It’s not about changing personalities: “We’re changing skills and giving new skills,” he said.
Even at a young age, people must learn to pick priorities. A sense of purpose can help guide how individuals regulate their behaviors to achieve their goals, Beatty said.
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The survey looked at five main categories of social, emotional and behavioral skills. Those include:
“It really is a skill to be able to focus your life and energy on things that matter to you,” she said.
Put it all together and it is increasingly apparent that there is overlap on sense of purpose and SEB skills, particularly self-management skills. The researchers also found that sense of purpose was consistently related to higher life satisfaction among college students. Counter to the researchers’ prediction, there was limited evidence relating sense of purpose to the students’ GPA and likelihood of degree completion.
To do that, psychological researchers Patrick Hill and Jennifer Beatty, at Washington University in St. Louis, led a study of 400 college students. They first surveyed 200 college students at WashU and 200 other college students nationwide. They were surveyed on their sense of purpose and answered questions related to their SEB skills, attributes such as self-management, cooperation and emotional resilience. The survey also assessed the students’ sense of well-being and their academic outcomes.
“What are people able to regulate and motivate themselves to do?” Beatty said. “Even if you have a sense of purpose, it doesn’t mean it’s easy, especially in the face of difficulty,” she said.
Rather than cast personality as some fixed unit, psychologists are increasingly interested in how to change a person’s mindset toward improvement. In many ways, humans are constantly subjected to “personality interventions” because culture and hierarchy shape personality from day one, something Hill often reminds his students in psychology classes.
The study found strong overlap between “self-management” skills and sense of purpose. It may be that people who have those skills can more easily override the impulses for more immediate desires to keep working on the higher order goal, Beatty added.