Personality potential: optics of psychology

Abstract

The paper considers the concept of personality potential (LP), introduced by the author to designate a system of psychological characteristics of a person that are important for the successful solution of life tasks. The personality potential as the core of the personality accounts for the capacity to function as an autonomous agent, rather than just following internal impulses or pressures of the external environment, to navigate in the constantly changing world, guided by one’s goals and meanings. Personality potential is conceived in the author’s approach as the potential of autoregulation. The essence of autoregulation as a general explanatory principle of the activity of living and quasi-living systems is that one’s actions on the way to the goal are not set in advance or programmed in detail, but are continuously corrected under the influence of incoming feedback information about whether one is approaching the desired incentive or missing it. Thus, personality potential includes those personality characteristics due to which the subject can successfully carry out the autoregulation functions. Personality potential is also viewed as a systemic organization of psychological resources of the individual, which largely determine whether the person will be the beneficiary of their own human potential resources, whether one will be able to put them at the service of one’s own autonomous motives and goal-setting, laying an independent trajectory in a changeable environment, or will inertly follow uncontrolled impulses, someone else’s will or pressure from external circumstances. A person as a carrier of personality potential disposes of oneself as a carrier of resources, or as an element of human capital. The three main substructures and functions of the LP include 1) self-orientation in the uncertain situations, weighting alternatives and choosing goals and priorities, 2) attainment – paving the optimal path to the goal based on available resources, and 3) preservation – evasion and protection from external threats and pressures that seek to disrupt one’s plans, force one to change.