What's your MBTI?

When I was working at NCAR, we were offered seminars of interest to us, and one I took long ago was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). (The link takes you to Wikipedia.) After we signed up, we were sent questionnaires of 180 questions to answer a week before the day-long seminar, and I filled it out thinking this would be an interesting day. It was.

The premise is that people basically have two opposite ways of viewing the world in four categories: introvert/extravert, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuition, perceiving/judging. Here is a graph showing how people line up up in 16 categories:

The room was filled with around 50 people who had also signed up, and a facilitator. The first thing she did was hand us a sheet of paper with a few questions on it, and she encouraged us to think of where we ourselves thought would be on the graph. I guessed that I am an extravert (obvious, that one), that I am a feeler rather than a thinker (although I really hoped I would be a thinker), intuitive, and the last one I had the hardest time with but finally put myself into the perceiving category. This made me, at first blush, an ENFP ("giving life an extra squeeze").

The she gave us back our long questionnaires, and guess what? ENFP. Most people are not all the way one direction or the other, but I was way out on the extraversion side, and also moderately strong on intuition and feeling, and pretty balanced, but still a perceiver rather than a judger.

The Myers-Briggs website gives YOU a chance to find out where you fit into this typology, if you're interested. I have used it to find out why I have such a hard time with some people. I have a hard time with strong sensers, and I am attracted to introverts (they are a great audience!). Enjoy!
:-)