Personality Type Testing

It is important for your Self Improvement / Personal Development to understand yourself. The more you understand yourself, the better your growth efforts will be. You can target your efforts more precisely. You can come at a problem from a different angle rather than trying to force a change in a particular way the goes against your underlying nature.

Matching a career with your values, interests and skills doesn't work as well as knowing your Personality Type. There are two reasons: first (unlike the other three) your Type does not change. Your values interests and skills change as you leave school, start a career, change careers, marry, have children and so on. You mature as you grow older, but your core needs, the way you're hardwired to think and act, what motivates and is important to you, your natural, in-born talents as well as those activities that energize and drain you, all remains constant. (For example, the quiet, thoughtful five-year old who loved learning to read and assembling model space ships, might grow up to be a very satisfied and successful scientist. Likewise, the outgoing, persuasive seven year-old who sold more Girl Scout cookies than anyone else in her school, may well turn out be a top business development person).

Second, when your job is a good fit for your personality type, it energizes you. You look forward to going to work and are much more likely to succeed. The opposite is also true. When your job is not a good fit for your type, your work drains your energy, makes you prone to burnout and you're much less likely to be successful.

It's not just about introversion it includes 4 distinct areas:

• Extroversion - Introversion
• Sensing - Intuition
• Thinking - Feeling
• Judging - Perceiving

The scales of the different areas are bipolar e.g. Extraversion-Introversion (E-I) areas ranges from 100% on E to 100% on I so it is 200% long and 0% meaning in the middle between 100% E and 100% I. By taking a professional personality type test, you will discover your type formula along with a numeric measure of each of the 4 areas. This shows the strengths of the preferences.

Learning about your personality type can help you in real and concrete ways including, understanding just what you need in a career for it to be satisfying, determining which careers work best for you, knowing how to capitalize on your work-related strengths compensate for your weaknesses, and using your strengths to conduct a much more successful job search.

Having information about personality types and preferences can be quite useful in understanding others as well. Once you understand the basic personality type preferences under which people operate, as well as your own preferences, you can begin to find ways to more effectively work with opposite types or even your own type. Through type watching, you can find ways to build upon people's strengths and improve many group activities, such as time management, conflict resolution, problem solving, and team building.

Time Management
Judgers/Perceivers:

Time management is primarily a judger/perceiver issue. When it comes to time management, it's a judgers' world. J's have their homework done on time, their projects done on schedule. In a time-conscious society, people who are slave to their clocks get ahead. People who are constantly late are said to "have problems with authority." Unfortunately, society's J preoccupation with time sometimes leads to poor results.

In groups, judgers need perceivers to help them avoid being overly rigid and compulsive. Ps help Js stay open to creative solutions. Js, in turn, help Ps complete a project in a realistic time frame.

Differences in this personality type preference by far are most significant in conflict resolution. Thinkers want feelers to deal with the facts and not personalize everything. Feelers want thinkers to consider the feelings of all those involved. Both types are afraid of losing control. T's are afraid they will lose control if an issue becomes personal and they appear to be personally affected by the conflict. F's are afraid that they will say something during a heated discussion that will cause irreparable harm to an interpersonal relationship. To work together, both types must simply realize that there are no right or wrong ways to approach conflict resolution, only differences.

Over the sixty years since its inception in 1943, the MBTI or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has evolved and been perfected through continual test research and development of ever more accurate questions. Many, many millions of people have taken the test (actually the Indicator is an inventory or psychological instrument rather than a test - as a test suggests right and wrong answers. All answer choices in the MBTI are equally desired).
The MBTI research data base is huge. The subtle enhancements to the "M" edition of the inventory were the product of a landmark study involving thousands of people and over two years of work by a team of experts in the field of psychological testing.

It's best to take an authorized MBTI. Those that are certified by the Myers-Briggs organization take advantage of the most up to date research and adjust their questions and evaluations accordingly. You can find some free tests online, and they can help. But they can't fully replace a professionally monitored and evaluated test. The only one that is available on line is the one I'm recommending here called Know Your Type.