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Everyone gets this shit wrong. Personality Type Systems are extremely limited and narrow in scope, but within their very limited range, can be very useful. People just keep wanting to widen their applicability, and that's when they turn to shit. These are not newspaper horoscopes, putting you in boxes and telling you how to run your life. They're merely a set of language that *you* decide which describes you, that can help you understand yourself and others *in narrow ranges* that you can use to better communicate with people who you want to understand and who you want to understand you.
ttps://www.quora.com/How-should-one-view-their-Myers-Briggs-type-Would-it-be-wise-to-base-your-relationships-and-employment-on-what-it-says/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper
Q. How should one view their Myers–Briggs type? Would it be wise to base your relationships and employment on what it says?
Joreth Innkeeper, teaches workshops on Type Systems like MBTI & 5LL
A. MBTI is, at best, a communication tool. It should not be used to make any kind of decisions for anything. It can be used to explain to another person how you work, so that they know what to expect from you, and to then offer you some shorthand to reference these points later.
For instance, I am an INTJ. One of the characteristics of this category is that I really like having my plans on the calendar and scheduled, and I get very uncomfortable and anxious when the plan is changed.
My former sweetie, who works with the actual institution that controls the MBTI (not one of these knock-offs that just make up online quizzes based on some workshop they once took on MBTI), introduced me to the “hit and run” method.
This is when we have plans, and suddenly something comes up that has to change the plans, like if we were going away for a weekend vacation and on Friday morning his boss tells him that he will have to stay late instead of leaving after lunch for our trip. So then he would have to call me and tell me that the plans have changed.
For someone of his type (ENTP) to be dating someone of my type, we often had scheduling challenges because I prefer more structure and he is very spontaneous and can more easily roll with change. So this might be mildly irksome to him to have his boss delay his vacation plans, but to me it would be a huge deal. I would have a lot of strong, negative emotions about it when he would be over it already.
So, he would call me up, say “sorry, sweetie, plans have changed, we have to leave tonight instead of this afternoon, oops, gotta go bye!” and let me stew by myself. Then my own processes would kick in and I would get back to planning a contingency and backup plans, which alleviates my anxiety about the change. By the time he would call me back in an hour or so, I would feel better because I “solved the problem” by creating a new plan. He would ask how I’m doing, and I could say “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do…” and lay out the new plan.
I would be happy because now I have a new plan, he would be happy because he doesn’t have to plan anything, and even though things wouldn’t be our ideal, we would have solved the issue.
If he had stayed on the phone with me, he would have had to listen to me get upset at the change in plans, and the anxiety of “what are we going to do now?” He would have wanted to try and reassure me or console me and try to tell me to relax, to just roll with it, everything will work itself out.
For someone with my type, telling me to just relax and not worry, to just let things work themselves out, would be the wrong thing to say. But to someone with his type, it would have made *him* feel better if the situation was reversed. So he would have been upset because I was upset, and then I would have gotten upset because he wasn’t helping me figure out a plan and he was making things worse by dismissing my concerns.
The “hit and run” worked a lot better for us. Once we realized that our conflict was a product of our personality types, we could come up with a solution. And then later, I had some terminology to explain to both him and to other people how to solve this problem with me in the future.
When I started dating other people, I could tell them “I am an INTJ, which means I feel this way about scheduling and change and plans and organizing.” They could tell me how they feel about those topics, and then if they happened to also be one of the categories that likes spontaneity, I could say “OK, then, if this situation comes up between us, the hit-and-run method is the best way to deal with me.”
Then, later, when I am faced with a plan change and I start freaking out about it, if the new person is just standing there looking lost at me, wondering what to do, I can remind them “I’m just being INTJ right now, remember how this goes?” and they can say “Oh, right, we talked about this - the hit-and-run, OK then, I’ll leave you to your planning and not take your freaking out about this as personal or as something that I need to fix for you”.
Knowing the processes going on behind the behaviour and the emotions helps two people communicate with each other and helps them to find solutions that work for their particular dynamic. MBTI is one system among many that offers language and a structure to facilitate that communication and solution-finding process.
But it is absolutely not meant to help you make decisions. MBTI is not a set of boxes that we all fit into. It’s more like a spectrum of handed-ness. If you were to draw 2 lines from left to right, one line on top of the other, and put 0 on one side and 100 on the other, and then place an x somewhere on the top line for how often you use your right hand, and another x on the bottom line for how often you use your left hand, you could use those two lines to determine if you were right handed or left handed.
ttps://www.quora.com/How-should-one-view-their-Myers-Briggs-type-Would-it-be-wise-to-base-your-relationships-and-employment-on-what-it-says/answer/Joreth-Innkeeper
Q. How should one view their Myers–Briggs type? Would it be wise to base your relationships and employment on what it says?
Joreth Innkeeper, teaches workshops on Type Systems like MBTI & 5LL
A. MBTI is, at best, a communication tool. It should not be used to make any kind of decisions for anything. It can be used to explain to another person how you work, so that they know what to expect from you, and to then offer you some shorthand to reference these points later.
For instance, I am an INTJ. One of the characteristics of this category is that I really like having my plans on the calendar and scheduled, and I get very uncomfortable and anxious when the plan is changed.
My former sweetie, who works with the actual institution that controls the MBTI (not one of these knock-offs that just make up online quizzes based on some workshop they once took on MBTI), introduced me to the “hit and run” method.
This is when we have plans, and suddenly something comes up that has to change the plans, like if we were going away for a weekend vacation and on Friday morning his boss tells him that he will have to stay late instead of leaving after lunch for our trip. So then he would have to call me and tell me that the plans have changed.
For someone of his type (ENTP) to be dating someone of my type, we often had scheduling challenges because I prefer more structure and he is very spontaneous and can more easily roll with change. So this might be mildly irksome to him to have his boss delay his vacation plans, but to me it would be a huge deal. I would have a lot of strong, negative emotions about it when he would be over it already.
So, he would call me up, say “sorry, sweetie, plans have changed, we have to leave tonight instead of this afternoon, oops, gotta go bye!” and let me stew by myself. Then my own processes would kick in and I would get back to planning a contingency and backup plans, which alleviates my anxiety about the change. By the time he would call me back in an hour or so, I would feel better because I “solved the problem” by creating a new plan. He would ask how I’m doing, and I could say “OK, here’s what we’re gonna do…” and lay out the new plan.
I would be happy because now I have a new plan, he would be happy because he doesn’t have to plan anything, and even though things wouldn’t be our ideal, we would have solved the issue.
If he had stayed on the phone with me, he would have had to listen to me get upset at the change in plans, and the anxiety of “what are we going to do now?” He would have wanted to try and reassure me or console me and try to tell me to relax, to just roll with it, everything will work itself out.
For someone with my type, telling me to just relax and not worry, to just let things work themselves out, would be the wrong thing to say. But to someone with his type, it would have made *him* feel better if the situation was reversed. So he would have been upset because I was upset, and then I would have gotten upset because he wasn’t helping me figure out a plan and he was making things worse by dismissing my concerns.
The “hit and run” worked a lot better for us. Once we realized that our conflict was a product of our personality types, we could come up with a solution. And then later, I had some terminology to explain to both him and to other people how to solve this problem with me in the future.
When I started dating other people, I could tell them “I am an INTJ, which means I feel this way about scheduling and change and plans and organizing.” They could tell me how they feel about those topics, and then if they happened to also be one of the categories that likes spontaneity, I could say “OK, then, if this situation comes up between us, the hit-and-run method is the best way to deal with me.”
Then, later, when I am faced with a plan change and I start freaking out about it, if the new person is just standing there looking lost at me, wondering what to do, I can remind them “I’m just being INTJ right now, remember how this goes?” and they can say “Oh, right, we talked about this - the hit-and-run, OK then, I’ll leave you to your planning and not take your freaking out about this as personal or as something that I need to fix for you”.
Knowing the processes going on behind the behaviour and the emotions helps two people communicate with each other and helps them to find solutions that work for their particular dynamic. MBTI is one system among many that offers language and a structure to facilitate that communication and solution-finding process.
But it is absolutely not meant to help you make decisions. MBTI is not a set of boxes that we all fit into. It’s more like a spectrum of handed-ness. If you were to draw 2 lines from left to right, one line on top of the other, and put 0 on one side and 100 on the other, and then place an x somewhere on the top line for how often you use your right hand, and another x on the bottom line for how often you use your left hand, you could use those two lines to determine if you were right handed or left handed.
Handedness is a category. People are either right or left handed (let’s leave out ambidextrousness for now). But that doesn’t mean that they don’t use both hands on occasion. And it doesn’t even mean that there is a spectrum with left handed use on one side and right handed use on the other. You have an individual spectrum for each hand. The one that gets used the most is your dominant hand, but if you added up the amount you use each hand, you would get more than 100% because the amount you use each hand overlaps.
Same thing with types. You are not in an either/or box. You are on a spectrum of each individual trait where you use some more than others, or where some come more easily to you than others. You will still use the others a little bit, and you can learn to use the others the way you can learn to use your off-hand if you want to.
In addition to that, our experiences throughout life teach us skills in those traits that are not our dominant traits. Many of those experiences come very early in life, so it can be difficult to tell if your skill with those traits are “natural” or “learned”. Scheduling, for example - our society encourages good scheduling skills from our very early days in primary or elementary school.
Many people learn how to schedule well, whether it’s “natural” for them or not. That same partner I was talking about above has diabetes, so as a young child, he learned how to schedule his day around his eating needs, to prevent any diabetic complications. Yet scheduling is not “natural” to him and not something that he likes doing. But he’s very good at it … when he wants to be.
So you can’t make decisions based on your category because there are too many things that can influence individual people - life experiences, deliberate training, where on the spectrums they fall, etc.
DO NOT use MBTI to make decisions about who to date or what kind of job to take. I can’t stress this enough.
DO NOT MAKE DECISIONS BASED ON MBTI.
Use MBTI for its intended use - as a communication tool to better understand yourself and the people you are relating to such as partners, family, coworkers, etc.
