Penguin unearthed

Introversion

Via JennyD, I found an on-line Myers-Briggs personality test. I did it out of curiosity to see if my rating would have changed from when I did it 10 years ago at some work love-in. It hadn't, I'm still INTJ - Introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging (the opposites are extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving). Each of the 16 possible categories has some wonderful description and adjective that you can model yourself on so that you feel good about yourself.

Doing it knowing what the categories are gives you a slightly different view of what it all means, and I found it interesting when I got to the introversion questions. There are two quite different aspects to introversion, as defined by this test: do you like being the centre of attention? Do you like being with other people? For me, the answers are definitely not, and yes, I really enjoy being in a group of people. But for E, he is an introvert the other way round - he's quite happy being the centre of attention, but needs some time to himself to recharge after being forced into a big group.

It's interesting watching our kids - C takes after E and loves being the centre of attention, but will wander off with a book in the middle of a party. D seems to be taking after the extroverted parts of both of us, so far.

To me the two aspects are so different that it's almost strange that they are both labelled "introverted".

posted by Jennifer @ 9:29 pm