a label I can live with
I'm a female INFJ (Sybil) Scanner (Water) Tiger Scorpio. Snort.
In case you're wondering, that description includes my Myers-Briggs personality type (introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging—NF's, by the way, are said to be the most spiritually philosophical of the four temperaments), my Scanner type (scanners love to learn a little bit about everything [which may be why I can't focus on any single one thing in this blog], with Sybil referring to having a number of select recurring interests) developed by the talented Barbara Sher, my Chinese animal sign (it seems appropriate that as a self-professed cat lover I would also be a Tiger, although the Water aspect makes me the calmest of the big cats), and your regular boring (although my particular sign is known to be quite, ahem, feisty) astrological sign. Oh, I'm also the last-born in my family, but the first-born female as there is a gap between the two sets of siblings. This may explain why I appear to have characteristics of both first-born and last-born in case you accept birth order theory. There. Have I forgotten anything? Double snort.
posted by KJ's muse at 9:01 p.m.
8 Comments:
Scanner type? Sybil? I must confess that I've never heard of those before. Please enlighten me, i.e. direct me to the nearest online quiz!
Many thanks,
an INFP
July 25, 2006 11:58 p.m.
When I was principal of a boarding school, my staff had to do a Myers-Briggs, so I took it, too. Doing it, I found it was easy to match the different categories 'to do well'. If you change just one answer, you're another person. Now, I can score as the perfect boss every time.
July 26, 2006 5:36 p.m.
Sorry anonymous INFP,
There is no online quiz! Barbara Sher first developed the concepts of "scanners" and "divers" in her book I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was, and just recently devoted a whole book to scanners called Refuse to Choose!. In it she divides scanners into Cyclical Scanners who often return to their interests (e.g., Sybil) and Sequential Scanners who don't return to their interests, but find new ones instead.
To quickly (and inadequately) summarize for you, scanners hate being bored, and love learning (i.e., inventing, problem solving, creating and thinking) more than they love knowing. To a scanner learning is fun, and fun is usually more important to them than ambition or success. Hope this helps!
July 27, 2006 10:10 p.m.
Hi country dweller,
Yeah, it's not too hard to figure out the pattern when answering the questions. Ya gotta be honest with yourself, OR score as the perfect boss! *Wink*
July 27, 2006 10:13 p.m.
Well, you see, I could be any of at least half of the types in the test, depending on mood and circumstances. Also, I'm a different person when I'm off work. At work, I project the person most suited for the job. People seem to like that. That's not dishonest, that's being
adaptable ;)
July 28, 2006 4:27 a.m.
Yeah, I'm different in work situations too, extremely task-oriented and no patience whatsoever for social chitchat—not surprising given that I score at the top of the class for introversion! And I tested as INTJ for a number of years before consistently testing as INFJ.
Yep, being adaptable IS a good thing.
July 28, 2006 6:57 p.m.
If you’ll bear with me, muse. I’ve dappled in psychology. At the time, introversion/extroversion was one of the few character traits, which could be proven to influence behaviour in a predictable way. Optimism/pessimism links to the trait. There’s a recent, fairly simple study: A group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none—the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35 percent of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100 percent helpless. It seems extroverts are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion than we are (I’m an introvert, too).
July 29, 2006 2:03 p.m.
Hi country dweller,
How fascinating—I've never seen those two traits linked before! Although it makes sense, I guess, given that introverts tend to spend more time ruminating. Thanks for passing that along.
It seems extroverts are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion than we are. Snort.
July 30, 2006 8:26 p.m.
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