On the other hand, I also encounter people who just don't know much about MBTI. Why would it matter? How reliable can it possibly be? How can you ever try to claim that anyone's personality can be described in four little letters?
It's mostly for those folk that I am creating this post.
First of all... I don't think MBTI really does capture your personality. Just a teeny tiny part. To me, "personality" means a whole lot more, including your opinions, fears, hopes, dreams, interests, background, skills, sense of humor... the way you move, talk, dress, laugh... your handwriting, your expressions, how you organize your books, how you spend your money, how you feel about long car rides, & so much more. Whenever anyone tries to apply MBTI to any of that, whenever anyone tries to make broad generalizations about any personality type outside of the strict definitions of what the typing actually means, I proceed with extreme caution or ignore them completely. MBTI should never feel like a little tiny box that contains everything about who you are. You get just four simple letters, & each is just expressing one preference of how your brain works.
It's kind of like saying I'm a woman. You can't really just proclaim something like "being a woman means you're a good cook"-- women can be terrible at preparing food. You could say that "in many societal backgrounds, women are more likely than men to be better cooks, due to spending more time in the house cooking, while the men were out plowing" or whatever. A particular personality type may be more prone to something than another type, but unless it's exactly directly connected to the literal specific things it is actually describing, many grains of salt should be taken.
Let's be real here. MBTI can be a bit misleading. It's super easy to get confused about the terms it uses. What should be a truly simple tool becomes easy to misinterpret, & therefor dismiss.
You've got Introversion & Extroversion. These terms are getting more popular these days, & all sorts of memes & comics & things can be found to explain the definitions, but they're still widely misunderstood. Intuition/Sensing? Thinking/Feeling? Judging/Perceiving? I mean, we all do each of those things, right? Of course right. There's a clue for you right there that it's about where we each fall on a spectrum, not about little boxes to contain the entire definitions of ourselves. It's taken me much time reading many things from all sorts of sources to really start grasping what they really mean, & I admit I still don't know much about the "functions". But for me, it's not about all of the technical breakdown, & for my own purposes, I don't need much information beyond the basics. I don't need a prediction of how each type would react in any given circumstance, just an overview of what a type generally is like.
Above all, MBTI to me is about a broader understanding of how people are different from each other. That's really all I need it to be, & as simple as that may be, it is so important to me.
I spent much of my youth feeling like I was "wrong", & struggling to be "right". I want to be able to provide concrete examples of what I mean, but the feeling was so pervasive I'm having some trouble nailing down what I want to express...
One example might be how hard I've always struggled with having to figure something out on my own. I've been treated with disgust & scorn for asking how to do things.
I've shed many tears over how I like people but can't seem to stand to be around them for long. If I truly loved them, couldn't I spend all my time with them? How were others still lively & excitable when I was exhausted?
My idea of politeness & showing interest was always to not interrupt people, yet everyone else seemed to talk over each other all the time, & love it.
It seemed like everything that came natural to me was looked on as boring or pointless, & how other people thrived looked terrifying & stressful to me. (For a while, I thought it was because I wasn't "feminine" enough, but upon reflection I didn't really want to be feminine if it meant being like most of the other girls I knew, so that wasn't helpful.)
I was 22 or 23 when I first stumbled on a free online MBTI test. (I had actually taken one from a library book when I was 16; right after graduation I got like a dozen books from the library that were supposed to be helpful in determining what sort of career one might be best pursuing, & one of them used MBTI. But it didn't really resonate with me at that point.) I've long been a sucker for online personality test/quiz/things, it's a guilty pleasure. Want to tell me what 80s rock ballad best suits my life? I'm there. So anyway, it had a whole bunch of questions, each question was a scale, I was a newlywed killing time in our itty bitty apartment, clicking over a hundred little bubbles analyzing my own brain was a lot of fun. It said I fell into a category called ISTJ. The Inspector. It praised my attention to detail, my loyalty, my work ethic... it lamented how stressful it is for me to be spontaneous, & how I have such trouble connecting emotionally to anyone... It struck me as accurate, & it felt like for the first time in my life, it was okay to be who I was, with my inherent strengths & weaknesses. I don't mean to make it sound like The Most Pivotal Moment of My Life or anything, but it was the beginning of truly liking myself on a large scale, instead of judging myself by how well I could act like the person I felt like other people most wanted me to be. Maybe no one will ever say "Val, I really appreciate how exact you are", but I could learn to value it about myself. Turns out, I wasn't Worse at Everything than Everyone like I'd thought-- I just have really boring skills. Maybe that sounds silly. I'm not sure how to put it better. I believe that some types are better at things that are more evident, more appreciated in general, more fun, more interesting, more useful in dealing with people & therefor more likable. People who can make small talk, people who are expressive & sympathetic, people who will laugh at jokes instead of being confused because they took it too literally. All of the people are important & valuable.
Many factors, both MBTI stuff & other aspects of one's personality, are going to impact how you react to things (& people). Like when I've been demeaned for wanting step-by-step directions for something I'd never done before, it was because the person telling me to do it values different things than I do-- like Independence, Ingenuity, & Not Asking Inane Questions. If I'd been in those situations with someone who valued things like Precision, Getting It Right the First Time, & Oh So Much Knowledge, my asking for directions would have been seen as quite valuable indeed. It's just about perspective. I don't know how I ended up surrounded by so many people who value such different things than I do, but that's how I've come to see it, & it has saved my self-esteem & my relationships with many of these people. Now I can accept who I am, properly applying my strengths where they can be most useful, & tending carefully to my weaknesses. Instead of forcing myself to try to do what other people want, I can do what suits me. So sometimes, I can in fact in praised for what I'm doing right, instead of putting way too much effort into something someone else could do better without even trying. It's so much more efficient. & of course I am still trying to improve in areas like Expressing Appropriate Amounts of Emotion, Adapting to Change, Making Small Talk, etc! I'm just taking much better care of myself about it, not freaking out that Everyone Else Does It Better. I can love all people better than I could before, because they aren't Better or Worse than me, they just have different priorities & different skills. I'm learning that I don't have to be friends with everyone, or be friends the way that they do friendship-- if the way I express fondness & interest aren't the ways they value, that's okay! I can try my best, I can stretch myself, but if we never 'click' I'm not a failure. I'm finding people who do understand the ways I behave & value the same things about me that I value, which is so very fantastic. There will always be people out there who are good at the things I'm not, & there will always be a need for people like me.
I think that SO MANY of the problems people have with each other could be worked out better/easier if people would have more understanding just how different each person is, & how valuable the differences can be. That's what MBTI reminds me.
