My Incredible, Shrinking F: Guest Post from an INTP

I am pleased to introduce Barbara Saunders to you. She reached out to me to explain how the MBTI Step II helped her feel more secure with her Feeling preference. I encouraged her to re-take the assessment so she would have a current copy of her report. Interestingly, she no longer reported out as an F. She was kind enough to share her story of MBTI type exploration and validation with us. Enjoy!

A self-awareness hobbyist, I discovered the MBTI when I was in college. The context was career exploration. Intrigued by the ideas in one of the popular books of the time, I followed up by reading Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing. I didn’t need no stinkin’ indicator, I believed, to diagnose myself as an ENFP. A “shy” one.

That E got a swift correction when I befriended a true, blue, shameless introvert. He set aside an entire day to go out into nature alone. His solution to bad acid trips was to “get away from all the people,” even if the only way to do so at the moment was to climb a tree! Having this role model gave me permission to accept that I might have trouble with small talk and parties because I just didn’t like them. So, INFP was it. This was confirmed officially by my career counselor, a qualified MBTI administrator.

Cut about a decade. I got a job writing for one of the many type- and temperament-related sites on the internet. It was then that the F began to chafe. I certainly did not see myself as the stereotypical T, the software engineer, mathematician, or scientist. My F, on paper, fit with my usual occupations like teacher, writer, and counselor. Still, I simply did not relate to the F or NF mindset.

For example, I am a huge biography buff, and even wrote one for publication. Someone once asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about some celebrity they admire. What tumbled out of my mouth: “Nah … Living people are like books not yet finished!”

My discomfort with the F led me eventually to Jung’s seminal Psychological Types, where I found an F I could live with. To paraphrase: people with dominant introverted F are concerned mostly with their values. The accent of life, the place their mind goes with every perception, he proposed, is, “Is this agreeable or disagreeable to me?” Being introverted, within this conception, is merely a side effect of the fact that looking outward interrupts this projects and requires thwarting, which drains. Being highly opinionated with strong convictions around values, I settled into my INFP identity.

On my next job, I became an accidental MBTI champion. The hiring manager, my direct supervisor, was struggling with the way that jobs were constructed in the startup: many of them consisted of tasks best handled by people with contradictory preferences. A renowned MBTI consultant came in and met with key employees. This is when I discovered one of the problems with my F.

The Step II report I read delineated type facets, presented as polarities – a new concept for me. Among those polarities: “Critical and Accepting” and “Questioning and Accommodating.” I guess the Socratic style education I received in prep school may have had some influence – I tested top of the scale on “Critical” and solidly “Questioning”! I embraced my seeds of T. Interestingly enough, my boss, an ENFP, had a similar profile in these facets.

The story doesn’t end there.
After many years of working that F, something had shifted. I had warning signs. As a personal trainer, I had loved making myself over into a health science autodidactic, conducting assessments, and the empirical process of finding how to get results for each client.

Though I cared a lot about my clients, I had gradually gotten burned out on “the people stuff.” I attributed this to my introversion, even though the balance of appointments and down time actually served my introversion well. From a distance, I realize that I had lost interest because the modeling part had stopped. I had figured it out – how to assess, how to build a program, how to apply pedagogical method, and how to sell. My true rewards had been getting to play all day with experimental models.

So, it should come as less of a surprise to anyone reading this than it did to me that since that time, I have taken several instruments, both popular and official, have yielded the preference INTP. This comes at the same time as I am making a career move away from nonprofit management into consulting on strategy, policy analysis, and technical issues for some of the same organizations.

That first Step II pointed me towards a deeper understanding of myself. Just as there is really nothing wrong with not liking parties, there is nothing uncaring about preferring to attend to the ideational rather than the social.

These kinds of “Ahas!” are the beauty of the MBTI beast.

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