Personality Types - Myers and Briggs

SJ = Guardians

SP = Artisans

NF = Idealists

NT = Rationalists

This one theory explains most of the things that have happened in my life, and also explains behavior patterns in your friends and acquaintances which, until MBTI, seemed totally inexplicable. It turns out that usually people's seemingly-inexplicable behavior is really just them being their own inborn personality type.

A few years after Myers and Briggs published MBTI, David Keirsey wrote his excellent book Please Understand Me. To quote from page one of that book:

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.

Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.

Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.

Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague. If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right -- for me.

To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness.

And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

This is why personality typology, and MBTI in particular, is so important. MBTI is the best and most useful tool in psychology today. It encourages people to see each other's differences and respect them and cherish them. It points out the foolishness of trying to force someone else to become a copy oneself. It explains many of the tensions and disagreements in this world, and gives useful tools for building teams instead of making enemies. It brings people together in a way that no other psychological theory has ever done. This is the legacy of MBTI.

5: Other Personality Type Theories

Several other personality typing systems have cropped up over the years, the Enneagram being one of them.