[NF] Soooo... what got YOU interested in personality types?

[alcea rosea]

I had crisis and I didn't feel I knew myself. So, I did some online tests, got interested and so on....

 

[CuriousFeeling]

Started off taking a couple MBTI tests on SimilarMinds.com, became interested in knowing what the results meant, and then started applying MBTI personality theory to better understand others around me, as well as understanding myself better.

 

[chickpea]

i've always been interested in systems that categorize people, whether it was dumb little personality quizzes in teen girl magazines, astrology, whatever. i think i found the test for the first time just dicking around on the internet, pretty sure it was on similarminds. i forgot about it for a while, then we took it in 11th grade psychology class. i got enfp and i remember that a really large portion of the class got enfp too. i read a decent amount about it, lost interest, rediscovered it and realized i'm definitely not an extrovert.

i took enneagram tests a few years ago and got 7w8. but sx/sp has been consistent.

 

[Betty Blue]

Yeah... so I don't mean to sound snotty but YES, I am in the gifted program. We took it for a project. Actually, I was the only ENFP. Anyway, yeah, your turn.

Some freakzoid of a nihilist on myspace years back asked me to take a test...explained some basics...took a few more years for the snowball to start rolling though.

 

[Savage Idealist]

Took the test in my 11th grade 'Home and Society Class' (basically a course that taught about politics, taxes, jobs, and all that other shit), and after that I sorta became obsessed with it, although I can't really explain why. I mean, on the intellectual scale, I don't even see typology as being high in value, but I just find it fun for it's own sake, as if it were a mindless sensory pleasure.

 

[prplchknz]

took a test senior year of highschool got intp, stumbled a test a year or 2 later took another test got intp again thought i was intp turns out i'm not.

 

[Reverie]

I was recommended the test roughly at the same time by an ENTJ lawyer friend and a an ENFJ psychologist friend of mine. They wanted to help me find suitable careers that would be more secure financially than my more artistic endeavors. I read a description and was amazed that some parts of me I considered unusual were actually common to a specific group of people. Obviously there are numerous differences but that there are similarities was a real tickler to me. ;D

 

[DisneyFanGirl]

I was at a career seminar and we had to take the test so we would know what kinds of careers would be best for us. I actually tested INFP. I really liked being part of the NF group, it made me feel special.

 

[animenagai]

I saw a test online, I can't remember if it was on fb or just on another forum. I got hooked after I read my results (which were ENFP of course). I started asking all my friends to take it and showed it to my family. Turns out my dad actually took the test already on some business training thing (he thinks he's an INTP, but he's really an INTJ). Yeeeeep.

 

[CrystalViolet]

I took the test as part of a church thang back when I was 22-23. I was still trying to be a good Christian then. I wrestled significantly with the fact I thought very differently to the rest of my peers. I struggled with personal identity ( a fair bit of that struggle has a lot to do with my relationship with my mother). It set me on a path to independence and self discovery, as cliched as that sounds. It made me feel less lonely.

 

[Winds of Thor]

One day my father told me a friend of my parents from church would like to talk with me..and he had taken an interest in MBTI. So I agreed and spoke with him and during the conversation he asked me lots of questions and made an effort to type me from my answers. Later I took the humanmetrics.com test and started to learn more about it out of a thirst for knowledge.

 

[Ginkgo]

I didn't know what I was about or what I wanted because I was stretched so thin.

 

[Within]

I've been interested in myself for as long as I can remember. MBTI came along somewhere on the plotted course of exploration. It rewarded me with new lanes of thinking about myself and everyone around me. Even though it hasn't changed the fact that I still believe that everyone else is a figment of my mind, I'm on a course of interception now.

 

[figsfiggyfigs]

A boy asked me to take a test. Curious, I searched for more, found typoC, and fell deep into the black hole that is typology.

 

[garbage]

When my dad took it in his leadership course, he tested ENTJ, like everybody in the world does. He showed me his results and I was mildly intrigued, then I shelved it for a few years.

I came back into it when I reevaluated myself and I got deeply interested in personal growth, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human behavior modeling, sociology, etc.--not to mention actually reaching people in the real world. I built a career on all of that, and typology has influenced (though not dictated) my work.

After slogging through books, discussions, articles, and lectures on JCF, I went back to regarding the 'official' MBTI test and framework as a 'good enough' categorization scheme and have used it ever since.

 

[Coriolis]

I took MBTI at work years ago. All I took away from that experience was "INTJ". Took it again more recently. This time we got a decent debrief, with references, and I was just intrigued, especially when I found out what was behind those letters, and how close a fit it was to my whole mindset and way of operating. The more I read, the more it explained about why people did certain things, why I got along easily with some and hardly at all with others, etc. It's not the only tool in the box, but it has helped me learn.

 

[Eric B]

One day almost eight years ago, my wife hands me this questionnaire, as part of this Christian psychological service she was getting a license in. I remember her rushing me through it, telling me to put down the first thing that comes to mine (choices 1-6, similar to Nardi's Keys 2 Cognition, from lowest to highest in identifying with the trait the question is asking you about) and not think about it too much. (I still have the questionnaire, The Arno Profile System Response Form; really a specially designated FIRO-B, and it was dated 10-28-04).
So then the results came back, and I had just gotten home from work, and was eating some chicken cutlets she just sauteed, and she explained to me temperament, and this new temperament, called Supine that I fell into. (I had never even heard the word before; it meant "lying on the back with the hands outstretched", and I had run across the words "Sanguine" and "Melancholy" occasionally, but didn't know what they meant. Sanguine reminded me of sangria —and they are directly related; and "melancholy" I could tell was an adjective for an emotional state, but I thought it meant happy, because it rhymed with "jolly", the way it was pronounced!).
I was also this other temperament, Choleric (also never heard of), which explained my stubbornness, and not becoming too much of a passive doormat in life.

Our best friend was Melancholy (mostly Compulsive), and this explained why she was so quiet and not usually wanting to be bothered with people. My wife thought for sure I was Melancholy, because I look like it on the surface. But that's how the new temperament is, and perhaps why it went unrecognized for so long.

OK, whatever.
It was when she began testing my family (also Melancholy), and other close friends that it began explaining the dynamics of my relationships.
I also began seeing the symmetrical matrix patterns, that got me really hooked into it. I remember my father explaining introversion and extroversion once, in my teens or so. (Stuff like this was found nowhere near the schools I went to, including college). Among the extroverts, I also noticed some were more "serious", and some more "light and airy".
So this temperament system explained all of this. It also divided personality into the three areas, social (Inclusion), leadership (Control) and deep personal relationships (Affection), in which temperament was divided.

So over the next couple of years I got really active into it, contributing information to the Wikipedia article on temperament, trying to get my wife to test other friends, or at least trying to figure out what everyone was.

In '06, a friend approaches us with the Keirsey Sorter II online, and we take it, both getting NF at first, and then when paying, got the full code, ENFJ. It sounded a bit more like her, but not me at all. Though J/P was divided 50/50.

I had read of MBTI and the four dichotomies before (likely before I even got into temperament to begin with), but with four dimensions, it was so complicated, and I just passed it by and kept going. But now, I really wanted to know how it fit with the system I was into. (I didn't realize Keirsey and MBTI were two different things at that point).

The 16 types did look like some sort of temperament combos, with E/I as pretty much the same "social" dimension as it was in APS temperament. T/F and J/P looked like the other dimension, of "responsiveness", but I could not for the life of me figure how it fit.
All I could figure, was that ExFP looked Sanguine (ESFJ also), ExTJ was Choleric, ExTP's both looked like mixtures of both Sanguine and Choleric, IxTJ was Melancholy and IxFx looked Supine. I couldn't figure out what the IxTP's were. S/N was totally foreign to me (wondered what the difference between those types differing only in that dimension were), as was Keirsey's Cooperative/Pragmatic.
Also, he said the "Artisan" was the Sanguine (In APS, "artistry" is associated with the Melancholy, but I didn't realize "artisan" had a somewhat different meaning), and that the Idealist was Choleric. (Idealist seemed almost the opposite).

This forum wasn't here yet, INTPc was, but I didn't know about it yet, so I ended up on a Yahoo list on Keirsey temperament. I hadn't identified a type for myself yet. (though I knew some form of NP was most likely), but I did learn more about the temperaments (including Keirsey's justification for making NF Choleric and NT Phlegmatic), as well as the Interaction Styles (And other parts of Beren's theory, such as the structure/motive cross-factor for the Keirsey groups), which were the main key for my correlation. I was also greatly aided by this site: http://www.rogerbissell.com/achillestendencies (and he was also a member of that list, though it seemed all of the Thinkers like him, Ben Kovitz, etc. had basically stopped regularly posting there).

2-11-07, my corellation was complete; Keirsey temperaments were APS "Control" (With NF as Supine or Phlegmatic, and NT as the true Choleric), and Interaction Styles were "Inclusion"; and it suggested INTP for me. When I began reading its profiles in this light, I now recognized its tendencies as fitting me.

A little over a year later, I finally join here, especially after tangling on that Yahoo list with this unofficial "expert" who didn't like people discussing their ideas without proper credential, or whatever. Since that conflict involved the John Beebe archetype model, which made use of all eight function-attitudes and not just dominant to inferior, and manipulated in a way to make me ENFP (another type I had seen some possible identification with, but was too "Sanguine"), I then set out to learn that system.
I had by that point learned how the dominant and auxiliary shape the "blended temperament" behavior I had identified in the types, and I was just beginning to eye how the tertiary affects it. (Like if "TJ is the most directive and FP is the most friendly" as the achilles site says, then what does it mean for the FP's to have this "directive" Te in third place right after their aux. Fi? This I would figure out much later).

So I developed my understanding of that as I went on, and here I am today!
(Sorry, so long!)

 

[Xenon]

^Hehe. Wow, so detailed. I don't remember nearly as much detail.

I don't even freaking remember when I first heard of MBTI/Jungian typing. I know I was a personality test junkie when I was a teenager (the internet was first starting to catch on when I was 13 or so, and this was one of the things online I first got really into) and I took the test a few times at some point during my teen years. The usual four-dichotomy, yes or no tests. I kept getting INTJ or INFJ - there were pieces of each profile that sort of fit if I squinted but they didn't resonate enough to impress me, so I sort of forgot about it. Then when I was in my twenties - in 2009, I took some MBTI tests from career counsellors. One was another online true-or-false one that typed me as ISTJ; another was the official test that returned the result of INTP. For some reason I started reading more in-depth about what the letters actually meant and what sort of factors can lead someone to test differently than they actually are, and the more I read, the more I thought that the INTP descriptions and the idea that I was Ti-dominant fit best. I even started reading about the role of the tertiary (which I was pretty heavy on, probably more so then), which seemed to explain why I took on SJ-ish characteristics at times. So everything seemed to click more, so I got increasingly interested and ended up joining this forum in 2009, tentatively typing myself as INTP. The more I've learned from this forum, the more certain I've become of my type.

 

[NPcomplete]

I took a test in a seminar in undergrad and was fascinated by the results. Certain things started making even more sense and, as is usually the case, my curiosity grew exponentially and couldn't be contained.

And then I got sucked into this vortex of madness.

 

[Mole]

The Day of the Introverts

From an early age I have been an introvert in an extrovert society. My parents tried to turn me into an extrovert by buying me the bible of extroverts, "How to Make Friends and Influence People", by Dale Carnegie.

However I found a book addressed to introverts called, "Relief Without Drugs", by Ainslie Mears.

And today introverts are coming into their own through the internet.

We see this everywhere, from Ted Talks to billionaire introverts, to the interest in Eastern religions.

And indeed MBTI has provides some relief for introverts from an aggressive extrovert society.

And it is the day of the introverts.