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Mind Your Own Career: Your Guide to Right Working for Right Living can help you to explore important questions about how you, your work, your career and your life are integrated, and to understand, and even to change, the answers you find.

The guide lays a foundation with a basic philosophy and some practical tips for changing your answers to these questions, so your answers become more suitable for who you are, what you need and what you want – in your work, as well as in your larger life.

Your Working Personality

In Do What You Are Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type, Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger explain the application of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument (MBTI®) to your work and career. They provide a simple method to determine your personality type, as well as comprehensive guidance for leveraging your personality type to identify suitable careers and to sustain career satisfaction.

The concept and application of personality type are based on theories and research developed by Carl Jung and, independently, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers.

The MBTI® test considers four dimensions of personality type and, according to psychological preferences in each dimension, identifies sixteen different personality types.

Two of the dimensions of personality type are especially relevant to the process of choosing. The Sensing/Intuition dimension describes how you perceive the world, events and possibilities. The Thinking/Feeling dimension describes how you interpret the world, events and possibilities.

According to psychological preferences in those two dimensions, you can identify four different basic styles for choosing:

• The Sensing/Feeling chooser prefers to trust their perceptions of facts, details and their physical senses, and their interpretation of what is most important to themselves and others.
  
  
• The Sensing/Thinking chooser prefers to trust their perceptions of facts, details and their physical senses, and their interpretation of logic and impersonal analysis.
  
  
• The Intuiting/Feeling chooser prefers to trust their perceptions of meanings, possibilities, patterns and relationships, and their interpretation of what is most important to themselves and others.
  
  
• The Intuiting/Thinking chooser prefers to trust their perceptions of meanings, possibilities, patterns and relationships, and their interpretation of logic and impersonal analysis.

The following tables describe common characteristics of Sensing versus Intuiting preferences for perceiving and of Thinking versus Feeling preferences for interpreting. You can use these descriptions to assess your own perceiving and interpreting preferences.

Which way of perceiving is most natural for you?
Sensing	Intuiting
Likes new ideas with practical applications	Likes new ideas for their own sake
Likes to use and hone established skills	Likes to learn new skills
Tends to be specific and literal, giving detailed descriptions	Tends to be general and figurative, using metaphors and analogies
Lives mostly oriented to the present moment	Lives mostly oriented to the future
Uses practical and common sense solutions	Uses imagination and newly created solutions
Recalls rich detail in facts and past events	Recalls patterns, contexts, and connections
Improvises best from past experience	Improvises best from theoretical understanding
Likes clear and concrete information and dislikes guessing when facts are "fuzzy"	Comfortable with ambiguous, fuzzy data and with guessing its meaning

Which way of interpreting is most natural for you?
Thinking	Feeling
Values logic, justice and fairness – one standard for all	Values empathy and harmony – sees exceptions to the rule
Sees flaws and tends to be critical	Likes to please others and shows appreciation
May seem to be heartless, insensitive and uncaring	May seem to be overemotional, illogical and weak
Considers truth more important than tact	Considers truth and tact equally important
Believes only logical feelings are valid	Believes all feelings are valid
Desires achievement and accomplishment	Desires to be appreciated
Seeks to understand facts and logic	Seeks to understand feelings and people impact
Focuses on work to be accomplished	Focuses on people needs and reactions
Easily provides objective, critical analysis	Seeks consensus and opinions
Accepts conflict as natural in relationships	Is easily unsettled by conflict

When you emphasize Feeling in your preferred way of interpreting things, you may develop more relationships and they will be closer and more intense relationships than when you emphasize Thinking in your preferred way of interpreting things.

As well as the impact that your choosing style has on the number and intensity of your relationships, your overall effectiveness at continuous choosing also impacts the quality and duration of your relationships.

The more you can develop and fully engage both personality type dimensions into your choosing style, the more you enhance your capability and capacity for continuous choosing. If you prefer Sensing to perceive the world, you can balance that preference by developing your ability to incorporate Thinking in your perceptions. Similarly, if you prefer Feeling to interpret the world, you can balance that by developing your ability to incorporating Intuiting in your interpretations.

Tieger and Barron-Tieger offer some suggestions for developing your ability to engage each dimension of personality type in your everyday living, working and choosing, e.g.:

• Develop your sensing ability by focusing on the present moment, noticing your physical sensory perceptions, and becoming more precise and accurate with facts and details.
  
  
• Develop your intuiting ability by being more open to change and seeing things in new ways, questioning the meaning of things, and using your imagination.
  
  
• Develop your thinking ability by staying objective, emphasizing fairness and equality, and being aware of logical cause and effect.
  
  
• Develop you feeling ability by being aware of how things affect yourself and others, sharing personal experiences and feelings, and developing communication and listening skills.

Tieger and Barron-Tieger also describe two other significant observations about how you engage your preferred choosing style and how you may naturally develop it throughout your life:

1. Early in life, you develop a hierarchy of the four basic functions – sensing, intuiting, thinking, feeling – so that your strongest and weakest preferences are both perceiving or both interpreting functions. So you prefer a perceiving or interpreting function to dominate your style, you prefer an auxiliary interpreting or perceiving function to complement and balance your dominant preference, you place your non-auxiliary interpreting or perceiving function as your third preference, and you place your non-dominant perceiving or interpreting function as your third preference.
   
   
2. During your life, you first emphasize development of your preferred dominant function, and then invest in developing each of the other functions according to their sequence in your hierarchy.

You must consider the other two dimensions of personality type to accurately determine your hierarchy of functions – do you prefer to be an introvert or an extravert? And do you prefer to have options resolved, settled and orderly or to keep your options open and adaptable to change?

You can gain a lot of insight into your personality type, your hierarchy of functions and your preferences by completing the full MBTI® instrument. Meanwhile, the following table may help you to determine your likely hierarchy of functions.

First, determine whether you generally prefer to relate to others as an introvert or an extravert. Are you more energized spending time alone, or being with other people? Do you avoid or like being the center of attention? Do you prefer to listen more or to talk more?

Next, with respect to your options, determine whether you generally prefer to keep them open as much and as long as possible or whether you prefer to choose an option and work toward getting it resolved.

Finally, recall your choosing style from the descriptions presented earlier.

Locate the line in the table that reflects your preferences for relating with others, dealing with options and choosing.

The corresponding hierarchy of functions identifies your Dominant – Auxiliary – Third – Fourth preferences for engaging your abilities to perceive and to interpret.

Note that your Dominant and Fourth preferences are either both perceiving functions, i.e. Sensing and Intuiting, or both interpreting functions, i.e. Feeling and Thinking.

Note also that your Auxiliary and Third preferences complement and balance your Dominant and Fourth preferences. If your Dominant and Fourth preferences are to perceive, then your Auxiliary and Third preferences are to interpret, and vice versa.

Relating Style	Options	Choosing Style	Hierarchy of Functions
Introvert	Open	Sensing/Feeling	Feeling – Sensing – Intuiting – Thinking
		Sensing/Thinking	Thinking – Sensing – Intuiting – Feeling
		Intuiting/Feeling	Feeling – Intuiting – Sensing – Thinking
		Intuiting/Thinking	Thinking – Intuiting – Sensing – Feeling
	Resolved	Sensing/Feeling	Sensing – Feeling – Thinking – Intuiting
		Sensing/Thinking	Sensing – Thinking – Feeling – Intuiting
		Intuiting/Feeling	Intuiting – Feeling – Thinking – Sensing
		Intuiting/Thinking	Intuiting – Thinking – Feeling – Sensing
Extravert	Open	Sensing/Feeling	Sensing – Feeling – Thinking – Intuiting
		Sensing/Thinking	Sensing – Thinking – Feeling – Intuiting
		Intuiting/Feeling	Intuiting – Feeling – Thinking – Sensing
		Intuiting/Thinking	Intuiting – Thinking – Feeling – Sensing
	Resolved	Sensing/Feeling	Feeling – Sensing – Intuiting – Thinking
		Sensing/Thinking	Thinking – Sensing – Intuiting – Feeling
		Intuiting/Feeling	Feeling – Intuiting – Sensing – Thinking
		Intuiting/Thinking	Thinking – Intuiting – Sensing – Feeling

Here some ideas for developing your ability in each of the four perceiving and interpreting functions:

• Dream Walk to develop your intuiting ability.
  
  
• Explore sensory choosing to develop your sensing ability.
  
  
• Enhance your emotional intelligence to develop your feeling ability.
  
  
• Play mind games to develop your thinking ability.

  

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