This is an extract from a chapter in ‘Developing the Allied Health Professional’, edited by Robert Jones and Fiona Jenkins (Radcliffe Publishing, 2006).

This chapter is about the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a personality or ‘psychometric’ questionnaire widely used in business, in healthcare, and in personal development. The chapter sets out to explain what the MBTI is, how it can be useful to you, and how to learn more about it.

As it happens, both writers are MBTI enthusiasts and use it both inside and outside work. However, we are not setting out to seek converts. Our hope is that you will read this chapter ‘with an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out’ (Richard Dawkins). By all means be sceptical: you need to find out whether this is a method and an approach that will work for you and we welcome a readiness to challenge and question. But please, if your mind is closed already, read no further. We don’t expect to convince you on the basis of one article!

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the Myers Briggs Type Indicator  (MBTI) to people involved in healthcare and to give them an idea of how it can help them:

- to understand themselves better
- to value themselves and others more
- to get the best from themselves and others
- to become more effective in their working relationships

Five scenarios
How might you know you’re achieving these objectives? If the MBTI is the answer, what is the question? Here are five scenarios. If any of them fit – read on.

1. You have reached a decision point in your career. You have to choose between continuing in a specialist role, or becoming a generalist. The financial and promotion aspects point clearly in one direction – but your instincts are set
   in the other. How could you get a better understanding of your reservations in this matter?
2. You work closely with a colleague. At first you really liked their quiet, thoughtful, undemonstrative style. But now it is beginning to drive you mad. The more you push for responses from them, the less you get. What can you do?
3. You are a GP. One of your recent consultations involved a very rare complaint – you have never seen one outside a textbook. You successfully identified the problem and were successful in insisting that the patient take appropriate
   action. Now, to your dismay, you hear that the patient has lodged a complaint against you! What has gone wrong?
4. You work as part of a practice team. The team has agreed its targets and objectives at the start of the year and set them out clearly in a schedule – but you seem to be the only one of your colleagues who is attending to them. In previous years your colleagues have ‘got there’ fine in the end, but the uncertainty, and their lack of concern, are driving you crazy. How can you and they come to some kind of agreed style?
5. Mostly you handle work pressures pretty well – but sometimes you find yourself responding in a way that seems completely out of character. How can you prevent this happening again? And is there a way you and your colleagues can see it coming next time, and either guard against it, or minimise its impact?

Background to the Indicator
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is a personality test. Its underlying principles derive from the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961), the brilliant Swiss psychologist and philosopher who coined, among other things, the terms ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’. Jung was for a number of years a close associate of Sigmund Freud, but Freud’s insistence on the need for a close adherence to his beliefs and assumptions led to a breakdown of the relationship in 1911-12. This was a great shock to Jung, and he spent much of the war years – Switzerland of course being neutral – in trying to work out how two
people could differ fundamentally, and yet still ‘both be right’.

The result of that was Psychological Types. Three of the four dimensions of the Indicator were set out in that book. It was translated into English in 1923 and read by an American woman with a strong interest in character and personality – Katharine Briggs – and her daughter Isabel Myers. When America entered the Second World War in 1942, Isabel and
Katharine turned to Jung’s work for two reasons: first, to find an instrument that would help people find their niche in the turmoil of conscription and war work; and secondly, from a more idealistic drive closely related to Jung’s – to find a way to understand and respect others, or in a phrase that became a beacon for Isabel, to ‘value difference’.

The resulting questionnaire went through thirty years of research before becoming available to the general public in 1975 ...