Know Who You Are

On the surface, it would seem that in the course of ordinary maturation, individuals would come to know who they are. Unfortunately this is neither an automatic outcome of maturation nor an easy process. Knowing who you are entails many things including making conscious our preferences, our responsibilities and roles and the reasons that tie this all together. This can be a lifelong process.

Psychological type is just one thing to know. Here it is necessary to focus on preferences and not on roles and responsibilities. For example, an individual may want to become a father, sees that role as has having a particular type associated with it and therefore sees himself as having that type. This is not the same as that person having that psychological type.

In theory, psychological type is established without conscious control, i.e., we become “wired” so to speak without being able to control how this “wiring” comes out. Psychological type is believed to fully emerge by about our mid-twenties and to be stable from there on. However our perception of ourselves can radically change over time. Consider this case history.

• Jesse grew up in a family that was business and results oriented, i.e., a very traditional family with an ESTJ outlook. Jesse wanted to fit into this outlook and upon graduation from college took a job with a well established, large company, i.e., an ESTJ organization. Jesse wanted to fit in and prove himself at this company and worked hard to do so. When Jesse first took the MBTI, he reported as his preferences those that were consistent with the family and business and thus reported himself as an ESTJ.
• Some years later, after Jesse had undergone a great deal of personal reflection and acceptance, he discovered his psychological type actually was an INFJ.
• Jesse had initially reported as his preferences what he wanted them to be. He was unable to identify his actual preferences because his values and beliefs about what was “good” and “right” conflicted with those preferences.

Since it is our perception that is reported on the MBTI, our MBTI results can also change. Statistically about 25% of the people who take the MBTI experience some change over time. How then should we view the results of the MBTI as we try to know who we are? It can be helpful to take our current MBTI assessment as a hypothesis – and not as fact. Then it is time to test this hypothesis using our daily experiences. Does it fit? How well? When does it not fit? Why? What would I prefer? In the course of determining how well our MBTI fits our daily experience, and why, we have the opportunity to learn more about who we are and what our innate preferences are. However please take note that our preferences do not dictate or constrain our behavioral choices unless we are not conscious of them.