Illustration by John S. Dykes
When Patricia Bubash started teaching almost 30 years ago, she wasn’t planning to teach classes about personality tests for St. Louis Community College. But according to the subject matter she teaches—the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—she’s perfectly suited for the job.
“I’m a people person because I’m extroverted,” she says, adding that the “sensing” part of her personality also helps with her part-time job as a counselor for a parochial school.
Once a novelty, personality tests like the Myers-Briggs, Keirsey or the Enneagram have gone mainstream. There are quite a few benefits to finding out what your “type” is, says Bubash. “There is a high correlation with job satisfaction and alignment of a personality to that job.”
Easily the most famous of the tests, the Myers-Briggs was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers over many decades and takes into account psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types. Beginning in the 1940s, Myers set out to better understand her husband, who was very different from herself, by watching “types.” With the help of her mother, Katharine Briggs, another subtle observer of human nature, Myers laid the groundwork for the personality test.
Today, approximately two million people a year—all over the world and speaking 18 languages—take the Myers-Briggs test. The results indicate how someone prefers to engage with the world: whether he is extroverted or introverted, intuitive or sensing, feeling or thinking, judging or perceiving.
In 15 years of counseling, Bubash has seen a shift in the types of people who take her classes on the Myers-Briggs. “I used to have a lot of blue-collar workers. Now I have people with master’s degrees and administrators,” she says. “People are wanting to have more awareness about themselves and to see if they are compatible with their jobs, if they should explore or change.”
Aimee Wittman, a career development specialist at Washington University’s Career Center, says her office uses Myers-Briggs tests to help students chose what subjects to study. “It allows students to narrow the possibilities and explore different types of careers,” she says.
In the book Do What You Are, authors Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger use personality types to categorize real-life individuals who have found careers that accommodate their personality strengths. “The secret of career satisfaction lies in doing what you enjoy most,” the book states. “A few lucky people discover this secret early in life, but most of us are caught in a kind of psychological wrestling match, torn between what we think we can do, what we feel we ought to do and what we think we want to do.”
An awareness of personality differences can reach past our work and into other important parts of our life, such as our personal relationships.
Bridget Brennan directs The Cana Institute, which focuses on helping adults find healthy relationships. She asks couples to take the Keirsey Temperament Sorter—which is also based on Jung’s teachings—before attending her St. Louis marriage preparation classes.
“There’s the assumption that the way ‘I think’ and the way ‘I process’ is the norm,” says Brennan, “so when you marry someone, you realize they get their energy differently and there is a tendency to believe something is wrong.”
The personality tests help couples under-stand each other. “Once people accept these differences, they can learn what that person’s gifts are,” says Brennan. “Having differences is not an excuse for not being responsible for doing your share in the relationship. In early stages, it is a power struggle and you are trying to change someone. As you grow more secure, you begin to see the advantages of being different.”
A greater acceptance of differences is the bonus of studying personality, agrees Bubash. “Instead of just thinking someone is annoying or picky, you think, ‘This is their way of doing things’ and ‘This can be beneficial.’”
For more information about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, visit www.myersbriggs.org.
