The 16 Personality Types/Enneagram: What's Yours?

[BellyBelly]

I have done a few personality type tests with my psychologist and was interested to know who knows theirs too. Is it spot on for you and/or your partner? How do you find it?

For the 16 Personality Types I'm an ESFP (The Performer)

In the Enneagram I am a Type 2 (The Helper)

There are free tests online to give you an approximate idea of what you are, if you don't know already.

All I can say is I find these veeeery accurate and the same for my partner too (ISTJ). Scarily accurate. I can see why we butt heads so often!

Personality typing is a tool with many uses. It's especially notable for it's helpfulness in the areas of growth and self-development. Learning and applying the theories of personality type can be a powerful and rewarding experience, if it is used as a tool for discovery, rather than as a method for putting people into boxes, or as an excuse for behavior.

The sixteen personality types which we use in our assessment are based on the well-known research of Carl Jung, Katharine C. Briggs, and Isabel Briggs Myers. Carl Jung first developed the theory that individuals each had a psychological type. He believed that there were two basic kinds of "functions" which humans used in their lives: how we take in information (how we "perceive" things), and how we make decisions. He believed that within these two categories, there were two opposite ways of functioning. We can perceive information via 1) our senses, or 2) our intuition. We can make decisions based on 1) objective logic, or 2) subjective feelings. Jung believed that we all use these four functions in our lives, but that each individual uses the different functions with a varying amount of success and frequency. He believed that we could identify an order of preference for these functions within individuals. The function which someone uses most frequently is their "dominant" function. The dominant function is supported by an auxiliary (2nd) function, tertiary (3rd) function, and inferior (4th) function. He asserted that individuals either "extraverted" or "introverted" their dominant function. He felt that the dominant function was so important, that it overshadowed all of the other functions in terms of defining personality type. Therefore, Jung defined eight personality types:

Extraverted Sensing (modern types: ESFP, ESTP)
Introverted Sensing (modern types: ISTJ, ISFJ)
Extraverted Intuition (modern types: ENFP, ENTP)
Introverted Intuition (modern types: INFJ, INTJ)
Extraverted Thinking (modern types: ESTJ, ENTJ)
Introverted Thinking (modern types: ISTP, INTP)
Extraverted Feeling (modern types: ESFJ, ENFJ)
Introverted Feeling (modern types: INFP, ISFP)

Katharine Briggs expounded upon Jung's work, quietly working in silence and developing his theories further. But it was Katharine's daughter Isabel who was really responsible for making the work on Personality Types visible. Isabel, using her mother's work and Jung's work, asserted the importance of the auxiliary function working with the dominant function in defining Personality Type. While incorporating the auxiliary function into the picture, it became apparent that there was another distinctive preference which hadn't been defined by Jung: Judging and Perceiving. The developed theory today is that every individual has a primary mode of operation within four categories:

our flow of energy
how we take in information
how we prefer to make decisions
the basic day-to-day lifestyle that we prefer

Within each of these categories, we "prefer" to be either:

Extraverted or Introverted
Sensing or iNtuitive
Thinking or Feeling
Judging or Perceiving