Myers Briggs Step III

Last week, I went to Sacramento for an introduction to the Step III assessment that is coming out later this year. The results of this assessment is supposed to evaluate how well you use your type functions! And the vision is to help individuals make their perceptions clearer, their judgments sounder, and their lives closer to the heart’s desire. But if anything, it will help bring about great discussions about personal development. Keep in mind that now someone won’t even have to learn the Myers Briggs lingo to understand the Step III results. This is contrary to Step I and Step II where you do need to have an understanding of Type.

It’s a common misconception that for the Myers Briggs, the numbers that you get as a result mean “how good you are” at that dimension. It actually means how confidence the test is in your scoring. However, this new assessment will provide color into your competency in your functions.

Here are just some gems that I noted from the session:

• You can be aware of things, but it takes time to integrate it into your life. When you read a self-help book, you might have heard of the concepts, but how well do you live by them?
• Good development means you are tolerant of other people but run your own affairs
• Poor development means you tell other people what they should do and neglect your own responsibilities
• Dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise … Thomas Jefferson
• Strong E’s and J’s are likely to get promoted for their ability to just make decisions. At times, they might make decisions with very little information! In time however, this will catch up to them when mistakes get costly.
• Child development can go wrong with over-indulging parents. They grow up with the wrong expectations, for example, that they will get what they want from life. That people will be able to figure out what you want from your tantrums or body language.
• If children are raised amid constant crises, they will grow up thinking that they don’t have the resources to match the world. Or, they will get so defensive that they will think that the best defense is the best offense … to become hyper-aggressive people.
• Overall, people need goals and work better with goals … idleness deteriorates humans.
• My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items, which I notice, shape my mind.
• Coaches will spend most of their time around appreciating a person’s skills and identifying what’s important … this is because it’s easy for people to take their skills and assets for granted.
• If a client reacts with an emotional “It’s wrong” attitude to an assessment, there’s likely something worth talking about here.
• Test to see if you need some personal development help …
  • Do you feel like you have sufficient resources to meet the demands of the world?
• Build confidence and self-motivation, while reducing strain in your life. These words are assessed in Step III.
• The Step III has been piloted with CEO’s and other high-powered individuals and the good news is that they found tremendous value in this assessment. It told them something new.

 

Being efficacious!

It fascinates me the subtle differences in the words efficacious, effective, and efficient. It was introduced to me in one of my Myers Briggs books.

According to Webster …
effective: producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect <an effective policy>
efficient: being or involving the immediate agent in producing an effect <the efficient action of heat in changing water to steam>
efficacious: having the power or capability to produce a desired effect <an efficacious remedy>

Additional meaning …
effective stresses the actual production of or the power to produce an effect … more focused on the fact that there was a good result rather than who or what was caused the good result.
efficient suggests an acting or a potential for action or use in such a way as to avoid loss or waste of energy in effecting, producing, or functioning … so something that saves time.
efficacious suggests that you possess of a special quality or virtue that gives effective power. This is how individuals ought to think about how they add value and be givers. That they possess something special and unique, something that only could have come from their unique, lifelong journey.

Yes, a cheesy picture from Google Images

People in this world are producing results and saving time constantly … but what are the results and time savings that the world gets from the efficacious you? What’s the contribution (big or small) that you could make efficaciously?

 

Care to join?

Just wanted to share a list of things I’m working on … please let me know if you wanna provide insight, learn more, or participate!

• Join the ~30 others who know the Myers Briggs lingo – The Myers Briggs provides you with a high-level framework to understand yourself and others. Helps you grasp direction into managing yourself, relationships, career, and decisions.
• Become more self-aware and start livin’ a more fulfilling life - With Fat Mike and Teo, we’re piloting peer coaching trios and have gone through about 6 weeks of pretty good self-reflection, open sharing of personal stories, and seeing life a bit differently. I’ll be starting 3 more groups with LeadersWiki team members and another with Lijen and Ben …
• Learn life lessons from Intuit leaders - With Tony, Angela, and Chris, we’re preparing a story for people early on in their careers … to be completed Jan 07. For ~6 months, we’ve gathered insights from 40 leaders at Intuit through 1 hour interviews. Originally, we thought we were going to gain insights into how to trek the career ladder faster, but instead, we walked away with more important life insights.

 

T vs F realization

On a random weekday, we went out for dinner with a few friends and had a Thinking vs Feeling realization. The learning at the end … lemme set the stage.

Short story short, Matt was having a tough week at the start-up since his work was giving him extra responsibilities in preparation for a demo for some large clients. After a “quick” dinner, he expected to be back home to do some work.

From my perspective, we were going to dinner to chill with some Berkeley friends who I haven’t connected with for a while and wanted, let them get to know Ben & Matt, and check out their pad as well.

So after dinner, we got into a minor argument about when to go home — immediately after just browsing their apt versus after 2 commercials of watching Desperate Housewife at their apt. We were arguing over which was only a 30 minute difference, so I reacted in a “this doesn’t make sense why we’re arguing about nothing” and he seemed to be reacting in a “don’t you understand I’m really busy” way. So I would say “T” stuff like, “I thought I set the right expectations, let me know in advanced next time if you have such a time crunch”. He would say “F” stuff like “but I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, you know it’s been crazy for me”. Inside, I wanted to say “then why did you come” and I’m sure that he wanted was thinking “selfish bastard”.

So this example triggered a realization for me that T’s tend to react until things make sense. I’m guessing that F’s tend to react until the other person can empathize with the situation first. So basically we weren’t listening to each other in the way that we wanted to be listened to. You gotta satisfy both, it just comes down to who’s going to go first.
So my area of improvement to connect better with F folks is to ask myself “does this person understand that I understand how he/she feels?” So when appropriate, empathizing first, making sense later.

 

Upgrading z Practice

Now if you sit through my 1.5 hour Myers Briggs course, you walk away with a FREE giveaway! I mean, I can’t even believe I’m giving this away for FREE. What a great bargain — you learn more about yourself & people AND you get a FREE book?? No friggin’ way.

This book isn’t publicly available — just through certified folks. Look how Amazon teases you to keep waiting and waiting for the book to become available. Look, it’s not going to be available because you gotta take the course!

The introductory book that has detailed information on all 16 types and teasers into type-based career interests, problem solving, and dealing with change. (Ronni, I could ship you one!)

 

Myers Briggs 1:1 Agenda

Somewhat of a dull post, but every time I do a myers briggs 1:1 sesh, I seem to keep recreating the agenda.

Agenda for 1 on 1 Myers Briggs self assessment:

1. What do you want out of our hour together?
2. <Take the online test without looking at the score just yet>
   • Guide the right mindset by saying … try to answer to the best of your ability — no right or wrong answers. Try answering the questions according to what YOU prefer, not what your parents prefer, not your friends prefer, not what you learned growing up, but what feels more comfortable you. So try not to pick choices that are things that were learned or things that are interesting for you to learn now. Choose things that seem to have always been pretty true for you … looking back also into college & childhood.
3. What is this assessment? What’s it do?
   • 16 types … high-level sorting of people
   • Finger print analogy
   • Left hand / right hand analogy
4. What’s the history behind this test?
   • Jung -> Myers -> most popular self-assessment in the world& therefore most widely misinterpreted
   • Commonly thought of as a 2D model (e.g. extroverts versus introverts). But when you study combinations of the personality dimensions, it becomes a 3D model of understanding people.
5. What are the benefits of taking it?
   • Understanding of a few basic, but important human psychological traits
   • Learning about your natural personality preferences and your blindspots
   • Learning a common language to have richer discussions about people
   • Leveraging your preferences to improve your relationships, career direction, and overall happiness
   • Insight into how you might progress in your lifelong development
6. Self-Assessment portion
   • We run through 4 dimensions of personality using a picture book and you self-assess your preference for each. You share stories along the way that come top of mind to you as we read several type descriptions
7. Validation — figuring out your best-fit type by comparing your self-assessment with your test results
8. Discuss what it means to have this type!
   • Reading your type profile & talking about it
9. Looping back to what you want out of this test
10. Sharing the other threads that we could explore next time
    • Advanced type dynamics … learning about your “approach” to life, potential developmental areas, and biggest blindspots
    • Implications on your relationships
    • Implications on your career direction
11. Next Steps
    • The next 2-3 weeks is all about “acceptance”. You’ll have thoughts around, wait, am I really an introvert? or am I an extorvert. This is a healthy debate that you will have with yourself.

 

Myers Briggs Me

I recently got training to administer and interpret the Myers Briggs self-assessment (aka MBTI)! It’s the most widely used (and therefore most misinterpreted) test in the world and it’s translated in over 20 languages so far. Compared to others — like the enneagram, strengthsfinder, or colors, I think the Myers Briggs is the most deep & valid, and I’m totally up for discussion around this.

Also it’s really fun just to learn more about yourself or valid what you know already. I’ve helped about 10 peeps so far and everyone’s seemed to have enjoyed it and found it helpful. For me, it’s been more than helpful … but I rely on it pretty heavily to better understand people using a framework that works.

So what’s this test do?

Overall, it helps you recognize your personality preferences that you were born with so that you can make better decisions for yourself moving forward. And as an added bonus, I think the most interesting insights have to do with helping you improve bf-gf relationships and picking a career that you’re happy in. The test is limited, however, to sorting you into one of the 16 types that best fits you. To get to the real, juicy meat of self-awareness takes some additional reading, discussions with me or others, and/or self-reflection.

One way to think about what you will be discovering is … imagine you’re a boat out in the ocean. To figure out where you’re going or what you’re going to do, it helps to address some questions:

1. What type of boat are you?
2. Where are you right now and what does the ocean look like around you?
3. What are your preferences?

This understanding ultimately benefits you — so that you can better navigate in the world we live in.

So what are the limitations of the test?

This test looks at just 4, big dimensions in life:

1. Where you get your energy from
2. How you take in information
3. How do you make decisions
4. How structured do you prefer the outer world to be

The basis of the test is to sort you into the two different buckets of each dimension — not tell you how “good” or developed you are in each. Think of these buckets like your left and right hand. You prefer one — the dominant hand. It feels more comfortable, natural, and you use it most of the time. The other hand complements the dominant, but it’s less developed, take concentration to use, and is less effective.

So some other dimensions that is beyond this test include: where do you get your motivation from? what’s most important to you in life? what are your values? what do you like doing? what are you good at?

So what’s all this based on?

It’s based on psychological principles developed by Carl Jung (a colleague of Freud) with some important tweaks by Isabel Myers to be more applicable for normal people. Jung’s principles are rooted in his study of psychopaths. Eh? So how could that be applicable to normal people? In general, psychopaths tend to have dominant, forceful expressions of personality … sometimes more than one. The expressions are a bit more isolated and observeable. Normal people also have dominant expressions too, but can draw upon complementary personalities to adapt better to situations. It’s like how shy people can be outgoing at times when they need to or if someone who’s usually really organized can let a few things slip without organization.

Jung & Myers

More to post tomorrow or something … feel free to email me if you’re interested in doing this.