Myers Briggs video interview with Dr Simon Raybould

What is the Myers Briggs personality type system? What theory is it based on and how is this useful in understanding the people we work and relate with in our lives? In this fascinating video interview with Dr Simon Raybould from Newcastle based training company Aware Plus, we hear some explanations and examples that will help to answer these questions.

Myers Briggs video interview with Dr Simon Raybould

Myers Briggs interview taster

Here are some excerpts from this interview:

Can you explain a bit about what Myers Briggs is?
It is based on the work of a guy called Carl Jung, was formalised by Myers and Briggs, hence the term Myers Briggs type indicator, but it goes back to the work of Carl Jung. I often introduce it to people kind of semi humorously by saying, if you imagine a conversation between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud (people have always heard of Freud) It's a conversation where Jung would say to Freud, "How do you know when to stop treating people?" Freud would say, "I stop treating them when they're better", Jung would then say, "How do you know when they are better?" Freud would say "they are better when they are normal", and Jung would say, "What's normal?". At which point Freud is kind of stuck. Jung at that point went on to define normal, and what he didn't do fortunately is say "That's normal and everyone else is a freak". What he said was that there is a tremendously wide range of normal. And within that wide range of normal Myers and Briggs then formalised this into 16 different categories or types or normal, based on 4 very simple binary divisions. Introvert vs Extravert, Sensing vs Intuiitive, Thinking vs Feeling and Judging vs Perceiving. Those labels I don't find desperately helpful because thinkers can feel and feelers can think, so its not a mutually exclusive category, but those are the four steps or binary switches that it's all based on. If you work those out 2x2x2 you get the 16 fold classification of personality types

Details

Published on Friday, 08 June 2012 13:08

Written by Richard