The Present Authoring - Faults exercise makes an excellent starting point. It has been designed to allow you to do an in-depth analysis of the negative elements of your personality, that is, your faults. The exercise is structured around the Big Five Personality Model. The Big Five model is an empirically derived measurement model of personality that assesses variation in:

• Extraversion or positive emotion, dominance and enthusiasm
• Openness to Experience or creativity, artistic sensibility, and philosophical-mindedness
• Emotional Stability or the absence of negative emotion (anxiety, emotional pain, shame and guilt)
• Conscientiousness or orderliness and persistence
• Agreeableness or warmth, empathy and tender-mindedness (versus assertiveness and aggression)

How it works

When you do the Present Authoring - Faults exercise, you will be asked to identify your faults from among a list of traits that cluster around a particular personality factor. So for extraversion, for example, you might indicate that you tend to feel uncomfortable around others, or that you bottle up your feelings, and so on. For Openness to Experience, you might indicate that you have a hard time planning for the future because you are interested in everything, or that you can become possessed by an idea. After narrowing down the selected list to the faults that you feel affect you the most, you will be asked to write about each fault, first describing a time when that fault caused you trouble, and then exploring what you might have done, or how you could have acted differently, to affect a different outcome.