If you ask the average person about their personality type, especially Myers-Briggs, you’ll either get back a passionate response about their type, which they feel resonates with who they are, or a just as passionate response saying Myers-Briggs is all garbage, saying their “type” doesn’t make any sense or relate to who they are.
I think the main problem that people have in understanding their personality type though is that it doesn’t describe who you are right now (although it may partially) but who you can grow into and become. Thus a lot of it won’t make sense and have any meaning, until you’ve grow and had experiences that make sense of it as a whole. This is why I believe that personality types should be paired with development psychology, so as to understand this more fully.
For myself, while I try to remain open to everything, I obviously at the same try to use critical thinking to assess the accuracy of things. More recently though, over the past decade or so, I’ve seen dramatic improvements with regards to people building upon these systems and creating hybrid systems that seem much more accurate in assessing your personality type.
For example, 16 Personalities is one such organization doing this, as they combine the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) with the Big Five personality traits, as discussed in their framework. And while they don’t delve into developmental psychology, they clearly indicate that becoming your best self has a lot to do with personal development and growth in understanding yourself which allows you to leverage your strengths and overcome your weaknesses.
Now while I’ve used their site some years back to assess my personality type as a Mediator (INFP-T), which I found fairly accurate, they’ve upgraded their site and add some newer services. Noticing their Premium Personality Report was only $9 US, I decided to give it a try. Upon purchasing it, it provided a PDF titled Mediators Guide to Careers, as well as had me undergo a further assessment test of questions that helped them to further refine their understanding of me.
While I found the test results fairly accurate, especially in terms of my weaknesses (that I was already aware of that I needed to work on), it was the Mediators Guide to Careers PDF that completely blew me away when I started reading it.
Big Picture Thinker
What I mean by this is that how I think and process information to learn something new is radically different from how other people normally do so. For example, someone might learn something by following a curriculum and learning each facet of the new domain of knowledge, piece by piece.
I instead prefer learning in a more open, curious way, almost like you’re exploring a new world. So I’ll be all over the place initially, getting a bigger perspective and outline of the world, by first figuring out its edges. Then after that, I will often deep dive into areas within it. (And hilariously enough, I even do this within MMORPGs, whereby I’ll traverse through zones of a much higher than my own, just so I can get a bigger picture of the world I’m exploring within first.)
So while someone else has completed the first part of their formal course, I’ve gotten an outline of the whole course but haven’t dived into the details yet (although I will probably still have rough grasp of the basics of it).
This is what the 16 Personalities Mediators Guide to Careers PDF also revealed and thus helped me to understand about myself in a much deeper way.
Metaphorical Thinker
Even more so, one other way that I process large amounts of information, so as to make sense of it quickly, is to utilize metaphors to understand it as a whole. Yet of course, when I describe these metaphors to someone else, even if they’re familiar with the metaphor, it can go completely over their head.
For example, this is effectively what I’m doing with my Life as a MMORPG framework. I’m using metaphors within an overarching allegory to package and make sense of highly complex knowledge (i.e. Life as a Role-Playing Game = Developmental Psychology).
This again was highlighted in the 16 Personalities Mediators Guide to Careers PDF but they described this as the ability as creative mnemonics which helps people with my personality type to learn new things, since traditional bottom-up learning methods can bore us to death. Yet I’m obviously using it at a scale and complexity that is way beyond the norm.
Mnemonic: a device such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or associations that assists in remembering something
The Devils in the Details
Now while my ability to see the bigger picture and understand it more easily using metaphors or allegories is an amazing strength, my weakness in relation to this is all but obvious, especially now that I reflect back upon the last couple of decades of my research.
You see, my big picture approach stems from my intuition which allows me to almost magically grasp things much more quickly than other people normally can. But what’s happening when I use my intuition is that I’m making these leaps that let me grasp this big picture much more easily (i.e. exploring the edges of the world as a domain of knowledge).
For myself, this is my ability to 1) see patterns, 2) see the relationships between the patterns, and then 3) see the identity of the system as a whole.
Again think of the patterns as the edges of a new world of knowledge and the relationships helps triangulate these patterns, thus seeing the identity of it as a whole, almost like I’m mapping out this world.
But here’s my weakness. I’m so focused on the bigger picture that the details can often be vague or even unknown.
Now this doesn’t mean I can’t provide an overview of what I intuitively know and for that knowledge overview to be accurate.
But it does mean I have a hard time articulating the details of my life’s work because I often can’t find the rational words to describe it, even though I may have a ton of metaphorical words to use to describe my work as a whole.
Deconstructing My Worldview Brick by Brick
So this is what I need to be doing and this was something I validated some months ago but I’m still struggling with how best to do this.
So again, what I need to do here now is the reverse of what a conventional person would do who learns the foundational elements of a new domain of knowledge first and then builds it up to eventually understand it as a whole.
I need to deconstruct this new domain of knowledge that I’ve created and break it down into bite sized pieces so that others can understand it and learn it in a conventional bottom up way.
But again, upon reflecting back, if I had an implemented something like an evergreen note system which I wasn’t aware of back then, I could have built up this knowledge in bite sized pieces which I could have then just shared with others, as I was learning.
But again, remember that that is not how my mind works. I’m constantly looking for the bigger picture first.
Explains My Difficulties with Note-Taking Systems
Actually what’s really funny, now that I think about it, is that this probably explains why I’m having a hard time grasping how to implement an evergreen notes system. It’s because I’m big picture focused rather than detailed focused on the smaller pieces.
So when I read something in my mind that relates to something else that I read elsewhere in the past, it’s like the relationship between the two pieces of information is more important than the pieces of information themselves because I’m so focused on seeing the bigger picture (which the relationship provides).
Creating a Portal to a New World
And yet, without focusing on the details, it continually feels like I have no solid ground to stand upon which in turn would allow me to build upon it.
Thus it feels like I’m a ghost who is eternally stuck in an ephemeral, liminal world that only I can see as a whole but with which I can’t rationally articulate a pathway to it for other conventional minds.
All said and done though, the more I read this Mediators Guide to Careers, the more I’m beginning to understand my strengths that I can leverage even more so but also my weaknesses that I need to overcome, especially if I want to make my worldview a tangible reality for others.
More importantly though, what it is revealing to me is that I’m not crazy or incompetent, as my struggles in articulating myself and my work often make me feel. I’m just different. And if I can leverage that difference, understanding it as a whole, then I can transform the way I work and translate my work in such a way that others will begin to understand it.
That statement is profound because I’ve describe this metaphorically before. I’ve said that it feels like I’ve discovered this tome of wisdom deep within the depths of myself and a lot of my journey now is in trying to decipher and translate the details of it for others to understand. And that effectively embodies Return stage of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
