Myers-Briggs®, whaaat?
Myers-Briggs® is the most widely used personality assessment worldwide. Over 2 million+ people take it every year. It was created by a mother/daughter team and it's based on Carl Jung’s work on personality type from the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is also rooted in Hippocrates and Plato’s theories and all the other big brains throughout history, so the theory behind PixiesDidIt! has been around for a very long time.
Pixie personality types are based on Myers-Briggs'®,Keirsey's® and Jung's theories. But, we've given different names to our personality types because our own proprietary research stirred up nuances that we wanted to properly capture. Plus, people relatively unschooled in type terminology often get confused by it. "I remember a bunch of letters but can't remember what they mean." For those Myers-Briggs® junkies out there like us, we include type terminology along with our own to make life easier for you.
For example, Kelly is an ISFJ or in Pixie Language, a Classic Freedom (SFJ) and Katie is an INFP or in Pixie language, an Organic Freedom (NFP).
Below is our brief summary on personality type theory. But, to learn more about it in depth, we steer you to the most reliable source on this topic, the Holy Grail, The Myers-Briggs Foundation®.
The basic theory is that each personality has four components. Within each component, you have inborn preferences for doing things one way or another way. You are capable of doing things both ways but you have an inborn preference for one way over another. For example, you use both of your hands. But, you are either right handed or left handed. And chances are (even if you're ambidextrous), you instinctively sign your name with your preferred hand. It's these preferences within each of the four components that interplay and combine to form your personality type.
The four components of personality type are essentially how you interact with the world:
1. where you get your energy
2. how you take in information
3. how you make decisions on that information
4. how you structure your world
Where you get your energy is an indicator of whether you are introverted or extroverted (I vs. E) and neither has to do with how social you are. It's about your orientation to the world and what charges your inner battery: inner thoughts (I) or external monologue (E). As for gathering information, you are either intuitive or sensing (N vs. S) meaning you either take things in a big picture way focused on the future (N) or you are practical and detail-oriented (S). When making decisions, you are either feeling or thinking (F vs T). This means you either prefer to make decisions subjectively on your lifetime of experience (F) or objectively based on logic (T). Neither preference has anything to do with whether you have feelings or not. Finally, there is the structure you prefer to create in your outer world. In this component, you are either perceiving or a judging (P vs J) meaning you prefer your outer world to be open-ended and flexible (P) or set and orderly (J).
When you mix up these preferences, you get 16 possible personality types. Obviously, you probably feel as if you know more than 16 different "personalities" out there and that's because our myriad environments and lives deeply shape us. But at our core, we remain who we are in our own fantastic way.
