The Emotionally Effective Personality

We all know people who seem to radiate charisma, everyone appreciates them, who brighten a party with just his presence, who everyone listens, who always seem to know what they want, and who always help when needed.

Such people do not necessarily have a particularly high capacity for processing emotional information (i.e. it is not a matter of intelligence), rather it seems like

what they do comes naturally to them, it is the way they are, it is their personality. They were born that way or they learned it when they were very little and we do not even know how. Research shows that this kind of emotional intelligence (I call personality emotionally effective) is a combination of elements including extroversion, responsibility, openness to new ideas and experiences, agreeableness, and the ability to worry about things a bit and just enough. People who worry too much about things do not have followers, do not create enthusiasm, do not create positive emotions in the group. They can be very useful to avoid problems, but they lack charisma.

Can your children develop this personality type? And if they can, how? In theory, personality and intelligence are unchanged throughout life. Once formed, some experts say that at the age of five, others say around 14 or 15 years old, personality does not change much. But certainly some life experiences appear to have an effect on personality. For example, we know that a war trauma can change a person, and often young people doing solidarity stays in places of great poverty and need return home transformed, with a more positive outlook on life.

If you want your children to develop a personality more emotionally effective, I make three recommendations: 1) Children must feel loved at home, and have a close relationship with parents. 2) They should be proud of themselves, and this means that they should be used to strive to achieve things (e.g. participating in competitive sports, or in voluntary work). And 3) they must be in continuous social relationships (with friends, with family, with people of the same age). The more accustomed we are to dealing with people, the more we develop our social skills, but if we do not feel loved and proud of ourselves, those social relationships may be more torture than a blessing. We have to work on the three areas at the same time.