The Magic Carpet of Type People flew into Denver in 1989, not on magic carpets, but on jet planes. They flew in for the APT Conference held in Boulder, Colorado. And while they weren’t coming on magic carpets, the effect of us all being in one place at one time was magical! They came from Kuwait and Hungary, Poland and Hong Kong, Australia and South Africa. We gathered in a room and put push pins on a world map – and it was so exciting! First times are almost always exciting. Suelynn, APT’s president, had canvassed the members in the organization and gotten names and sent out an invitation to anyone who was using the MBTI in other countries. And to use a metaphor (albeit loosely) from the movie, The Field of Dreams, if we had it, they would come! And they did. Now, 15 years later, it seems rather common knowledge that the MBTI® is used all over the world and we tend to take that for granted. We’ve learned about the many challenges of translations, now in over 30 languages. We’ve learned about how the surface behaviors of people are impacted by the country’s culture, that the expression of type may look different in different places. The underlying theme is still magical – type is universal. You can go to any country in the world and find people agreeing with certain behaviors; “yes, I am like that” – you can find people verifying that they have certain preferences. Just think, the instrument developed by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, based on the theory of Carl Jung, can cross cultures. After all, Briggs, Myers and Jung were world’s apart. Let’s take a look at how it crosses cultures— When I was in Finland, presenting the Qualifying Training program, my co-trainer and I tried so hard, in so many ways, to connect with the people in the class. We said, “talk to us at the break, write us post it notes.”We didn’t get any response from the class. On the last day they presented us with a cartoon and, as we read it, they laughed and laughed at their cross cultural joke!
Later that day, I sat down with one of the participants, a young woman, who claimed ENFP, like me. We shared our experiences in growing up and we found we had gotten similar parental messages, “slow down,” “be quiet,” “don’t be the center of attention.” I linked that with a wonderful conversation that I had with a man who lived in Korea, an ESFP who said, when I was growing up, my parents said to me “slow down,” “be quiet,” “don’t draw attention to yourself.” Now don’t you think that is almost magical that a young woman in a technical field in Finland and a middle-aged man who taught at a university in Korea and a later-aged counselor from the U.S. mid-west would have that bridge between us? And understanding that the bridge was a similarity in our inborn type! Type does that; it builds bridges—between people from different countries, different socio-economic levels, different jobs, different ages. Knowing about type makes it an everyday experience to fly on the magic carpet of type. Nancy J. Barger is an international consultant with 24 years of experience in applying psychological type and using the MBTI® instrument. She works primarily with organizations, focusing on organizational change. She serves on the APT international faculty for MBTI® qualifying training. |
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