🥂 Here’s To Personality Tests That Tell You Stuff You Already Know

I always love an opportunity to dig out my B.A. in Psychology (not literally—I’m not actually sure which basement box it’s buried in) and yammer at the masses about psychology things they may or may not have ever heard of. Today, I’m discussing the Myers-Briggs test, which I took for the first time in about 10 years yesterday and relearned a bunch of stuff I already know about myself.

And yet, still learned something new.

But first, psychology! The test is actually based on the work of three psychologists: Carl Jung, Isabel Myers, and Katharine Briggs. As you can see, it is named after the second two (a mother-daughter team) who actually based their work on the research Jung presented in his book Psychological Types. The test measures four personality dimensions and provides a personality “type” based on your answers to a list of questions.

(Okay, I’ll stop yammering now, but if you want to learn more, you can read about it here.)

Once you complete the test, you get a four-letter code that stands for your results in each of the four personality dimensions. Unless you take it from the 16Personalities site (which I did). Then, you have the nifty option of getting an optional fifth letter (which I also did). Leave it to me. 🤦‍♀️

Anyway, so I took the test and got INFJ-T, which told me I’m an introverted, imaginative, sensitive person who tends toward perfectionism and is sensitive to stress.

😲 Thank you, Sherlock.

These are all things I already knew. And yet, sitting with them overnight has brought me to some conclusions I did not have yesterday.

First, strangely, I feel more comfortable in who I am today. As if seeing these letters on a screen is somehow more believable than what goes on in my head. Or, really, more like I can look at what goes on in my head and think “yup, that’s me.”

Second, the 16Personalities results came with a suggested career section, which said I seek meaningful work where I can stretch my creative muscles.

Again, “duh,” but I suddenly understand why certain jobs have never held any interest for me. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around what felt like some major dissonance between “I know how to write” and “but it would have to be a literal crisis for me to consider certain types of writing as a job.” This is also why I struggle so much with social media and marketing. It’s not that I don’t know how to do the stuff. It’s that “writing authentically to sell yourself” feels dishonest. Perhaps more dishonest than advertising. At least with an ad, I know what I’m getting. Someone’s trying to sell me something. But disguising sales as “your authentic self” doesn’t work when my “authentic” self really doesn’t want to sell something.

I realize how odd this sounds coming from what’s essentially a personal blog on a business site, but it’s true. I offer paid services because I have the educational background to do it, and I’m good at what I do. I understand narrative, I can spot discrepancies a mile away, and I have an innate sense for when something in a story just isn’t working, plus the know-how to dig into the manuscript to figure out what it is and offer suggestions for how to make it work. If I didn’t have to eat or pay bills, I’d do this stuff purely for fun. Rather unfortunately, buying food and paying bills are real things, and so paid services it is, at least for now.

But, hey, if I can buy the food and pay the bills doing something I love while also helping writers achieve their dreams, I’ll take it.

So, if you need me, me and my INFJ-T will be here introvertedly imagining stuff to create and stressing out over whether or not those creations are perfect. (Spoiler: They probably aren’t. But that’s what revisions are for.)

👋 Fair travels,

Mary

P.S. A big thanks to DarkoStojanovic from Pixabay for the image.

P.P.S. If you also want to take tests and then say “duh” when the results come up, here’s the original Myers-Briggs test and the 16Personalities version.