Show a little personality

On Monday, Leon and I attended Team Day for the Office there in Carlisle. This particular Team Day had me a bit excited because it was an opportunity to meet and connect a bit with people on the team. I was also interested because the topic of Team day was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality profile thing, which I know a bit about already. A couple on the team, whom I met when I was there in February, led the activities for the day.

Prior to coming everyone had to take an online assessment to find out our personality profile. Once at the team day, the neat analogy was made from Scripture to say that everyone is made uniquely, and it’s important to know ourselves well so we can know God well. I have never thought of it that way before. How cool is that–God created us all uniquely yet we are made in the image of Him!

From there, the 16 different personality types were being described. There are four elements included: Extravert vs. Introvert; iNtuitive vs. Sensing; Thinking vs. Feeling; Judging vs. Perceptive. These elements are combined into combinations of four letters which makes up an individual’s personality profile (ESTJ, INFP, etc).

We were then divided into each of these groups to find out what the team’s personality type and to discuss the differences between each personality so that we can better understand each other. Interestingly, the ICT (International Coordinating Team) is predominately introverted which comes as no surprise because ICT team members mostly work behind the scenes like most introverts (such as myself) prefer to do.

Image Source: kencf0618

One of the things that I learned is that the two most important elements in a personality profile is the two middle letters (ST, SF, NT, and NF). Normally, you ‘operate’ within those elements. However under stress, you will quite often ‘operate’ in the personality that is opposite what you really are. For example, my two middle letters in my personality are Sensing and Thinking. Since I’ve been under a lot of stress, I have been operating more as a Feeler than a Thinker. I have also discovered that I don’t do the Feeling thing very well because it’s not my usual tendency. It can also be exhausting if I have to be Extraverted when I’m an Introvert, or iNtuitive rather than Sensing.

Oh, this is such interesting information to me! I confess personality profiles are interesting to me. We do have to be careful to not place people in a box and assign a type to a person without first getting to know the individual.

Of course, the most important part of this Team Day was connecting with a few people since I don’t really know anyone on the team just yet. Hopefully, the connecting will continue once we are back in Carlisle in a little over a week.

…And if you were wondering, I’m an ISTJ personality type. :)