Personality Discovery

One of the cool things I get to do as a wing girl is figure out people's personalities based on the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), an assessment tool stemming from Katharine Briggs' and Isabel Briggs Myers' studies on Carl Jung's psychological types. The Myers-Briggs Foundation endorses an online test at MBTIcomplete.com where you pay $59.95 for an assessment. It's a pretty good test except for one thing: it assumes that all extroverts talk a lot.

At the end of the test you can basically disagree with the test results. It said I was borderline introverted. So, I disagreed and said I was extroverted. And it was because the test had a lot of questions about being talkative!

Looking back, I realize one of the reasons why I don't talk so much for an extrovert is because when I was a kid, my entire family would tell me to be quiet all the time. I grew up in a household of introverts! Every single one of them, Mom, Dad, my two big brothers, but probably not my grandmother. Come to think of it, I wouldn't stop! I would just talk to myself, by myself. Well, eventually I stopped doing that.

By the time junior high school came around, I was a pretty quiet person, except for one thing: I was a huge flirt. In fact, I was voted most flirtateous in high school. And I liked picking fights with fat boys. When college came around, I bolted away from my small town upbringing and traveled 2 continents. It was the best release for my squashed down extroverted personality. Then I became a talker again. Except the talking was so full of debate that I would argue with people all the time.

I wasn't happy picking fights with people anymore, so I decided to become more Zen and learned to empty my head of extraneous thoughts. And I became quiet again. It's been about 15 years since learning that. Now, here I am talking through my fingers. It's more satisfying anyway, cause my energy isn't going towards defending an argument. Rather I get energy from writing in public places where I can observe people. I watch their movements, the way they talk to friends, work on their computers, listen to music, then I guess their personalities. Sometimes, I get into a conversation and ask them questions to see how close I was to figuring them out.

It's definitely a good exercise to study people and try to imagine how they live their lives. Then when I'm out with a guy as his wing, I impress people with my "psychic" ability. It's really not psychic at all. It's just understanding personality types.