How To Start A Deeper Conversation With Each Myers-Briggs® Personality Type

31 March, 202030 March, 2020Marissa

This pandemic might have us stuck at home and/or keeping our distance from other people. But that doesn’t mean we have to go without conversation. We humans are social creatures, and even the introverts need other people sometimes. And so we head online to talk with people on social media, or pull out our phones and call a friend, or join one of the Zoom hang-outs that people are organizing to stay in touch. If we’re still leaving our homes, we might have the chance to talk with customers and co-workers in-person as well.

But what do you talk about?

Assuming you want to move beyond the weather and other small-talk, then you’ll need to find a topic that the other person is interested in as well. When trying to draw others into conversation, it can help to know what things different personality types like to talk about.

I recently published two posts about how to tell which Myers-Briggs® type you’re having a conversation with: How Do You Know If You’re Talking with a Feeling or a Thinking Type? and How Do You Know If You’re Talking with an Intuitive or a Sensing Type? Figuring out which personality type someone has is going to involve talking with them quite a bit, so if that’s part of your goal then you’ll already be having a conversation with. Once you know someone’s type, or have a good guess which type they might be, then knowing how to start a deeper conversation with each personality type can help you move past small-talk to connecting on a more meaningful level. Read more →

How Do You Know If You’re Talking with an Intuitive or a Sensing Type?

25 February, 202024 February, 2020Marissa

Once you find out about your own Myers-Briggs® personality type, it’s usually just a matter of time before you start to wonder what other people’s types are. You can ask them, of course. It’s actually not all that hard to work the question into a conversation.

“What are your hobbies?”

“Oh, I like x, y, z, and Myers-Briggs types. Have you ever taken one of those personality tests?”

Pretty simple. They might not remember their result, though, or might not have taken the test yet, in which case you can pull out your phone and direct them to Personality Hacker for what I think is the best free test on the internet. At that point it could start getting weird, though, so you might need to drop the subject if they’re not interested.

There are also ways to guess someone’s type from having a conversation with them. It’s not always possible (I’m still not 100% sure what my own mother’s type is), but in many cases you can get a pretty good idea of at least a few aspects of their personality from a conversation or two. In today’s post, we’re going to look at how to tell if you’re talking with an intuitive or a sensing type.

Before we begin …

Quick word of advice: if your primary goal in a conversation is to guess someone’s type there’s a good chance you won’t actually get to know the person. Myers-Briggs® types simply describe how our minds work and there is a huge amount of room for individual variation within a type. If you want to get to know someone, you need to listen to them and ask them about themselves. Figuring out what their type is should be a secondary goal after getting to know who they are. Read more →

Personality Type Myth-Busting: Is It True That Only Intuitive Can See The Big Picture?

6 January, 20205 January, 2020Marissa

One of the ways that we often talk about the difference between Sensing and Intuitive types in the Myers-Briggs®system is by saying that Intuitives are big-picture thinkers who recognize patterns and think abstractly, while Sensors are detail-oriented thinkers who rely on sensory information and think concretely. Those descriptions are, broadly speaking, true. But it’s also important to note that this does not mean Intuitives always ignore details or that Sensors are incapable of seeing the big picture.

Your Myers-Briggs® personality type describes your preferred mental processes. If you’re an Intuitive type, that means you prefer to take in new information and perceive the world using an Intuitive mental function. Sensing types prefer to use a Sensing function when they’re learning and conceptualizing the world. Intuitives also have access to Sensing and Sensors can also use Intuition, just not as comfortably. (If you’re not familiar with Myers-Briggs® functions or want a quick refresher, click here.)

As with most of my myth-busting posts, this article is basically about not judging people based on stereotypes. Preferring a certain function doesn’t mean you use it exclusively. Having skills in one area doesn’t make you incompetent in others. Personality types describe how our minds work — they don’t limit what we’re capable of. Read more →

Intuitives Abroad

24 October, 201924 October, 2019Marissa

I’ve safely returned from my trip to France, though not without a few complications. Flying with a nasty headcold scores a 0 out of 10 and I would not recommend it. Thankfully my brother and sister were healthy and navigated the airports for me so I could just follow them around in a congestion-induced stupor and focus on breathing.

That was only a shadow over the last couple days of trip, though. Most of the experience was fantastic. Before this, I’d never been any farther outside the United States than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Then all the sudden I’m getting on a plane in Detroit, waking up the next morning in Paris, and walking down streets older than the country I live in. We had one day in Paris, then flew to Nice and took a bus to Saint-Raphaël. We were there on the Mediterranean coast for about a week, during which we also visited Saint Paul de Vance (pictured in the featured image for this post), Monaco, and Cannes.

Visiting Paris with Mark Twain

I took this trip with my siblings, so our little group consisted of an INFJ, INTJ, and ENFJ (hence the title of this post, which I’ve been planing on using for a while now and am still endlessly pleased with). I started reading Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad while on the trip, mostly because I wanted to nod to it in a blog post title once we got home. I love the books by Twain that I’ve read, but even though this was the one that sold best during his lifetime I hadn’t read it before.

It’s interesting to read Twain’s record of his visit to Paris in 1867 with our own visit 152 years later. Our experience with French food was similar, with unfamiliar dishes accompanied by “wine with every course, of course, being in France.” Like Twain, on visiting Notre Dame “we recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment” even with the recent fire damage making it impossible for us to go inside. We also visited the Louvre like Twain and his companions, though we seem to have been more impressed by “its miles of paintings by the old maters” than he was. Read more →

I Have Become All Things To All People: ENFJ Christians

28 August, 201930 April, 2020Marissa

Today’s post about ENFJ Christians is the sixth in a series talking with Christians of different personality types. I started this series because discussing faith with with different personality types revealed that they don’t all feel equally valued and understood in Christian churches. This is particularly true, in my experience, for Intuitive types (which make up about 30% of the population as a whole). If Christianity is a faith meant for all people (and I believe it is), then why aren’t we doing a better job of connecting with all personality types?

Our walks with God don’t all look the same. We’re influenced by our backgrounds, variations in beliefs, and individual personalities. And even though the goal is for us all to become “like God,” that doesn’t mean we become indistinguishable from each other. God created great variety in people and I believe He did that for a reason. So let’s spend today’s post hearing from and talking about the unique perspectives of ENFJ Christians.

Identifying With Bible Characters

Three of the six ENFJs I talked with for this post identified David as a Bible character they relate to, at least in part. They identify with his heart, his struggles, his expressive worship, and his depth of feeling. One ENFJ named Nathan qualified this choice by saying, “I relate to the fact that David gets incredibly emotional about relational issues in his life, but not so much his impulsive daring.”

Other characters ENFJs mentioned relating to include the Apostle Paul, who Heather described as “a man of great conviction, and grace and grit” with the ability to adapt his leadership style to meet others’ needs (e.g. “I have become all things to all men, that I might save some,” 1 Cor. 9:22). Gwyneth chose Jesus as the most relatable Bible person for her because “His peaceful ways were misunderstood as rebellious” and “He had empathy for every person.” Nathan mentioned, “Daniel in that he’s kind of an academic/thinker type who is trying to find his way in relation to the society around him.” Kait identified her favorite book of the Bible as Ecclesiastes and said the stories of “Ruth and Joseph mean a lot to me, and Peter/Thomas are the disciples I feel I can understand where they are coming from.” Read more →

What Advantage Is There To Using Sensing Or Intuition In Myers-Briggs® Theory?

13 May, 201910 May, 2019Marissa

One of the hardest personality dynamics to navigate is Sensing/Intuition. Part of this is due to the fact that Intuitive only make up about 25-30% of the population. That can lead to Intuitives feeling misunderstood and marginalized. On top of that, because our Sensing/Intuitive preference influences so much of how we conceptualize reality, someone who doesn’t share our S/N preference seems even less “like us” than those who don’t match on the E/I, T/F, or J/P preferences.

An unfortunate side-effect of the challenges involved in navigating Sensing/Intuitive relationships is that there’s now a bias against Sensing types in many parts of the personality type community. The myth that Intuitives are intellectually superior to Sensors and that Sensors will never understand them is now widespread among both Sensors and Intuitives.

However, it’s simply not the case that Intuition is better than Sensing. Both preferences grant advantages in certain areas and disadvantages in others. Myers-Briggs® theory is designed to explain how our minds work. It doesn’t say one way of processing is better than another or invite us to make that judgement. So with that being the case, lets take a closer look at the advantages of using Sensing or Intuition. Read more →