations, and the noise of a complicated world. Stress, on the other hand, is your internal response to that pressure.
When the pressure is on, your natural personality patterns shift, sometimes in ways that feel completely unlike you. This week, we’re talking about how to recognize those shifts before they take over.
In this episode, we unpack the three common ways your personality reacts to pressure. We share personal examples of what it looks like when we fall into "the grip" of our least developed traits, and how you can use self-awareness to stay in the driver's seat of your own life.
Onward and Inward,
COMMON QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE
❓ What is the difference between pressure and stress? Pressure is the external force (deadlines, expectations, environment), while stress is your internal, physiological, and psychological response to that pressure.
❓How does my personality change when I'm under pressure? When you are stressed by external pressure, you may over-rely on your dominant personality trait, get stuck in an introverted or extroverted feedback loop, or fall into "the grip," where your least developed trait temporarily takes over your behavior.
❓What is "the grip" in personality psychology? "The grip" occurs during periods of significant stress or exhaustion when your inferior (least developed) personality function takes over. This often leads to behavior that feels completely out of character and surprising even to yourself.
❓How can understanding my personality help me manage stress? By recognizing your specific stress responses—such as becoming overly task-focused or hyper-vigilant about your surroundings—you can catch yourself early and use your natural personality tools to shift back into balance.
CHAPTERS
(00:00) Mind Share: The Kindness of Strangers
(02:04) The Reality of Pressure & Positive Psychology
(05:37) The Personality Car & Stress Responses
(07:18) Over-reliance: When Your Strength Becomes a Weakness
(09:30) Imbalance: Getting Stuck in a Feedback Loop
(11:49) The Grip: When Your Least Developed Trait Takes Over
(13:56) Real-Life Examples of "The Grip"
(17:31) Mailbag: Why Personality Tests Get Harder Over Time
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LINKS AND RESOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
Kent (00:02)
After many podcasts of foundational work, we're ready to share how we unpack personality and bring it to life in YouFinder Because personality doesn't disappear when you're stressed, it changes how your natural patterns show up, sometimes in ways that feel completely unlike you. We'll unpack these shifts and show how YouFinder helps you recognize what's happening before your stress starts driving the car.
Kent (00:27)
I'm realizing I'm on a bit of a service kick
Kent (00:29)
for mind share. Just the good feelings that come with experiences that live up and people that go out of their way in a broken world to to be decent. And I'm thinking about how we recently used an app to order food and got to the location and realized we ordered it at the wrong location. And the person
Kent (00:54)
Couldn't have been nicer. They didn't shame us. They didn't intimidate us. We went into frantic
Caanan (01:01)
Yeah, like no we we'll drive around town. We'll drive to the other side of town.
Kent (01:05)
Yeah, because
Kent (01:06)
you have all the warnings that are like you'll be charged and you'll have to go to the other place and whatever. And this person was just like so understanding and so cool, and there wasn't an ounce of bitterness or venom in them. And I just thought that was so great. Like it's just tough to be nice and decent and understanding and not judgy and
Kent (01:33)
Interactions like that make me want to be more like that. I work very hard to be like that and it just inspires me to want to be more like that.
Caanan (01:45)
So I want to take a moment to tell you how much we appreciate you and your time. We do not take it for granted. We do have a request though. Please take a moment to subscribe, hit the like button, or drop us a comment. We really appreciate it.
Caanan (02:04)
okay, so I'm gonna start this by saying something we always say. Like, the world is really stressful.
Caanan (02:12)
Yeah.
Caanan (02:12)
Right? It just is. You know, we're positive psychology guys, so we are very optimistic, we're very forward-looking, we're very generative, but a part of positive psychology is just honoring how F'd up things can be and how difficult the world can be. And that's just not our take. It's
Caanan (02:34)
What we find our clients, our thousands of clients across all these projects over twenty years, people are just stressed.
Caanan (02:44)
Yeah.
Caanan (02:45)
And so when we were developing YouFinder and figuring out ways to go deep into personality and give people more information than they could find elsewhere so that could really understand their personality. And as I've said before, most importantly,
Caanan (03:04)
Use it. Like actually do something with the information. One of the things we felt was most important, maybe I'll just say is most important
Kent (03:16)
Yeah, for sure.
Caanan (03:17)
is how to use your personality to manage stress. Because we've all got it and we've got innate tools to navigate it effectively. You can't get rid of it.
Caanan (03:32)
But you can navigate it more effectively than you are today with the information you you can get, not just through YouFinder, but just understanding your personality, right?
Kent (03:44)
Yeah, and hearing you talk about this is reminding me that I want to give a little bit of that context. Context that we've been giving in the last couple episodes that this all comes from reader feedback from our former
Kent (03:57)
Four packs on personality, just saying, wait, where does all this information come from? I know about personality or I've had the test, but I've never gotten this kind of an in-depth view. I need to know exactly what do you guys deliver, because this is amazing. So we're kind of doing something uncharacteristic for us. We're getting into the beating heart and soul of our core product called YouFinder if you haven't listened to episodes one and two in this four pack,
Kent (04:25)
Please do that. And in episode one, we talk about how we got into this work – our credentials. yeah. We learned that in all those projects, as Caanan said for so long, stress just occupied so much of people's time.
Kent (04:45)
Yeah.
Kent (04:45)
Weren't worrying about how to get out of stress. And right in really quality personality work
Kent (04:51)
is the information to know how you work to know then how you can best deal with the stress in your life. So yeah, in the next segment we're gonna get into
Kent (05:04)
Three dynamics most commonly at play in people and how having this information on your personality can help you when you get into those to those situations. So yeah, this is this is about chapter four of our YouFinder product, which is all about
Kent (05:27)
Your responses to stress, and how to work with your personality when you're under stress.
Caanan (05:37)
It's funny, can't you said it in the last
Caanan (05:39)
segment and I just have to repeat it, it feels very strange for us to be talking about YouFinder and our credentials and all of these things because we're just not very self-promotional guys. But I just want to say what we're talking about, we love it if you got this information from us. But if you can find it elsewhere, all that really matters to us is that you get this information on your personality because it is so helpful in navigating
Caanan (06:09)
Life. And today we're talking about chapter four of the YouFinder report, which gets into stress responses and how you can navigate stress more effectively using your personality. So before I get into some of the most common stress responses and the things you'll learn about in the report, I just want to reference the car metaphor for your personality stack.
Kent (06:38)
Our last our last podcast episode two in this four pack.
Caanan (06:43)
Yeah.
Caanan (06:43)
And you know, effectively you need to understand that to understand what we're talking about today. so if you haven't go back and listen to that before you hear this, you can hit pause. But today I just want to cover briefly what are the common stress responses
Caanan (07:04)
And how you can use how you can understand your stress responses via your personality stack and how you can be more effective at navigating stress. Right? So do
Kent (07:17)
Let's
Caanan (07:18)
it. Okay. So the first one is what we call over reliance. And this is a situation where maybe you're feeling some mild stress in your life.
Kent (07:28)
Usually mild, yeah.
Caanan (07:30)
And what happens is you tend to lean harder
Caanan (07:34)
into your dominant personality type and this or personality trait. And this is kind of an interesting one because it's not really a bad way to approach stress because your dominant personality trait is your dominant strength. And so you can be quite effective
Caanan (07:55)
Over-relying on your dominant personality trait, but it's not the most effective way. Kent, what happens when you over rely on your dominant strength?
Kent (08:07)
Your dominant personality characteristic literally becomes your whole personality. You know those people. They're brilliant. You say that because they're in their dominant. Something about what they're doing feels very embodied, but it turns into ooh.
Kent (08:31)
They're a know it all. Or wait, wait, why they're not listening to other people. So
Kent (08:40)
You're just you're being very, very you without – we always say to clients – without looking at reality a little bit more. Looking at reality means that you're not relying on your whole personality stack.
Kent (09:02)
That's reality because when you're relying on your whole personality stack, there's elements in there that are naturally going to drive you to be more aware of your surroundings, yeah, what other people are thinking and feeling. so again, just knowing, okay, now I now I know from the personality car what my dominant strength is. So now I need to watch out, huh? Maybe I'm feeling stressed because I'm over-relying on that.
Caanan (09:30)
Yeah. And so then the next, let's say the next level of stress, moderate stress. What happens here is something we call imbalance.
Caanan (09:41)
Yeah.
Caanan (09:43)
And this is where, and again, you need to know your personality car metaphor to understand this, but this is where your dominant function and your tertiary function start communicating
Caanan (09:57)
in a feedback loop. So you're cutting out your secondary, you're cutting out the grip, or your inferior, and what happens is You either are having your tertiary confirm your thoughts and feelings or disconfirm them.
Kent (10:14)
Yeah. That's great. Go ahead. And this is because your dominant and your tertiary are are gonna be either introverted or extroverted. They're both going to be that way, depending on if you're introverted or you're extroverted. So in this case you're getting in a into a introversion loop or an extroversion
Kent (10:37)
loop. Now keep in mind this isn't introversion and extroversion in terms of you're relating to people or how you energize. It's introversion or extroversion meaning how a particular personality component shows up. Your personality components, as you learn in in this process with us, are either more introverted or extroverted depending on where they are in your
Kent (11:05)
in your stack. So with the first and third, dominant and tertiary, you're having an imbalance because everything becomes reliant on your introverted traits or everything becomes reliant on your extroverted traits. And not unlike number one, this is just another
Kent (11:28)
I'm emphasizing these components of my personality too much.
Caanan (11:32)
Yeah. And that one can also feel kind of effective because it feels like you're doing something. It's
Kent (11:38)
Yeah.
Caanan (11:38)
it it's really pretty ineffective. You really are out of balance and you're losing important perspective that keeps you out of that feedback loop.
Kent (11:49)
Yeah, and these
Kent (11:49)
get these get kind of progressively more tricky. So I'll take the the final one that we really go into.
Caanan (11:56)
This is what everybody loves to
Kent (11:57)
In
Kent (11:58)
you fighter. Yeah, I think it was last week's was question was about the grip. And it essentially the grip will appear in periods of significant stress. We're talking, you know, overworking, exhaustion, burnout, a prolonged kind of strain. And at this point, that toddler in your stack is sort of taking over and
Kent (12:25)
it almost becomes the de facto dominant yeah personality trait. And one of the ways to recognize this is it often comes up when people's stress is tied to their being exhausted. So you're so exhausted that this inferior function, function four, the grip, is like, ooh, I've been waiting for this moment. And it can just kind of
Kent (12:52)
Become your personality. It's it's the less developed and less familiar part of your personality. So this is when your behavior is even surprising you.
Kent (13:02)
Yes.
Kent (13:03)
Somebody somebody calls you out on something and you can't even argue or dispute it because you feel, Whew, yep, I've been off, or I see that, or you're right. I don't even know what I'm doing. I feel like a maniac. So this is again the third.
Kent (13:18)
Kind of form of stress that we help clients unlock in learning. Yeah. Okay. As Caanan said at the open, stress and thinking about stress and ruminating on stress and thinking about how stressed I am and thinking about how little time I have and all the mistakes I've made takes up so much of my time. So we built this into this product to help you learn skills tied directly to your personality.
Kent (13:47)
that help you feel like that is alleviated.
Kent (13:56)
Okay, so Caanan and I know you've got a great you want to talk about how how this information specifically shows up in you. Yeah. and how how clients experience having this knowledge and then putting it to work.
Caanan (14:11)
Yeah,
Caanan (14:12)
I think it would be helpful to hear what the grip can look like in somebody. Kent, I'm gonna make you talk about how the grip shows up for you too. when I'm in the grip and my grip is my inferior function, I should say, is extroverted sensing, right? So things I can see, feel, touch.
Caanan (14:34)
Whatever. Yeah. When I'm in the grip, so this becomes my whole personality, this inferior function, this immature function, I get I'll use the term hypervigilant.
Caanan (14:48)
Yeah. Right. I'm very easily distracted by my surroundings. I get very persnickety about my surroundings. Things need to be just right for me to function effectively. even then if I'm really in my grip, no there is no just right. it's actually, you know, not to be dramatic, it's quite debilitating when it comes to just being effective.
Caanan (15:12)
Right? Because it's such a distraction to what I actually want to get done. So normally, you know, that inferior function is a really nice part of my personality that helps me take in the world and and have a nice setting for the work we do and it it's a really lovely piece of me. But man, if I'm overstressed, overtired and I fall into the grip and
Caanan (15:38)
that takes over my personality, it's rough. It's rough for both of us.
Kent (15:42)
Yeah.
Kent (15:44)
I'll just say briefly, and we say this in service of letting you know as examples of when you have this information, you know the thing to watch out for. Mine getting super tasky. If I go into super tasky mode, similar to Caanan's but a little different. If I go into super tasky mode, very checklisty mode, very to-do list mode, kind of frantic
Kent (16:10)
panic mode, I know I'm in my grip. And it's amazing how when you have this information, you can see this on either kind of the the lightest version where I can start to feel my mind going toward list making. Those become cues or if it progresses further getting into full-on panic mode, I'm not getting enough done, that kind of a thing. So I
Kent (16:39)
as we want our clients to walk away with, can recognize these things and then you know how to respond, shift in an effective way that pulls you out of that stress hole.
Caanan (16:56)
Yeah. So, you know, l a little more of a pitch here. YouFinder can't eliminate stress. Wouldn't that be nice, Kent? We would be so rich if we could eliminate stress. YouFinder can't eliminate stress, but the information in this chapter specifically of YouFinder
Caanan (17:13)
can help you navigate stress more effectively, recognize how you're showing up when you're stressed, and ultimately be more effective regardless of what's happening around you.
Kent (17:31)
So we had an email this week. Somebody said that they took the sixteen type personality test again. and they thought it was interesting. They were inspired by us to just take it and and see, you know, what showed up for them. They talked about how they thought it would be easier this time because they have more context about personality. They're more actually motivated to do it with the things we've been talking about. And they said that it was even more difficult. It was harder for them to kind of.
Kent (17:58)
briskly move through the questions. And you're supposed to kind of briskly move through the questions. You're not supposed to give the questions too much thought. but they're asking like why wait, why with more information and even more interest, why would it be more difficult? And this is a very, very common problem. It's not really a problem, but we'll call it a problem. as you know more about personality and as you become more well balanced
Kent (18:26)
you become more balanced in your personality too. And so this is something that gets very tough. As I, and I'll speak for Caanan just for fun, we take these things ourselves every once in a while just to go through the process. And in a way, it becomes much more difficult because I can see how I exercise both sides of every question. Yeah. so it truly does
Kent (18:55)
get more difficult because oftentimes the first time you take it, you just have a clear idea. that's me. that's me. that's me. And as you move on and take it in the future, you're often, well, that's me, but I have a real appreciation for that. Or I also bring that side. So I would just tell this person and anybody, like, it's not uncommon, but still whenever you do any kind of personality assessment, it's best
Kent (19:25)
to move briskly and answer before you get into thought too deeply.