Find out more about the MBTI, personality and its influence over your effectiveness.
The MBTI is one measure of personality and your personality has a large impact on your effectivness.
There is an ancient Buddhist saying that "to know and not to do, is not to know at all." Aristotle went further when he asserted that "excellence is not an act, but a habit". Your personality does not overwrite free choice. You can make conscious choices to act in any way that you wish. However, much of the time we act as if on autopilot - enacting habitual routines and ways of interacting. Your personality has a significant influence over these habitual ways of behaving.
Understanding your personality enhances your self-awareness, going beyond just knowing about your strengths and weaknesses, to help you understand why you tend to act the way you do. Understanding personality differences is also a key aspect of social intelligence, enabling you to be more understanding and effective in your intereactions with others.
The MBTI is based on the work of psychologist Carl Jung. Whilst every individual is unique, Jung's work shows us that we differ in remarkably similar ways. His early work differeniated between introverts, whose energies focus on their inner worlds and extraverts, whose energies focus on the people environment around them. Jung identified eight personality types by combining introversion and extraversion with four possible dominant mental functions - sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling.
Carl Jung did not develop the MBTI but he provided the psychological theory which Myers and Briggs used to develop what is now commonly known as the MBTI - the most widely used personality assessment in the world. The MBTI classifies your personality along four either-or catergories. Your MBTI type is determined by whether you: are Introverted or Extraverted; tend to take in new information as it is (Sensing) or connect it with ideas of what could be (iNtuition); value emotions and values over logic and reason (Feeling) or logic and reason over emotions and values (Thinking); and whether you prefer planned order and quick decisions (Judging) or spontenity and contemplation (Perceiving). In each case the emphasis is on an either-or preference somewhat akin to your preference for being either right or left handed. Like handedness, you can choose to operate in non-preferred ways and you can even become quite skilled in those areas. However, to do so takes hard work over a prolonged period of time, where-as within preference behaviours come more naturally.
The power of the MBTI lies in the way it captures both strenghs and weaknesses in each of the 16 possible personality types. Every MBTI personality type has unique gifts that it brings to the table, whilst also having tendencies that may be less than effective and somewhat strange to people with a different personality. It is through developing your understanding of yourself and others that you can take the steps needed to enrich and enable your relationships with others. Discover the profound insight of the MBTI by purchasing an MBTI online assessment today.