Personality and Personal Growth: The Aquarius Personality

The timing of your birth may shape your personality and the traits you lean on when you sit down to build a personal development plan. People born between January 21st and February 19th fall under Aquarius. A cluster of characteristics tends to follow this sign around, and if you count yourself among them, you'll probably recognize a fair few. Use what fits to put together a plan that actually suits how you operate.

Like anyone, an Aquarius carries a mix of strengths and weaknesses, and that mix is part of what defines them.

On friendship: an Aquarius can come across as cool or distant at first glance, but underneath they're warm and will go out of their way for the people they care about. Few things make them happier than getting a friend to laugh or watching someone close to them feel settled and content. They do kind things with no scoreboard in mind, expecting nothing back. There's an appetite for fun in them too, and a spontaneous streak. They'll suggest doing something out of the blue, no plan, just because it sounds good right now.

Independence runs deep here. An Aquarius pulls away fast from anyone or anything that starts to feel like a cage. Room to move, freedom to be themselves, that's where they find their footing. Calling it a want undersells it; for their sense of well-being, it registers more like a requirement.

Temperament is where the rebel shows up. Aquarius people like doing things their way and can dig in hard. Stubborn enough that they'll keep going down a path even after it's clearly led them to a dead end, even when they already know better. Bright people, often, and that doesn't soften the stubbornness one bit; being told they're wrong is not the same as changing course. When someone pushes back, the opinions hold firm. That said, they don't try to shove those views onto anyone else, and they'll give other people space to see things differently.

Work tends to matter to an Aquarius in terms of usefulness. Social work, psychology, politics, anywhere that calls for reading people and collaborating well, those fields tend to suit them. Their forward-leaning way of thinking makes them good at dreaming up fresh theories and frameworks, and they read constantly, chasing whatever they haven't learned yet. The weak spot is detail. Grand ideas, yes, in abundance; the small, unglamorous steps that turn an idea into something real, not so much. Those tasks get neglected.

Look past the surface and an Aquarius turns out to be sharply observant, forever hunting for something closer to wisdom. They keep a cool distance from their own feelings, which makes them unusually objective, and they'll tell you the truth even when the truth lands like a slap. Emotion rarely gets a vote in their decisions; in fact they half-distrust their own emotions and would rather reason it through. What pushes them along is intellect and the pull of wanting to understand a thing better. Questions about why they're here surface often, along with a wish to spend their life on something that genuinely helps other people. What the crowd thinks of them barely registers.

So that's a bit more of what makes an Aquarius tick, the traits and patterns that tend to cluster around the sign. Keep them in view while you're setting goals for a personal development plan, since they can steer you toward targets that fit and toward realistic ways of actually reaching them. Plenty more could be said about how a sign colors a person; treat this as a starting point for digging further.

References: http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~rpicha/personal/astrology/ and https://www.pinterest.com/pin/285274957616937337/