Questions like who am I? What are the boundaries and resources that define who I am? Is it my behavior, my emotions, my physical appearance, my place in society that makes me who I am? All of these and perhaps more... It seems that there is always something missing when it comes to defining "me". On the other hand, the person I called "me" when I was seven or eight years old and the person I call "me" now bear almost no resemblance to each other, yet I can call them both "me". My body changes, my emotions change, my habits and tastes change. So I am variable, not static. So are the people around me. We are all different from each other and we exist in a constant flow within ourselves.
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But we also want to fix ourselves and define ourselves by certain characteristics. Because we need to differentiate ourselves from others with certain qualities that make us who we are and we need to identify what is unique about us. When we make a similar classification for others, we are able to make predictions about our relationships and our attitudes towards each other, and we get rid of the unknown to some extent.
We know our own feelings, intentions and inner world, but we cannot know others, we can only guess. But as social beings who are constantly interacting with their environment and who dislike uncertainty, we need stable, fixed, uniform and mutual anchoring points in order to live together.
It is precisely at this point that the concept of personality becomes meaningful and functional. Personality (character) is defined as a person's thinking, feeling and behavior patterns. The natural, social, conscious, unconscious and environmental factors that influence the formation of personality and the connections between these factors are so infinite that it is almost impossible to have a coherent idea about how our personality is formed. But there is no need to do so. The important thing is to identify the status quo rather than how we got it. And for this there are many different theories and approaches.
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For us to say that a trait is part of a person's personality, it has to be repeated over a period of time and be distinctive. If we see someone we know blushing or trembling when they speak, even if we think that they are shy or introverted, we cannot immediately accept this reaction, which occurs under certain conditions, as a personality trait. Under other circumstances, this person may be someone who can speak freely without feeling embarrassed or ashamed. He/she may have acted this way because of the anxiety he/she felt about the subject he/she was talking about, or because of the negative feelings he/she had towards the person he/she was talking to.
In addition, inhibiting and restrictive conditions that arise during the conversation may also have affected the way of speaking. It would be very misleading to make a definite judgment about a person's personality without watching him/her speak at other times, in other places and with other people. If we see that he/she is still embarrassed and his/her voice trembles under different circumstances, then we can talk about an element of personality. The concept of personality structure can be used as a result of the combination and organization of similar, long-lasting qualities that have become habitual.