Mature Personality is a positive label for people who are considered already achieved. Unfortunately, many people never thought to be mature. In fact, Mature Personality is the size of a healthy personality development. The Mature Personality is defined differently by many people. This is reflected in the several opinions below.
Answering questions about the personality of a lecturer in the lecture in a faculty psychology, there are students who interpret Mature Personality as a patient, not excessive in expressing emotion, and good at managing relationships with others.
There also are interpreting the ability to solve various problems of life with wisdom. Some students pointed to the ability to fulfill the tasks of adulthood with a good development, as has the work and philosophy of life is steady, stable mental condition, and so forth.
This paper presents a more complete criteria of a Mature Personality of an elder who joined pioneering Psychology, namely Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967). Until now his theories (about the healthy personality) remain relevant.
Here are seven criteria of Allport about the specific qualities of healthy personality:
Expansion of Personal Feelings
When people become mature, he developed concerns outside of themselves. Not enough to simply interact with something or someone outside ourselves. More than that, he must have a direct and full participation, which by Allport called “authentic participation”.
In view of Allport, the activity performed must be appropriate and important, or really meaningful to the person. If we think that job is important, doing his best work will make us feel good, and means that we become participants in the work authentic. This will give satisfaction for ourselves.
People who are more fully involved with various activities, people, or ideas, he is more psychologically healthy. This applies not only to work, but also relationships with family and friends, exasperation, and membership in a political, religious, and so forth.
Social Relations Warm
Allport distinguishes two kinds of warmth in relationships with others, namely the capacity to develop intimacy and to feel touched. Psychologically healthy people are able to develop intimate relationships with parents, children, spouses, and friends. This is the result of the expansion of self-feeling and sense of identity is well developed.
There is a difference between people who love affair neurotic (not cooked) and a healthy personality (mature). Neurotic people should receive more love than capable of granting to others. If they give you love, it was given with conditions. In fact, the love of a healthy person is unconditional, not stifle or binding.
Warmth of the other types, namely compassion, is the result of the basic conditions of human understanding and feeling of kinship with all nations. Healthy people have the capacity to understand the pain, suffering, fear and failure that is characteristic of human life.
The results of this kind of empathy is the patience of the behavior of others and do not tend to prosecute or punish. Healthy people can accept human weakness, and knowing he also has weaknesses. In contrast, neurotic people cannot afford to be patient and understand the universal nature of basic human experiences.
Emotional Security
The main quality of a healthy human being is self acceptance. They accept all aspects of their existence, including the weaknesses, by not passively surrender to such shortcomings. In addition, a healthy personality is not captured by their emotions, and not trying to hide from those emotions.
They can control your emotions, so as not to interfere with interpersonal relationships. Control is not the way pressed, but directed into more constructive channels.
Another quality of a healthy personality is “looking forward to the disappointment”. It shows how a person reacts to pressures and constraints of various desires or the will. They are able to think of different ways to achieve the same goal.
Healthy people who are not free from feelings of insecurity and fear. However, they do not feel threatened and can cope with feeling a bit better than the neurotic.
Realistic Perceptions
Healthy people view the world objectively. In contrast, neurotic people often understand the reality tailored to your wants, needs, and their own fears. Healthy people do not believe that another person or situation at hand is evil or good according to personal prejudices. They understand the reality as it is.
Skills and Tasks
Allport emphasized the importance of work and the need to immerse yourself in the job.We need to have skills that are relevant to our work, and more than it should use those skills in a sincere and full of enthusiasm.
Commitment to healthy or mature person is so strong, so that could submerge all the ego defense. Dedication to the work associated with a sense of responsibility and a positive survival.
Work and responsibility to give meaning and sense of continuity to life. It is impossible to reach maturity and psychological health without doing an important job and do it with dedication, commitment and skill.
Understanding Yourself
Understanding oneself is a difficult task. It requires effort to understand ourselves throughout life objectively. To achieve an adequate understanding of self-understanding is required of him according to actual circumstances. If a picture of yourself understood closer to the actual circumstances, the individual has matured.
Similarly, what a person thinks about himself, when the closer (same) with which other people thought about him, he is more mature. A healthy person is open to the opinions of others in formulating an objective picture of yourself.
People who have self teradap objectivity impossible to project his personal qualities to others (as others negative). He can judge others carefully, and he usually received well by others. He was also able to laugh at themselves through a healthy humor.
Life Philosophy
Healthy people to look ahead, driven by long-term goals and plans. He has a sense of purpose, sense of duty to work through to completion as cornerstones of his life. Allport called these impulses as directness.
Directness that guide all aspects of one’s life towards a goal or series, as well as providing a reason for living. We need to pull the remains of a meaningful goal. Without it we might have personality problems.
The framework of these objectives is the value, which together with the very important purpose in order to develop a philosophy of life. Having strong values that are characteristic of mature. Neurotic people have no value or have value fragmented and temporary, are not strong enough to unite all facets of life.
Conscience plays a role in determining the philosophy of life. Allport suggests the difference between a mature conscience with conscience is not ripe. That is not mature, her voice like a child: obedient and slavish, full of prohibitions and restrictions, are characterized by feelings of “should”.
People who are not mature said, “I need to behave like this.” Conversely, a mature man said, “I should behave like this.” A mature conscience is a sense of obligation and responsibility to themselves and others, and may be rooted in religious values or ethical.