I hesitated to post my Myers-Briggs personality measure, thinking it might be egocentric (there are enough of those blogs around) and because I don\u2019t put much weight on personality testing. But if Myers-Briggs measures can lead us to consider (or reconsider) some aspects of ourselves,\u00a0they can be of value.\u00a0 And recently I had reason to consider that perhaps I really am INTJ and not always the sweet, agreeable guy that I tend to think I am.<\/p>\n
I hold some strong beliefs\/principles\/hypotheses (take your pick of word choice) that in some cases lie outside the cultural mainstream (see pacifist realism on this site). \u00a0I also strongly identify as an educator and a social scientist (the hypothesis-testing, data-driven, laboratory-based variety).\u00a0 At the same time I think of myself as a romantic in close personal relationships. I consider the first time Fran and I met — a rainy-night hike in the woods — to be one of the great romantic encounters. On the other hand, when at a later time we were composing our marriage vows, I explained why I would never promise to love her. She understood my position completely, but explained that she preferred to make a promise simply\u00a0for setting\u00a0a goal. It\u2019s interesting that this would be a \u201cmatch\u201d for Myers-Briggs.<\/p>\n
I first discovered Fran at match.com, where she identified herself as INTJ (along with saying \u201cserendipity rules\u201d and \u201drisk taking, not thrill seeking,\u201d while I\u2019m \u201cChance favors the prepared mind.\u201d)\u00a0 I was a bit bothered by Fran\u2019s apparent ignorance of the fact that there is no external validation of the Myers-Briggs test and that it is based on sloppy and popularized Jungian theories. Perhaps ironically, her test scores turned out to be in fair agreement with my own later assessment of Fran (sloppy doesn\u2019t necessarily mean erroneous).\u00a0 Thus I felt a need to take this test myself, before saying too much more. Surprise to me — I was INTJ also (although my score on the J category is less than Fran\u2019s). When I examine the Myers-Briggs questions themselves (a necessary step) and consider that I might have answered some differently at different ages, it makes me reflect on how we change over a lifetime. Myers-Briggs measures are attitude and not behavior based. How do we change over a lifetime in our tendency to put attitude into action? I think that Fran has mellowed somewhat with age and parenthood. I don\u2019t believe that she is as \u201cruthless\u201d a character as she likes to believe (although I realize that saying this is like waving a red flag in front of her). On the other hand, I may be\u00a0having less inhibition and thus be less concerned about maintaining some of the behavioral niceness\/considerateness that was important in my family upbringing as an accompaniment to our sometimes radical thinking. This upbringing was radical not so much in political or leftist terms per se, but for being atypical\/counter-culture on account of being highly principled and \u201cliberal\u201d in the true sense of the word.<\/p>\n
This INTJ topic came to mind after a recent email exchange with an online friend regarding what I saw as her two different lives, public and private,\u00a0and\u00a0my\u00a0implicit suggestion that she should do something about this discrepancy. She readily acknowledged that there were two personas involved (good insight) and that she had made her peace with this (and was doubtless somewhat annoyed at my intrusive “helpfulness”). Maybe this\u00a0supposedly thoughtful and deliberate Quaker is becoming as uninhibited and \u201cruthless\u201d as Fran claims to be. Maybe Fran and I will be meeting in the middle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hesitated to post my Myers-Briggs personality measure, thinking it might be egocentric (there are enough of those blogs around) and because I don\u2019t put much weight on personality testing. But if Myers-Briggs measures can lead us to consider (or reconsider) some aspects of ourselves,\u00a0they can be of value.\u00a0 And recently I had reason to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.peacefulways.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}