re-hashing myers-briggs

a while ago i went through a personal and professional crisis (cringe. i hate using that word because it sounds so touchy-feely, but i gotta call as spade a spade) and decided to start searching for answers. i hated my job because it felt like i was a monkey punching keys and spending $9 million on random furniture while being closely watched by a big circus of control freaks. i loved my office and my colleagues and my former boss, but my new boss was showing definite signs of insanity and her boss would only encourage it since it drove performance. anyway. so i started doing things, researching, talking to people in other jobs, took the GMAT, whatever. i also took the MBTI (myers-briggs type indicator) to figure out what i might be happy doing. having never previously needed direction in life, it was really a strange place for me to be in to suddenly not have a grip on where i was going.

based on MBTI, i am an ISTP: introvert, sensing, thinking, perceiving. in my language, this basically means:

• Introvert: loner, driven by head-function vs. heart-function. tieger and barron-tieger put it this way: 'are energized by spending time alone. avoid being the center of attention. think, then act. think things through inside their heads. are more private, prefer to share personal information with a select few. listen more than talk. keep their enthusiasm to themselves. respond after taking time to think things through; enjoy a slower pace. prefer depth to breadth.'
• Sensor: trust fact vs. intuition, find value in the practical. more helpful citations from tieger & barron-tieger: 'tend to be specific and literal, give detailed descriptions, value realism and common sense.' on this spectrum, i am far less extreme and kind of sit in the middle, but i don't know how to splice that so i just went with sensor.
  
• Thinker: logic logic logic. apply logic instead of heart, frequently unable to appear compassionate because we're busy thinking of solutions or assessing the current problem. i tend to value finding an answer over empathizing with the affected person. sorry. apparently, 2/3 of males are thinkers and 2/3 of females are feelers. and saadiq questions why i think i'm a boy so much of the time. i am one!
  
• Judger: deadline-driven and responsible. i get to the airport so early that most times my flight hasn't even been posted at the gate. i am deathly afraid of missing deadlines. i focus more on finishing what i'm doing than wondering if the relevance of the task still applies. some friends call this ocd.
  

why am i sounding off about this and boring all 5 of you? there are two schools of thought in my head about this. one, i think it's crucial to first understand your own tendencies. you can then understand how you affect dynamics and sit around picking apart every aspect of every situation you find question with. (ok, just me.) some people think of me as EU (thanks, sherry) - emotionally unavailable - but i just think that i function in my head so much of the time that i forget to share that with people. and then i see/watch/listen to outgoing people and cannot believe the amount of information they let out into the open air, but appreciate their social generosity all the same. i find that small talk gives me tunnel vision, the phenomenon that sherry and i both share when in situations where we aren't the most comfortable. i find small talk inane and unnecessary, and yet if there wasn't small talk, we'd all be sitting around bashing each other will beer steins in an effort to get our thoughts across. so it is important. but to me it serves no documentable purpose, so i can't see the actual value, even if i admit that it has value.

the second school of thought is that knowing your personality tendencies tends to pre-determine your reactions. you type-cast yourself as the introvert, so you find it ok that you don't make more efforts when with new people, when actually tonight you may have been okay with donning your social butterfly hat and acting outside of your norm. stranger things have happened. while i do find it incredibly important to know thyself (like the oracle says), i think it's equally important that you don't limit thyself through knowledge. do what you feel like doing sometimes. it's ok.

at any rate, had a recent conversation where i had to explain why i get so quiet and then tired in situations where i have to meet and chat with new people. i find it emotionally draining... and what a dramatic thing to say. but having to think about being intelligent and appropriate and funny and nice while trying to maintain eye contact and pay attention to the people you do know... my god. it made me recall my days where i would spend hours thinking about my personality type and obsessing over what i could do with my weirdo self. it sounded so self-involved and strange, coming out of my mouth, trying to explain why i couldn't go on to further socialize. i hadn't heard myself justify my shortcomings with a personality breakdown in such a long time.

i am grateful now for the space to let that go. my super-anal excel spreadsheet-waving alternate ego has subsided a little bit, and i can appreciate the different and less predictable things in life. this time is teaching me that now.