Who am I?

As we were discussing the "Nature" and "Nurture" debate, it spills over to this discussion but now to understand more about personality development and how it influences others in personal or work life.

The discussion which sparked my interest during this session was majorly when we started citing situations in work setting where it gets difficult to work with certain colleagues and easy to work with others.

Though I agree, we do have some mental checklist that makes us feel at ease when working with somebody whereas when somebody does not meet those criteria, we tend to avoid them.

But, fundamentally I believe this to be wrong on some levels as to how can one pass a judgement about the other without trying to understand the perspective, the situation or the environment, that instance took place.

MBTI - Myers Briggs Type Indicator, a set of questions which when answered categorizes you into one of the 16 personality types and puts you into a bucket.

I have come across this test, during my under-graduations, my work and now in my post-graduation course.

I have reservations against the validity of MBTI because the inherent act of putting people into buckets based on a certain set of questions seemed very arbitrary and incorrect.

I believe there are certain traits that are very core to our being but as a situation demands it, even the most stubborn personality traits compromise in those situations. Maybe, I am making such a strong case against it because I have myself given this test multiple times and got different results depending on the mood or situation I am in. I have also caught myself behaving completely opposite to what I am categorized under.

But as mentioned by Viji herself, this is a starting point to understand themselves. One should not limit themselves by this categorization and instead learn and understand more about them.