Individual Development, EQ, Jung, Pearman Personality Integrator

                                            What does empathy have to do with judgment?                                         A look at the engine of judgment: Thinking and Feeling. For many years I’ve had participants in psychological type workshops say to me, “How can Feeling be a rational judgment?”  “What does Feeling have to do with making decisions?”  “How is empathy related to making a choice or in judging something?”  When I’ve been with experienced long time consultant or facilitator users of psychological type assessments, I’ve asked the following and usually get silence in response:  “If Thinking is a rational judging process, how is Feeling rational?”  I’m willing to bet there are a number of readers of this blog who have had the same thoughts or questions, and have simply defaulted to, “that’s the model Jung put forth.”  Our perspective on this has a significant impact on how we present type to others and how we learn to use type processes productively. All of

Patterns, Possibilities, Connected Dots, and Imagined Scenarios I suggested to a group recently that if we think about the four “portals” of perceiving as outlined by psychological type, we have four unique ways of “seeing experience.”  In one blog entry on the Sensing functions, I suggested that Extraverted and Introverted Sensing are by design “portals” on the tangible, concrete, and consensually verifiable in very different ways.  I want to explore the other “portals” related to the role of Intuiting in Extraverted and Introverted modalities.   As Jung noted, our type pattern has a way of being one-sided and prompting us to pay attention in one particular way.  Further, he pointed out that our challenge is to learn more about the other modes of perceiving and to learn to access them more consciously—which is what I hope the Pearman Integrator invites individuals to consider.  Jung called perceiving mental functions “irrational” by which he meant these just operate without t

Reality is Here and Now, Proven There and Then It seems to me that Jung indicates that the mental functions of type operate in conscious, adaptive, and unconscious ways.  For example, we might force our mind’s eye to pay attention in a particular way (conscious) or might might find that we are naturally using a mental function to address a situation that has just emerged (adaptive).  At times we project meaning or perspectives on to a situation and only later on reflection realize the unconscious operation of a function was at work. Jung gave us a fabulous way to think about our personality intelligence by outlining ways of perceiving and judging our experience.  In the next four blogs, I want to simply explore the eight functions and their value to us through a variety of frames of reference.  Perceiving functions serve to provide information that is both actual and possible.  By their very definition, perceiving means receiving, taking in, and seeking information about

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”  ― Albert Einstein Using the Pearman FlexIndex Throughout my career as a coach and consultant, clients have shown me just how important flexibility is in dealing with challenges and in personal growth.  The research I completed using multiple variables with the database at the Center for Creative Leadership provided ample evidence that the more flexible individuals were consistently rated more effective by others and demonstrated both more resilience and use of capabilities. As a result of experiences with clients and research, I wanted to make sure that a new exploration of psychological type measured flexibility as related to the use of mental resources.  This insight is embedded in the Pearman Personality Integrator. Flexing in the use of your mental resources is essential to adapting to challenges appropriately and coping with the complex demands of modern life.  To flex you need to read what is required, know how

Why I developed another personality type assessment tool—to move the development conversation forward. For the last forty years I have been actively using an array of personality inventories and assessments to facilitate insight and growth of my clients.  With numerous books published on my research on leaders and psychological type as measured by the MBTI, you might well wonder why I would feel compelled to develop another tool in the field that has a number of tools already. When I completed a massive data analysis of variables collected at the Center for Creative Leadership in 1991, I published a number of articles indicating the presence of significant patterns in a number of independent variables which generally confirmed the MBTI hypotheses about personality patterns.  But that was only a fraction of the story.  The analysis involved hundreds of pages of statistical computations which both supported the basic propositions of psychological type and revealed a number

Centrality of Flexibility for Development Flexibility affects three dimensions of type development.  Flexing within the mental function (Si, Se, Ni, Ne, Te, Ti, Fe, Fi) allows for a deeper, richer utilization of the mental function.  Flexing across mental functions (Te shifting to Fe) in a situation indicates the individual has assessed the current situation and shifted to a more appropriate function.  Flexing between modalities of what feels natural to what is demonstrated due to the environmental press of a situation allows for managing tension and energy required for doing what feels uncomfortable.  Far too often, flexibility is thought of as important only as related to shifting from one mental function (Fe to Te) to another, which may be required from time to time. For many years, type development was defined as knowing which function to use and using it in a given situation.  As evidence has been gathered over time, including enormous clinical experience, reveals that developm

The End of Personality Types When Jung wrote, "It is not the purpose of a psychological typology to classify human beings into categories--this would be pretty pointless (CW, p. 986)", you might wonder why create a typology?  A close read of Jung's stated purpose of his book gives a big clue: to understand the  psychology  of types.  And when we dig deeper into what he means about the  psychology of the types,  Jung provides an array of principles and hypotheses designed to guide our thinking.   Keep Jung's end and overall goal in mind when thinking about psychological type: "Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things.  It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all it dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost (CW 13, para. 24).” The task of saying &q