Strongly Worded

Gimme an E! Gimme an S! Gimme a T! Gimme a J!

On Friday, I attended a day-long training on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), which is a test based on the premise that everyone fits into one of 16 personality categories, based on four sets of preferences (Extraversion/Introversion; Sensing/iNtuition; Thinking/Feeling; Judging/Perceiving). While it may sound kind of flaky and horoscope-esque, the MBTI is legit. (It has been validated many times and is used by corporate and career counseling experts.)

(And, even though the training presenters strongly discourage this, you can check out a free fake version of test here. (Completing the official version costs more than $100.)

I am an ESTJ, which means I "approach life with confidence and energy" am "active, ambitious and pragmatic"and "mistrust lofty visions, ideas or philosophies." What can I say? These guys have me pegged.

I loved the training. The presenter was dynamic and we did lots of cool group work.

Usually I loathe group work. I generally want to sit quietly and sip my lukewarm conference-continental-breakfast coffee and doodle on my handout, and absorb the trainer's expertise.

Even though I'm theoretically grown up, I still feel panicky when instructed to find "X other people to work with". The phrase always elicits this scary exchange of glances as everyone tries to instantly nail down a group and avoid awkwardness and pariah-dom. I hate being asked to introduce myself to people I will never see again, "share" answers to pointless questions, and appoint a timekeeper, note-taker, and reporter in preparation for the mind-numbingly dull practice of "reporting back to the larger group". (I'm not sure if this is typical of all trainings everywhere, or just the ones I attend--which are usually related to social justice topics.)

Anyway. The group work in this training was fun, because we were broken into groups by type. So I got to chill with other ESTJs. During one exercise, the Js and the Ps exchanged advice on how to deal with one another. In another, we had to plot our own career paths and identify how type had played into our decision-making.

I left feeling much more comfortable with the instrument, which I may someday administer if I pursue college career counseling--a long-term interest. I left the training with a heightened awareness of myself and all my ESTJ-ness.

Which is useful, because my identity has become murky of late. My email has finally succumbed to the world of spam. I used to get maybe 15 junk email messages a day, now I get way over a hundred. And? They're all addressed to Leslie. Out in the spam-o-sphere, some techno-mechanism decided that I'm Leslie, a person who shops for v*i*a*g*r*a, is desperate for an iPod, and corresponds with Nigerian prisoners.

Thank God for the identity-building Myers Briggs. Without it, I might lose track of who I am.

Posted by Dori at 4:55 PM