Myers Briggs Personality Junkie

    Recently in our grad studies course, we did the Myers Briggs personality questionnaire (for those of you who might find this amusing, I keep calling it the "erlenmeyers test"). I'm skeptical of most personality things as they usually are used as excuses for people not following through in certain areas of their life because they're too lazy. I won't go into the history of the test save to say the people made it because one of their husband's was a bit weird and they wanted to know why or something. I never pay a lot of attention in class. 

     Anyway, the test measures your personality in accordance to how you answered the questions in a given questionnaire according to these four categories: extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perception.

Extraversion - get your energy from external sources

Introversion - get your energy from inwards.

Senser - take in information about what is actually happening (factual details)

Intuitor - take in information by establishing relationships/patterns (big picture)

Thinker - based on logic (principle/idea oriented)

Feeler - based on emotion (people oriented)

Judger - orderly/scheduled/planner

Perceiver - flexible/open ended/spontaneous

     As you can see by my grainy webcam picture that I took just now, apparently I'm an extremely extroverted creature, and confused on everything else. I could have gone either way (hah!) but the administrator of the class moved in favour of me being an ENFP - extraverted, intuitor, feeler, perceiver. Was this true? But...but I thought I was a creature of routine ....would I not be a judger? I was seriously confused. Serious confusion.

  

     "OH NO!" said one half of my brain, "what shall I do? How is my personality so confused?"

     "It's okay," the other half of my mind said, "we'll figure this out."

     So we continued reading. And in our reading adventures we discovered that ENFP personalities (extraverted intuition with introverted feeling) were keenly perceptive about people, experienced a wide range of feelings and intense motions, needed affirmation and gave others good support and appreciation, were verbally dextrous and zesty, but hated schedules and structure. Well the first part sounded like me....but I liked structure!

     ENFJs are highly attuned to others and use empathy to understand others, they are friendly persuaders and act as catalysts to draw the best in others, they can listen but have very definite values which they will clearly express, they can be inspiring leaders as well as loyal followers, always put people first, and they like their lives to be organized and thrive on closure in ambiguous relationships or situations.

      "Brain," I said, "I think I'm an ENFJ."

      "Yes," my brain said back to me, "I think we are. Good job. Don't forget, it was all very slight on those categories anyway, so you can be whoever you want."

      "Brain," I replied, "you suck at pep talks."

     As a side note, it was interesting to see that different types actually existed. We were put into different groups based on our personality type and asked to answer a seemingly simple question, and it was quite surprising what different groups came up with and how they came about it. That being said, we can always change who we appear to be and who we are.

Curious indeed the human person is.

Cheers!
ps. Feel free to check out the literature page on the RIGHT (anti left) side. Updated once a week. Poetry. You know how it goes.