[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Suddar here aka the focus b. And on this show I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.
[00:36] Katie: I'm absolutely thrilled to have Claudia Nario on the show today. Claudia is the author of the book nine Sapiens biology and Evolution of Personality Types. She is a psychologist, researcher, and enneagram expert. Wonderful to see you, Claudia. Thank you so much for joining this show today.
[00:58] Claudia: Likewise, Katie. Nice to see you too.
[01:01] Katie: It was wonderful to meet you at the Enneagram conference. I know this is one of the main topics that we're both passionate about in terms of personalities. And as the audience might not be familiar with the enneagram, we're not going to cover too too much in detail, but we're going to look into personalities. And this leads me to my very first question, which is how do you even define a personality?
[01:29] Claudia: Well, I would say personality is a stable pattern of our way in the way in which we think, we feel, and we react to situations in life which is at the same time coherent because it's not random. We don't get the random traits, but they have a logic. But as I said, it's kind of stable along life.
[01:54] Katie: So does this mean then, by the.
[01:56] Claudia: Way, from one person to another, that's another thing? Yeah.
[01:59] Katie: So does this mean that if you know someone's personality, you can roughly predict how they're going to react in certain situations?
[02:07] Claudia: That's the thing, that's the trick, right? Yes. From one thing, from one behavior, you can predict a whole world of other behaviors as well.
[02:17] Katie: And this is probably something that bothers quite a lot of people. People don't like the idea that their behavior or their thoughts can be predictable and are following a pattern.
[02:28] Claudia: I know we all want to be special, don't we?
[02:33] Katie: Yes.
[02:33] Claudia: But the truth is that when we look at other people, we kind of recognize, right, we intuitively perceive that there are these tendencies. And in our usual familiar language we kind of say, this person is such and such, and this other person is such and such. We intuitively know we don't like it, but we know.
[02:54] Katie: Yes, I agree. And I think this is what's so fascinating, and again, about the iniyagam that's a personality type way of looking at personalities because it can really help us to better understand ourselves and to better understand other people. And how much of our personality is based on genetics?
[03:14] Claudia: Well, there's a lot of research and this is not me saying it, but roughly it's about half between. They have calculated between 40 and 60% of our personality is rooted in our DNA.
[03:29] Katie: And so does this mean that the rest of our personality comes from our upbringing, our circumstances, our experiences.
[03:36] Claudia: Exactly. But, you know, this is very intertwined. It's impossible to separate which is which, because it's like a little seed that is developing in permanent interaction with all these macro and micro experiences like every single day of our lives.
[03:55] Katie: Yes, it's a funny sort of mix of both what we've inherited through our genes and what we've actually lived through our life. Exactly, yes, nice. And I also thought from your book I actually have it right here for those of you who want to discover more on this topic, nine Sapiens, that there is this sort of contract or contradiction sometimes between science and the ineghamso personality types. And how do you manage to make this union? Because I know this is something you're very passionate about, showing that both science can help understand our personalities and understanding our personalities can contribute to science. So how have you, through your research and your work, managed to sort of create this union?
[04:46] Claudia: Yeah, well, for me it's not really a contradiction. It's more like they have never spoken to one another, so there's never been a dialogue. Even so, from my perspective, it was not difficult to do it's. Just to go out there and look at the evidence and publish evidence regarding the latest discoveries in behavioral genetics, in behavioral neurobiology, and even in more theoretical areas of science such as evolutionary psychology, and just connect the dots, because they're out there for everyone to see. So that is why in our book, we just refer to the investigation. We refer and we actually cite lots of papers, but in connection to these nine types, which is the anagram topology.
[05:40] Katie: So the evolutionary psychology of things. And this is the aspect that I found most fascinating both in your book but also in the workshop that you presented at the conference, which is how has evolution contributed to these nine types? So perhaps to give a sort of clear indication, and maybe for the audience to understand this more clearly, we could either go through each personality briefly or maybe just look at certain aspects and how have they served this? Why do we now have these different personalities?
[06:12] Claudia: Yeah, well, from the evolutionary perspective, personality is an adaptation mechanism. We need to cope because any social animal needs to cope with their social environment in order to be able to survive. So that is personality. And our personality has evolved pretty much in connection to the evolution of our species in parallel. So one of the beauties of it and for those of you who are familiar with the anagram that describes these nine types, all these nine types seem to be necessary because they have different strategies that are all of them necessary for us coping, not only individual, but as a species.
[07:04] Katie: I was thinking right now that it's interesting that we don't have just one personality. So it's interesting that we need all these different or nine personalities and for those who know more about DNA, climate gets slightly more complex and diverges into sort of subtypes, but that we need all these different personalities in order to function as a group.
[07:26] Claudia: Right.
[07:26] Katie: Why are we just one type of person? And we all have the same personality and we all do the same things, but that doesn't work.
[07:33] Claudia: I mean, if there is only one successful personality, we are pretty sure this is how evolution works. We would have the same personality, all of us. Yeah, that is proof we are all necessary.
[07:48] Katie: Yes, we're all necessary. And all the different personalities are useful and necessary. And so maybe now we can look into more detail. So let's take I thought what would be fun would to look at your personality and my personality, for instance. So in your case, I remember that you told me during the conference that you correspond to the sort of type six in the inyakam and maybe you could explain slightly a bit about it and also why this served an evolutionary purpose. So how it was useful back then, why did this create this type of personality?
[08:23] Claudia: Sure. Well, as I am six, I can tell you about the six that the specialty, like the true power of the six is being very sensitive to any threat. So we are the first ones to detect and we are probably the first ones to react, which is of course it does have a downside, right, because we get stressed more and we react to anxiety more. But from an evolutionary perspective, it was key to survival. So those people who were more sensitive to real threat out there and had the energy because if you are sensitive to threat, you have lots of energy to do lots of things in order to mitigate, in order to prepare, in order to create a safe environment for yourself and for your own family. So that was very necessary then and it's very necessary now as well.
[09:26] Katie: Yes, and it's probably one of the first personalities that sort of came up because I remember that when you explained this was also something that's fascinating that all these personalities probably didn't happen at the same moment, but in order of how necessary they were in the evolutionary meaning of things. So being able to notice threats and be prepared for threats was probably one of the very first types of personalities from our perspective.
[09:56] Claudia: Probably one of the first. And you can also recognize like this general pattern in animals. So we believe we're talking millions of years of evolution, really. And as you say, yes, we believe that some of the other personalities require some level of evolution, perhaps of our cognitive skills as human beings or even some changing in the social requirements that we had along the way. So yes, we do believe, and this is of course a hypothesis, but it's grounded in science. But we do believe that some personalities are earlier in origin and others are more later, if you wish, because we don't want to use the word more primitive because it's not really that way. They have still evolved along the way. They're not the same as when they first appeared. They're not the same as you find in animals, but probably one of the first to appear and to become adaptive.
[11:06] Katie: I think I remember from your presentation that my personality type was maybe sort of a bit later on in the timeline. So I correspond to type Seven, which you mentioned in the book as the name the Explorer. I like that title. Very fun. So maybe you could say a few words about that and why we feel that this would have happened later on, evolutionary speaking.
[11:30] Claudia: Well, we believe, of course, this is also very early, but we believe the Explorer became adaptive when there was a real need to go and find new territories. And we believe also that this can be tracked down to a moment in which Homo sapiens came out of Africa because up to know, it had been relatively stagnant as neanderthals. By the way, our neanderthals didn't move around a lot. So there was something probably, we believe, a mutation that was responsible for the appearance of this type of this personality that became hugely adaptive when we were facing the last glaciation period and life became really difficult and we had to be on the move. So from one millennia to the next, something happened. It was like a boom effect. And Homo sapiens came out of Africa and they covered the whole world, the Tundra, Australia. They were everywhere in just a few millennia. And we believe that probably type Seven, the explorer, which is always on the move, both mentally and physically. Right. It's part of their DNA. We're probably leading the way with their enthusiasm and telling all these fabulous stories of what could lie beyond there. So, yes, we believe that is later.
[13:14] Katie: It makes sense. I love how I can sort of it's as if you're living it when you talk about it. It's as if you were there when people moved and migrated from one place to the next.
[13:27] Claudia: Exactly. You can find the same patterns in type seven today, right? Being on the move, being super curious, being innovative and always thinking there is something better over there. It's part of so enthusiastic, so excited. Yes. So it's the same thing. And as you see, it serves a purpose because if you look at personality from the perspective that it has a purpose, that there is a reason why these traits were maintained through natural selection, it is because they're still useful. They were then and they're still useful.
[14:13] Katie: Today, but they probably serve a different purpose. Right, because we're already all over the world. So I don't think Type Seven serve that purpose necessarily, but maybe in terms of innovation. Like you said, all these personalities obviously still serve a purpose, or some of them would be diminishing. But do you feel that it's possible over the next hundreds or thousands of years? Well, either they'll change or that some of these personalities will disappear.
[14:45] Claudia: I have asked myself that question and of course, I think it would be possible, perhaps. Although having said that human being is human being, society is society, and the main basic challenges that we face have not really changed at the core. So I don't know. But it could be possible. Theoretically, it could be possible. And also I think we are facing a crucial moment right now. I mean, we have the technology to extinguish humanity, so we could be facing a massive extinction moment for our species if we are not more aware. So who knows? We have been just a breeze in the history of the Earth. Dinosaurs lasted way longer than us. Like way longer than us. And we're so proud of ourselves, we're so arrogant as a species. I mean, anything could happen.
[15:53] Katie: Yes, it's true. And speaking of dinosaurs, but animals in general, do they also have personalities?
[16:02] Claudia: I wouldn't know that, Dana. But what I can tell you is that mammals and social animals in special have found to have personalities. They have strategies. You can see it with your own eyes. If anyone that has had a dog or a cat, they know that even being from the same breed, they are different. They can be shy, they can be aggressive, they can be super friendly, they can be playful, they have personalities, they can be dominant, they can be meek. So you can see that in your pets? Well, you can see that in communities of chimpanzees, the alpha male, all those that perhaps seek protection, and they can be so different from one another. So, yes, the answer is social animals have personality. Of course, we come with another level of complexity. Our big brains are responsible for that.
[17:11] Katie: Yes. Not as simple in some ways as simpler personality traits like in animals. I'm thinking right now about the biology aspect. So we're talking about evolution, but I know that the biology is also really interesting. And again, I remember during your conference, but also in your books that you gave examples of if we're, for example, looking at type nine and there's certain genes that might be responsible for some behaviors. Could you maybe explain a bit around this? I think it's so fascinating to see how our biology impacts and influences our personality.
[17:46] Claudia: Yeah, well, perhaps the best example here is your type. Yeah.
[17:51] Katie: With the dopamine.
[17:54] Claudia: Because it's all over in biology books. I mean, if you read the papers, you would be astounded by the very precise description of a type seven of an explorer. When you seek under investigation of dopamine thirsty brain, they have found the mutation. And of course, they don't talk about the enigm types, we have made that connection, but they describe patterns of behaviors that are so identical to your type to type seven that you would be amazed. And not only that, they have also found that you can find this mutation more often in populations that have a history of a lot of migration. So yeah, look at that. So it's not only us saying you can really find it. And of course, some types have more evidence in biological papers than others. In other types we have had to look more and thus they're more hypothetical. But for some of them, there's so much material. The evidence is just out there.
[19:18] Katie: Incredible. It's incredible. And I feel it really helps to understand ourselves better. I remember when I became aware, even without looking at InAir gun seven, but just looking extroverts and the way they assimilate dopamine compared to introverts and thinking, this is why I need to do more things or see more people, because I don't assimilate dopamine as well or as fast or as properly. I mean, I'm not going to go into the depths of the scientific jargon around this. But introverts, it's the opposite, where if they have too much stimulation, they can't actually cope with it. And just understanding this was really useful.
[20:00] Claudia: It's like when you go to the doctor and you suddenly receive a diagnosis of something that you know you have. It's like understanding why you do what you do finally. And I used to think of myself, of course, as everyone. I was so special and also so contradictory. And when you stumble upon these personality types, you suddenly discover, oh my God, now I understand. I understand so many things. Yes. In my experience, understanding about the biological core makes me also understand what is basic in myself, what I need to accept and work upon that and build from there and what is learned. So it's easier for me to understand what is core to myself. If I understand the biology, perhaps it's me, I'm pretty much of a nerd. But for me, it has even helped me in my personal development in getting to know myself even more deeply, to understand what is most ingrained in myself.
[21:16] Katie: And this leads me to sort of maybe our last sort of point of conversation around transcending our personality. Because a great part of personality is understanding why we have them. Fantastic evolution, biology, amazing understanding what they are. This isn't going to be covered today, but it's looking into the enigm in depth and seeing what these different personalities are, identifying ourselves, understanding ourselves and understanding others. So that's sort of the second point. First, where does it come from? Second, what is it? And then the third part is how do we transcend that? As an example, I was talking right now about extrovert introvert during a phase where obviously socializing was harder. The last few years, I literally looked up how to become introverted and I thought, can I change this? What was interesting is there were a lot around how introverts want to be extroverts. There wasn't very much extroverts want to be introverts. But also what I discovered was that we can't fundamentally change our nervous system so the way we assimilate dopamine can't be changed. So that isn't possible. But what is possible is learning to have some behaviors or habits that are more introverted. So this leads to sort of this third point, which is once we've understood our personality, what can we do to maybe move past these parts that are sort of hindering us? So if we take your example as type six, that's very aware of threats, that's useful. It keeps you cautious, but it can also make you more stressed. So how can you use that awareness and sort of transcend and move past them?
[22:53] Claudia: Yeah, let me tell you about the theory first and then I will apply to myself. But I would say there are two roads to transcending your own. Fixation two roads and they combine very well. They're not divorced, but the first one is the family of meditation mindfulness and embracing your core. It's more like looking, of self awareness and looking and accepting and being more compassionate to your own core. Self accepting that it's a blessing, that it's good, that it can give you a hard time, but it's essentially good and staying with it. So that's one thing. The other family is neuroplasticity, practicing behaviors that are outside your comfort zone and even fake it till you make it. And it's useful because you actually learn to behave in a different way and amplify your toolkit of behaviors if you wish. So if you apply to me well, yeah, I do practice meditation. And for me it's really, really helpful when I'm feeling anxious to connect and accept my anxiety instead of fighting against it. And it's magic. It operates magic in me because, yes, I accept, I am anxious. It's like I give myself permission. I'm not running around anymore and trying to get out of there, which, as you say, makes me even more anxious. So yes, that works with me. And on the other hand, this neuroplasticity thing, sometimes something I do is practicing power positions when I'm going to face something that I find it's threatening or I feel it's threatening for me. And even practicing these power positions, it does give me the testosterone and the adrenaline I need to go out and just do it. So that is just one silly example. But of course, there are many things that I prepare myself to do and that I practice as somebody else would do. And that gives me access to different experiences that I wouldn't otherwise have, like doing things that I find difficult or threatening and being successful. So again, that changes my experience. In a nutshell, I would say that's it the meditation mindfulness and neuroplasticity. Practice, practice, practice.
[26:03] Katie: I love that I tend to think of them as sort of the spiritual route or the personal development route, and they can go together. And through the spiritual route, you work on the meditation, mindfulness and acceptance and the personal development. Either you do what you said with the neuroplasticity, or you look at some of the fixations and what you can learn from other personalities and try incorporating them. And definitely, yes. Coming back to meditation, especially as a type seven, this has really been a huge game changer for me. So once more, for those listening, the type seven can be slightly restless, as you were saying, always on the move, physically or mentally. So having a practice of grounding and staying still and doing nothing or single tasking when you work really helps to channel that energy, because sevens have a lot of energy and can do a lot of different things, which is great, but also can get too dispersed and distracted. So meditation yes. Has just been yes, I think for me it has definitely been tune number one. But I think for all personalities, it really makes a huge difference because it allows you to have that perspective and to see your own behaviors, to understand it, to have more acceptation, to calm down a bit, the nervous system going to the parasympathetic and yes, be more grounded. So I love those two examples. I think they really can help at least transcend. Of course, we'll still always have our personalities, but if we have less of the fixations or less strongly, they become it's hard to explain, really. You'll put into some words, they become less of a prison. That's maybe one way of looking at it.
[27:46] Claudia: They're neutralized in a way, yes. And we become more free of our affixations and we can become more free to behave, to feel, to experience our life in any way we choose, not the way in which we were born.
[28:03] Katie: To do, in a way, the predetermined way from the personality. And once more, I think when we understand those behaviors, we can start to see for ourselves the patterns and then we can choose in that moment, do we want to follow our usual pattern? So as a seven, for example, it would be at the weekend, seeing lots of people, or do we want to choose a different route, like go on a meditation retreat or go for a long hike or be studious? And once we're aware that we have these choices, we don't just have to go with the default of the personality.
[28:38] Claudia: I love it. Yes.
[28:40] Katie: The default choice. Yes, we have a choice. I still love seeing people at the weekend, though, but I don't have to at least do that every weekend. We're already coming to the end of our episode. Thank you so much. Claudia, I loved our conversation, such a fascinating topic and you explained it so, so clearly. What would be the last words that you would say to people who are listening to this, who want to know more about their own personality or how they can transcend their personality, what would be your last words?
[29:13] Claudia: I would say we only have one life. So know yourself and being aware of yourself makes it so much better. So invest some energy in know in getting to know yourself better. You're always with.
[29:30] Katie: So, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so, so much. Claudia, I loved our conversation. Thank you for being here today.
[29:38] Claudia: Thank you for having me. Katie bye. See you.
[29:46] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus be show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. So let me know in an apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you. And feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.