Strategic Serendipity

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is based on the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung. Jung observed that people have inborn preferences for gathering information and making decisions and that these preferences guide an individual’s behavior. The mother/daughter team of Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers expanded on Jung’s theories and created an assessment to make the combined work accessible to all individuals. Today, the assessment is used by most Fortune 100 companies and over two million people worldwide, annually. The assessment identifies an individual’s inborn preferences on four dichotomous scales: where you focus your energy, how you prefer to take in information, how you make decisions, and how you deal with the outer world. There are no “good” and “bad” types. Rather, type is best used to understand other people, improve communication, and develop individual skills. Do you ever feel like you speak a different language than your co-...

Have you ever noticed that the same word can generate very different reactions from different people? Every person has their own lens through which they view the world. It is crafted from their personal preferences, the time and culture in which they were raised, and their personal life experiences. We can study personality type, generations theory, active listening, and coaching, but the fact of the matter is, at some point, a communication disconnect will arise because one person uses a word in a conversation that has completely different meanings or connotations to the two people involved. While this may seem easy to fix by looking the word up in the dictionary to find out who is right, I feel this only deepens the defensive positions of the two individuals involved in the potential conflict. This happened to me last week when a friend and colleague said she was trying to break through my righteous barrier. Through my lens, regardless of whether I am right or wrong, this was a ...