BEYOND MYERS-BRIGGS: THE ART OF USING YOUR WHOLE BRAIN Lya Sorano
This article first appeared in the Jan/Feb 2001 issue of Competitive Edge® magazine.
"The workshop had barely run 10 minutes, when the hunched-over woman in the blue dress in the front row raised her hand. “Is Myers-Briggs ever wrong?” With graphs and drawings plastered all over the walls and a standing-room only crowd in attendance, the facilitator had encouraged questions, but this one came too soon, too early on. Except that . . . it was such a good question! Others in the audience had wondered about this also, even if they had never voiced their doubts. Myers-Briggs, after all, is the widely-used, undisputed vehicle for personality testing, isn’t it? Companies use it all the time, to find out if a new hire should become a financial analyst or join the marketing team. Women who hire coaches for personal growth and development – such a nineties thing! – are routinely given the test and offered advice and encouragement based upon its results. Is Myers-Briggs ever wrong? How could that be possible?“Yes, yes,” the facilitator’s eyes lit up, her engaging smile became a beam and she was obviously thrilled with the interlocutor’s question, “and let me tell you why!”Based upon the groundbreaking work of Dr. Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who first developed a theory of psychological types and identified eight elements that became the tools for understanding, guiding and helping people, both the mother-daughter team of Myers and Briggs (in the 1950s), and Katherine Benziger, Ph.D. (in the 1990s) designed instruments for personality assessment. The difference between the two instruments (Myers-Briggs’s MBTI and Benziger’s BTSA) is that the former is based on only the first five of Jung’s elements, while the latter makes use of all eight. Dr. Jung developed his theory in the 1930s and had absolutely no interest in a popular/commercial application. Myers-Briggs had the application interest, but stopped short of the more complicated – and interesting! – science behind Jung’s theory. Then, thirty years after the MBTI was introduced, Dr. Benziger, a neuropsychologist by training, took the whole thing and designed her BTSA, which is now available for personal assessment as well as a workplace testing tool, both online and in print.Once you have an understanding of your preference, you will be able to use the guidelines provided in Thriving in Mind to help you lessen the extent to which you falsify type - by leveraging your preference consciously and frequently each day, and by consciously managing how you handle all tasks that require skills not managed by your preference.“The person who gave me the test,” the woman in blue continued, “told me I was an extravert and should think about a career in sales, but I know I am an introvert and I don’t think selling is my strong point.” “Myers-Briggs works very well,” the workshop leader commented, “if the person being tested thinks true to his or her type. But if type is falsified, the outcome of the test is often wrong.” Jung, Myers-Briggs and Benziger work with the same types of thinking: intuitive, thinking, feeling and sensing (Jung’s element 1); they also use the two established directions of focusing energy (introversion and extraversion: element 2). They agree that everyone has a dominant (preferred, lead) mode of thinking (element 3) and that this mode combines (Jung’s 4th element) with the focused energy direction to form a person’s personality type: the introverted thinker and the extraverted thinker, the introverted feeler and the extraverted feeler, the introverted intuitive and the extraverted intuitive, the introverted sensor and the extraverted sensor. Element 5 of Jung’s theory is described as “Living True to Type” – the extraverted thinker acts as an extraverted thinker, the introverted intuitive acts as an introverted intuitive, etc. – and this is where Myers-Briggs leaves us. Katherine Benziger, however, continued with elements 6, 7 and 8 of Jung’s theory (e.g. “Falsifying Type”, “The Cost of Falsification” and “Links between Living True to Type and Wellness on the one hand and Falsifying Type and Illness on the other”) and offers the world her BTSA assessment tool.The woman in the front row was much relieved, but others in the audience now had their hands up: “What do you mean by falsified type?” “What makes us falsify type?” “How do we know if we falsify type?”Briefly, this is what the workshop leader conveyed to her audience:
If, during the day, day in and day out, you mostly use your non-dominant, non-preferred mode of thinking most of the time, your mode of thinking is falsified, not natural, not true to your innate thinking type.
Conditioning causes us to set aside our natural thinking type and adopt a false one. The US educational system is geared towards the adoption of a falsified thinking type and our workplaces perpetuate the process.
There is a simple test. If you lack energy and enthusiasm, if you feel tired or depressed, if you are prone to illnesses, even minor ones, if you experience boredom at work or lack of “centeredness” at home, chances are you are falsifying your natural thinking type. Hungry for far more than the 90-minute workshop was able to provide, the facilitator referred her audience to Dr. Benziger’s Web site (www.benziger.org) and her book “Thriving in Mind” (order information available on the Web site). The woman in the blue dress left the room with a smile on her face and noticeably straightened shoulders, her Myers-Briggs experience explained and well put behind her. Now she knew how to get beyond its limitations".
