- Okay, so you've taken some personality tests,
the 16 Personalities Test maybe on 16personalities.com, ew,
or one of the myriad other ones.
And perhaps you've taken it more than once,
you've taken it on different sites and oh crap,
you're getting different results.
You got INTJ one place, INTP another place,
you've got INFJ and then ISFJ.
You're like, dude, what is going on?
What type am I?
The results are inconclusive, what is a boy to do?
In this video I'm gonna address the steps you can take
to find a bit more certainty
when it comes to your personality type
when the tests are inconclusive,
which tests are just naturally,
inevitably going to be inconclusive.
First up, the biggest thing is don't panic.
I see comments from people who are like,
dude, I got this result, then I got this result,
it goes back and forth, I don't know what to do,
I'm freaking out.
Please someone just help me.
Someone tell me what type I am.
It's not that big of a deal that you figure it out right now
and get certainty at this moment.
It's okay, you've gone your whole life up to this point
without knowing what your type is.
Enjoy the journey of figuring it out.
Don't worry, don't panic.
So going from there, I mean, the biggest thing
is learning more in a couple of different ways.
Because if you're new to typology,
if you're getting freaked out by the test,
because they're not giving you the answers,
it's likely that there are two things
that you are a little bit unsure about
or a lot unsure about.
One of which is Myers-Briggs in and of itself
and what the 16 personalities are and all that.
The other thing being yourself.
And then I guess the third thing would be
how those two things relate.
So first, learn more about the 16 personalities,
and if you want to get to the point
where it's really useful
and you're really getting a deep understanding of it,
you've gotta learn about the cognitive functions,
which is, but below the level of the four letters,
each type has four cognitive functions
and so much about each type is opened up
and just makes a lot more sense
once you start to learn this stuff.
But I understand it's not for everybody.
It might just be too complicated
and when I was first learning typology,
I wanted nothing to do with cognitive functions.
It seemed too complicated, too confusing,
but I have since realized that that's really where the heart
and soul of the 16 personalities is.
Now, there's many places you can learn
about cognitive functions,
and, I mean, one of the best places to start,
or at least to come to at some point is the origination,
the origin story of it all,
"Psychological Types" by Carl Jung,
and you might say, Frank, that's a huge book,
I'm not gonna read that.
I don't got that much time on my hands.
But you don't need to read the whole book.
The part about the types,
the description of the types itself,
is only like one part of the book, not very long,
and you can even find on YouTube,
I think if it's still up, this guy narrated it.
You don't even have to read it,
you can just listen to it,
which is always a plus.
Now, he talks about eight psychological types,
which are the eight cognitive functions,
and Myers-Briggs took those eight types
and had a subtype for each one giving us 16 personalities,
and if you want something that's a bit easier to understand,
that is not about cognitive functions,
that is more about the four-letter types
without getting too complicated,
"Gifts Differing" is the official Myers-Briggs book,
and it's a great place to read a bunch of descriptions
that are more in-depth than what you usually find online
about the types and what it all means,
and some cool statistics, et cetera.
I also have a whole playlist on my channel,
check it out here, all about the 16 personalities
where I'm explaining Myers-Briggs
and I'm trying to make it as simplified as possible,
and I think that's to avoid getting overwhelmed
'cause when you go out there
and you see all the descriptions
of the types and what it means and the cognitive functions,
you're gonna get a lot of very diffuse, nebulous,
sometimes conflicting things
that are attributed to different types,
different cognitive function,
so try to keep it simple, Simon.
Don't get too far out too soon.
Start with something more simple.
What is feeling?
What is introverted feeling?
Oh, feeling is about making decisions based on values,
when it's introverted, it's subjective.
Just start there, very simple.
While we're here, let's stop momentarily
and support this channel with a commercial.
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Thanks for sitting through that.
And if you're enjoying this video.
Now, maybe you don't wanna spend a bunch
of time learning stuff,
maybe you're just like, I want my type,
I want to get what I need to know from that and move on
and I've got these two or three different types
that the tests are telling me I am.
What you can do at the very least
is read the descriptions of those types,
and like I said one of the best places to start
is something like the official Myers-Briggs thing.
But there are a lot of good descriptions out there
of the types, but pick one source
and then do the hypothesis mode,
where you're like, I'm gonna operate
for the next month or whatever,
under the assumption that I am this type.
I'm gonna learn about this type and say,
okay, am I really doing this?
Let me check it out,
Am I an ISFP or whatever?
Do I line up with all these things?
And you gotta be really thinking hard
about what are the most important things about each type,
that's why I say be careful
of when things get too complicated
and there's too many descriptions,
because that's when it gets into the horoscope territory
of anyone can relate to this.
When the descriptions get too long,
and when they try to describe stuff
that is just universally human,
it's like, okay yeah, but that's not type specific.
So that's why I'm saying keep it to a few simple things
that you're looking for
that you're pretty sure this is unique to this type based on
what you've read in these descriptions.
And a good thing to do is to just work
by process of elimination,
what am I not?
If you have a few types that you're choosing from,
choose the one that's least likely
and just strike that off the board.
Sure, you might relate to a few things,
but you're gonna be able to relate to a few things
in every type, so eliminate what you are not.
"Now, Frank," you might be saying,
"this seems overly complicated.
This is too much knowledge for me to cram it into my brain.
I just want someone who knows what they're talking about
with the 16 personalities to give me their opinion
on what type I am."
And there are many people on the internet
who can do that for you, including me.
The link is down below if you would like to get my opinion
on which of the personalities you are
if the tests are giving you inconclusive results,
if you're just confused,
you don't know what's going on,
you want something a bit more solid.
And one of the advantages of that is that,
with the tests, they tend to be like multiple choice,
more often agree, disagree.
And they give you these questions
that are oftentimes not relatable,
and sometimes I think if you start to learn enough,
then you know what the questions are asking.
You know if they're asking feeling or thinking, et cetera.
And then it's impossible to get like an accurate answer
at that point, but when you have someone typing you,
like a human being who's trying to interpret
what you're saying, it's open-ended.
You get asked open-ended questions,
you answer them, you kinda go off on tangents, you ramble,
and then it's a bit more of a holistic, organic process,
if you will.
So I do recommend that if you just would like
to hand it over to someone else to take care of it for you.
However, you do not need to do that,
you can do it all on your own.
The process just takes a little longer
and it requires a lot more self-work,
because as I mentioned before,
you need to know yourself as well as the system,
as well as what the 16 personalities is all about.
And gaining self-awareness can be tough.
I think we all like to think we're self-aware people, right?
But there are still elements of yourself
and your personality that you can't see very well,
and that's one of the big drawbacks I think, of tests,
is that even if you think you're answering totally honestly,
you might not see yourself accurately.
You might not have the full self-awareness to understand,
actually, I am a lot more feeling oriented
than thinking oriented.
Or actually, I care more about the facts
than I do the big picture view.
And so that's gonna give you ultimately
inconclusive results.
It's gonna give you the results perhaps even
of the opposite type that you really are.
So how do you gain self-awareness?
Now, this is tough.
This is gonna be the hardest thing that I recommend,
I think, in this video.
The first couple of ways you can do it
are to keep records of yourself
and your thoughts through journaling,
especially when you're feeling upset,
to journal about what's going on.
Or vlogging which is a kind of journal.
Make videos of yourself, put 'em on YouTube,
you can keep 'em unlisted.
You don't have to put 'em out there for the world to see.
But have a record of yourself
where you can be witness to yourself later down the road,
because I guarantee you if you write in a journal
or make a video and you come back to it a year
from now or longer, maybe shorter, who knows,
when you've had some distance,
when you've grown a bit as a person,
you can be like, wow, what a psycho I was.
What was going on?
At that point you can start to pick apart,
what was I doing here?
What were the patterns at work?
Even I, when I go back to look at videos I made a couple
of years ago, it doesn't even really feel like me anymore.
But same personality type.
Personality type doesn't change,
so I can be like, oh, interesting,
I was doing this here.
I can see these cognitive functions at work here.
And it's a bit of a longer process for sure,
but if you start keeping track of yourself over time,
that will help you become self-aware
without using any outside people to help you out.
And then that's the second, faster, but more painful way,
more embarrassing way of gaining self-awareness
is to find someone you trust, another person,
maybe your bestie or your significant other,
your mom, your I don't know, your therapist.
But you basically are gonna tell them,
alright, so for the next 30 days
or whatever period of time.
Make it significant enough where they'll have time
to call you out, right?
(laughing)
Say for the next 30 days,
I want you to kinda just call me out on stuff,
or make me aware of things without being mean.
We're not asking them to be mean,
but it's like I want you to be honest
with what you observe about what I'm doing,
how I'm operating that I might not realize.
That's why you gotta find someone you trust,
because if you get someone who is your not close friend
and they're gonna try to get a dig in at you,
and they're doing it to make you feel ashamed or something,
it's not gonna work out.
But if you have someone who really cares for you,
usually we have opinions about other people
that are negative, even people who are close to us,
we're like, I see that this person is doing this
and they're not aware of it
and it makes them look dumb and whatever,
but I'm not gonna say anything 'cause it's not a big deal
and I don't wanna hurt their feelings. Right?
So when you give someone the permission
to then be open with you and be like,
hey, just tell me what you see going on with me.
You get one step closer to an objective view of yourself.
Now, they too, this other person will have their own lens
through which they're seeing things,
so it's not pure objective reality,
but they will see you somewhat more clearly
than you see yourself.
So they can say, hey, look, I am noticing
that you are making decisions very emotionally,
and you're going off the deep end here with that.
Or hey, I noticed that you take things very personally
that don't need to be taken personally.
Or I noticed that when you make decisions,
you're not really following your own gut.
You're looking for everyone else to tell you what to do.
Stuff like that where maybe you'll be like,
oh yeah, I do that.
Yeah, I see what you're saying there.
Or something that might take you off guard,
and you're like, what? No way, I didn't realize that.
And you have to also promise this person
that you are not going to hold it against them,
and that it's all in the spirit of peace and love,
peace and love,
(laughing)
and self-awareness.
At the end of that 30 days or whatever,
you will have gained a little bit more insight
into who you are,
which can help you then figure out your own type
because you will have been told a few things
that maybe you didn't realize before.
Of course, don't go too far with it.
Don't let someone else totally define you.
One other person who has their own biases, et cetera.
So maybe you ask two or three people to be honest with you,
to help out your self-awareness.
At which point you will have several data points
which you can triangulate to figure out,
okay, these three people all see this same thing in me.
I don't see it, but maybe there is something to it,
because I'm seeing the pattern here.
And I left that one for last
'cause it's not the easiest one.
And so the people who aren't up for it,
who aren't up for the hard difficult journey,
they're not watching at this point.
(laughing)
They stopped watching like a minute into the video, okay?
Thanks for watching.
Start learning about the 16 personalities
with this playlist right here.
I keep it simple, Simon.
Thanks for watching.
Till next time, stay cool and attractive.
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