THIS IS A family book. Whether your family is made up of blood relatives, close friends, or colleagues in the workplace, the ideas and concepts in this book can help you to understand yourself and your reactions in the process of living every day, and they can help you to understand and appreciate the reactions of those around you who, with differing gifts, seem to be marching to a different drummer.
If you have wondered about the diverse and often startlingly different ways that people important to you, or just people around you, seem to look at the world or react to situations, this book will interest you. If you have a problem understanding or communicating with someone you care about—a parent, a child, a co-worker, or a significant other—the ideas in this book just may be what you have been looking for.
The author, Isabel Briggs Myers, was my mother. After a twenty-year fight, she finally succumbed to cancer at the age of 82, just before publication of the first edition. Her goal was to help people to be happy and effective in whatever they chose to do, and the fierceness of this desire gave her the strength to keep going until her book was finished. It is a tribute to her insight that, since 1980, over 100,000 people have read Gifts Differing, with more copies sold each year than in the previous year.
Her book presents, in understandable language, the ideas about personality type of the famous Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, as they apply to normal everyday people with normal everyday problems. Her book has helped thousands of people recognize the different ways in which each of us act and react and make sense of the world in our relationships with others. Her gift has been in repudiating the old, but too commonly held, idea that we are each in various ways a deviation from some ideal “normal person.” She replaced it with the recognition that each of us is born with different gifts, with unique imprints of how we prefer to use our minds and values and feelings in the business of living everyday. Jung divided the business of living every day into two simple mental activities: taking in, or becoming aware of, new information (which he called perception); and deciding, or coming to some conclusion about that information (which he didn’t bother to name).
Jung wrote about his theory of type more than 70 years ago, but as a practicing psychologist, he generally saw patients with severe psychological problems, and he was primarily concerned with the unsuccessful or unbalanced development of type he found in people who were ineffective, unhappy, and seeking professional help. He was not particularly interested in the aspects of psychological type displayed by ordinary healthy people. In addition, he wrote in German for a largely specialized audience of psychologists. Even the English translation of his work Psychological Types makes heavy reading. It is not surprising, therefore, that his theory of personality type found scant enthusiasm among ordinary people interested in human personality.
Isabel Myers, on the other hand, while not trained as a psychologist, devoted the entire second half of her life to interpreting and adapting Jung’s theory to help ordinary, healthy, normal people understand that it is all right to be unique individuals, often quite unlike those around them, and that many, if not most, of the differences, problems, and misunderstandings they may have experienced with others can be explained in terms of the perfectly normal, but different, choices in the way people take in and process information.
The premise of this book is that each of us has a set of gifts, a set of mental tools that we have become comfortable using and thus reach for in the everyday business of living. Although we all have access to the same basic tools in our psychological toolbox, each of us is more comfortable with and thus prefers a particular tool (or set of tools) for a particular task. It is our unique set of these preferences that gives us our distinct personality and makes us appear similar or dissimilar to others.
A common problem that has often led to stress for many of us is our apparent inability, at times, to communicate about something that is very clear and personally very important to us to someone we care about in a way that that person agrees, or at least understands its importance to us. We may feel hurt and rejected by the lack of recognition of our concern or we may feel baffled by the failure of that person to appreciate the logic of our position. In Gifts Differing, Isabel Myers gives us recognizable explanations for these and many other normal, but different, uses of our personality tools and points the way to the constructive uses of human differences.
To help put this book in perspective, a little history of how it came to be written may be appropriate. Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs, had been interested in Jung’s theory for about 16 years when the Second World War took many men from the industrial workforce into the services and brought many women out of their normal activities to replace them. Since, for the majority of these women, the heavy industrial workplace was strange new territory, my mother and grandmother thought that a knowledge of one’s personality preferences in terms of Jungian type theory might be a valuable aid to identifying the kind of job for the war effort in which someone without previous relevant experience could be most comfortable and effective. They searched in vain for a test or some indicator of a person’s Jungian preferences and finally decided to create one of their own. The result was to become the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® personality inventory (Indicator or MBTI®). Since neither were psychologists or psychometricians, they had to start from scratch.
As long as they worked on their own to understand and correlate their observations, they had no problem, but when, in 1943, they produced the first set of questions destined to become the MBTI, they came face-to-face with a double-barreled opposition from the academic community. In the first place, neither was a psychologist, neither had an advanced degree or, for that matter, any formal training in psychology, statistics, or test construction. Second, the academic community (and even the Jungian scholars and analysts at that time) had little use for Jung’s theory of psychological type, and therefore even less use for a self-report questionnaire purporting to identify Jungian type created by two unknown women who were “obviously totally unqualified.” As it happened, however, Isabel Myers was not all that unqualified. True, she had no formal academic training in the required disciplines, but she had a first-class mind and had, for more than a year, apprenticed herself to someone who was a qualified expert in the techniques and tools she needed. That person was Edward N. Hay, at that time personnel manager of a large financial bank in Philadelphia, and from him she learned what she needed to know about test construction, scoring, validation, and statistics.
Undismayed by the lack of interest or acceptance by the psychological community, Isabel Myers concentrated on developing the Indicator, gathering data, refining questions, and applying the accepted tests for validity, reliability, repeatability, and statistical significance. Along the way, she was buoyed up by the enthusiasm and delight of the vast majority of people to whom she administered and explained the Indicator; she called it the “aha” reaction, an expression of delight that so often came with a person’s recognition of some aspect of their personality identified by the Indicator. One of her greatest pleasures in giving feedback after scoring a person’s Indicator was the occasional astonished response: What a relief to find out that it is all right to be me!
Fifty years later, a surprisingly large number of people have experienced, or at least have heard about, the MBTI (over two and one-half million people took it in 1994), and a number of Jungian concepts have entered our popular vocabulary. For example, extraversion is generally understood as deriving one’s energy from external activity, and introversion as deriving energy from internal activity. An illustration might be: would you rather go out socializing after work or relax alone? For many Extraverts, “hell at a party” is “not being able to get in.” Many introverts see it as “being there.”
Originally used primarily in one-on-one counseling, the Indicator has now been widely applied in team building, organization development, business management, education, training, and career counseling. It has been successfully translated into French and Spanish, and translations into almost a dozen other languages are in various stages of validation. Understanding one’s type has made a welcome change in people’s lives in a wide diversity of situations. Through the years since Gifts Differing was first published, there has been overwhelming evidence of its usefulness to individuals in almost every aspect of their work and personal lives. And the usefulness has been well documented.
I cherish a personal conviction that much of the nonphysical pain and stress in our world is the result of misunderstandings among generally well-intentioned people and is not occasioned by irreparable disagreements. If this is so, great gains in the quality of everyday life should be possible for each of us through a better understanding of ourselves and of how we gather our information, process it, come to conclusions or decisions, and communicate our thoughts and wishes to others. Greater cooperation and harmony should be possible if we can learn to understand and appreciate the ways in which others differ from ourselves and can find ways to communicate with others in a fashion they can understand and with which they can be comfortable.
Carl Jung wrote of archetypes—those symbols, myths, and concepts that appear to be inborn and shared by members of a civilization, transcending and not depending on words for communication and recognition. Different cultures may have different forms of their archetypes, but the concepts are universal. If personality type is such a concept, and if it is universal across cultures, religions, and environments, what a challenge lies before us! It could even be possible for the “aha” reaction, experienced upon recognizing something about oneself or the reason for a difference from someone else, to extend to an international family across political and economic borders, in order to bring understanding and respect and acceptance of the differences between people of different nations, races, cultures, and persuasions. Isabel Myers, shortly before she died, expressed as her fondest wish that long after she was gone, her work would go on helping people to recognize and enjoy their gifts. I think she would be pleased by the increased appreciation of her work fifteen years after her death.
Peter Briggs Myers
Washington, D.C.
March 1995