Try to imagine for a second that every person you meet today, the tram driver, a colleague, your father, lives inside a brain built completely differently. They recharge differently, they decide differently and different things annoy them. What you take to be “normal thinking” is something completely foreign to them.
That’s why we so often misunderstand each other. It isn’t ill will, we’re just talking to each other from heads that are built differently.
Just as you have an innate dominant hand, you have an innate setting of the mind. That’s why I call personality typology a translator for brains. Once you understand it, it’s like putting on 3D glasses: you start to see what really charges you and what drains you, why you decide the way you decide, and why the people around you react the way they react.
The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung noticed a hundred years ago that the human mind takes in information and makes decisions in several different ways. He described 8 cognitive functions and their combinations add up to 16 types, which you know today as four-letter codes (INFP, ESTJ…).
Most online tests stop at four letters. We’ll go deeper, down to the functions a type is made of. Two “similar” codes (INTP and INTJ, say) share three letters, but not a single function. They are completely different heads.
You use all eight, but four are in your natural kit and one of them leads. That’s the one we’ll be looking for.
1 · Answer as your natural self. Not as the role you play at work, not as the person you “should be”. A trick helps: how would you behave if nobody was watching? How did you behave as a child, before the world told you what was proper? For half a year I kept coming out as INTJ myself. The type I wanted to be, not the one I am. A mirror shows only what you put in front of it.
2 · Compare yourself with the average person, not with your ideal. If you’re the most imaginative person in every room, you are imaginative. Even if you compare yourself with Da Vinci and feel lazy.
3 · The middle is allowed. When both options fit or neither does, pick the middle circle. Just go easy on it, because the clearer you answer, the sharper the result.
4 · The options aren’t opposites. Often they are two different tastes, not a right and a wrong answer. Pick the one that comes more naturally to you, not the one that sounds better.
P. S. Tiredness, a hard patch or trauma can colour the result. You then answer as your “surviving self”, not as your natural one. If nothing fits, come back to the test another time and take the top three types as a shortlist, not as a verdict.
Types ranked by how well they match your answers. Take the score as a comparison between types, not as a grade. Read the top three and get to know yourself.
The test showed you the setting. What that means for your decisions, your relationships and your work, that’s a longer conversation, and that’s exactly what I do with people in sessions. If you’d like to talk about your result, the first 20 minutes are free and commit you to nothing.
The test is based on C. G. Jung’s cognitive functions and the model of 16 types. It isn’t the official MBTI® (a trademark of The Myers-Briggs Company); the questions, the algorithm and all the descriptions are my own, written after years of working with typology with clients. No type is better than another and no test knows you better than you do. Take it as a map and a mirror, not as a box you have to fit into.