Defining yourself

As a consultant, soft skills are very important and along this line, a colleague pointed me to an online personality test, which I promptly performed. It is based on Carl Jung's psychological theories and called a Myers-Briggs test. I have been partial to Jung's work, reading a large book on the man some years ago and finding it to be quite sensible. The engineer in me can be skeptical about such things and a pet hate of mine is that Sigmund Freud gets so much attention in pop culture despite having, in my opinion, far more fanciful ideas. I have no doubt that his popularity is due to his fixation on sexuality as a key human motivator. Interestingly, Jung and Freud were friends, or at least Freud saw Jung as his Protege carrying on his theories, but Jung started to disagree and eventually parted company. One of his criticisms was that Freud's sample set was not wide enough to form theories on people in general - predominantly wealthy, conservative housewives. Flicking through Freud's Wikipedia entry, it appears he was a cocaine addict, with there being a theory that this increases sexual interest and obsessive thinking.

Getting back to my original topic, it turns out that I am an INFP. This is interesting because each type (there are 16) has relationships to all the others and this gives you pointers on how to deal with them. So I sent it out to a few of my friends and colleagues and got an interesting response. It turned out that my fiancee was an INTP who apparently make good companions to my type - a fact which empirical methods had already proven to be true. A close friend who I worked very closely with at school was an INTJ, the description of which is very accurate. The relationship between INFP and INTJ is advisor which explains elements of our friendship. I wonder if this interests me because of elements of being an INFP...

The next step would be to do this in an organised with my colleagues and see what comes out. It will be interesting to see if people feel comfortable having their character type freely known by their colleagues.