On Personality Types and Personal Evolution
At a job over 10 years ago, my work team and I all took the Myers-Briggs personality test. Almost all of us, a group of women ranging in age from twenties to forties, tested as INTJs—was it coincidence? A classic case of groupthink? Or did we self-select into this work group based on a shared, specific personality type?
In the years that followed, I held onto that identity. I was an INTJ, though I tested as an ENTJ within a few years after that initial test. Though I straddled the line between introversion and extroversion (hello, ambivert!), the hallmarks of this personality type resonated with me. I remember thinking, “Yes. This is who I am,” and I rationalized my decisions and reactions based on this archetype.
Several weeks ago, my current employer had us all take the same type of test. This time, the result I got was ENFP: The Campaigner personality. As I read through the details of the results, I thought, “Well, this seems scarily accurate. How is it that I could take this test as the same person and get such different results?”
Was it the test? Was it me? My theory: it’s a little bit of both.
I don’t put a ton of stock in things like tea leaves and horoscopes; I think tarot is mostly entertainment. (Sorry, new-age friends.) Personality tests, while rooted in psychology—and can be a useful tool in understanding ourselves and those around us—aren’t gospel, nor are they always reliable. No battery of questions can fully understand our individual human experience: where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we’re going.
We grow. We evolve. We overcome hardships and celebrate milestones. And we come through all these things as changed people; an amalgam of our “true” selves and our lived experiences.
We’re ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, and one can’t exist without the other.
This November marked 10 years since I moved from Boise to Seattle, a turbulent and emotionally fraught time in my life that I don’t miss. Since then, I’ve moved to Austin, changed jobs (and careers) more than once, gotten married, and witnessed a decade’s worth of change in the world. It only makes sense that I’d come out of all of that a changed person.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to shed the “shoulds” that the world loves to pin on us. A people-pleaser since childhood, it’s difficult for me to separate my output from my self-worth. But as time passes and as I learn more about myself and the more destructive aspects of my personality that ultimately don’t serve me, I’m stepping into who I truly am, versus who the world tells me I am (or should be).
The Liz of 2020 is very different from the Liz in 2010 and the Liz in the year 2000, who was finishing high school and stepping into an adult life for the first time. The time we’re living in now is changing all of us, whether we consciously realize it or not. (Testing people’s personalities pre- and post-pandemic would be an interesting social experiment!)
Who will you be in 2030? Will you evolve into a completely different person you could have never predicted? Will you become a more solidified version of the person you are now?
Stay tuned, friends. Only time—and lived experience—can tell us.