Conscientiousness and quality of life

Based on the Five-Factor Personality Model, conscientiousness is one of the 5 personality traits and includes six facets: achievement-striving, deliberateness, dutifulness, orderliness, self-discipline, self-efficacy.

An individual high in conscientiousness will display determination, ambition, industriousness, the belief of having the ability to achieve goals, tidiness, the quality of being well structured, hard-working, and sacrificing immediate pleasure for long-term satisfaction and success.

Do you know someone like this? Or maybe you just recognised yourself in this description? 

Good news then: conscientiousness has been consistently linked with better health, more successful career, stable and favourable financial circumstances, and even a longer life.

This is because the trait of conscientiousness consistently underlies daily attitudes, motivation and behaviour orientation in a very goal-oriented way. But don't make the mistake of thinking that highly conscientious people are just driven by dry and pure ambition: for these people, accomplishments are appreciated in light of the sacrifice and effort they entail. If you are very conscientious, you do not expect important results to be easy to attain and do not look for shortcuts either; you embrace the arduous work involved. You also tend to take better care of yourself, and of the ones you love, by adopting a healthy lifestyle and avoiding potentially self-harming choices.  

When paired with a sense of purpose and meaning, conscientiousness is a powerful resilience weapon: the perspective that commitment and perseverance will result in a better future, a higher life quality and life satisfaction, will always steer an individual towards a path of growth and positive transformation. When facing adversity, self-efficacy in particular has been linked to a problem-focused and resourceful coping style. Self-efficacy consists in the belief of having the capacity and internal resources necessary to achieve certain results.  

The behaviours associated with conscientiousness extend to any life aspect: taking initiative and proactively participating in opportunities to promote change in areas deemed meaningful, or in domains involving particularly cherished values, is how conscientious people take responsibility and control of what is important to them.  

Would you like to measure your level of conscientiousness?

You can by taking this personality test: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/IPIP-BFFM/