One way to increase your happiness (or “well-being” as scientists like to call it) is to increase your self-awareness. By becoming more self-aware, you can tailor strategies to be happier specifically to you. Because let’s be honest, you are not the same as everyone else so different things will make you happy than other people. First, if you haven’t heard of the PERMA model, take a look at this blog for an explanation. We’ve recently done some research on Myers-Bri...

What is happiness? Definitions vary, but by becoming more self-aware you can make a plan for happiness that's tailored just to you. So, what do you mean when you say happiness? Scientists tell you it’s a combination of chemicals and hormones in the brain that produce positive feelings. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky (in her book The How of Happiness) defines happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is g...

There’s no wrong personality type, but there is certainly a least common Myers-Briggs personality type. We looked at a sample of the US population from three different organizations to determine what the least common Myers-Briggs personality types are for men and women and talk a little about why the population isn’t just split evenly among the 16 types. So, what is the least common Myers-Briggs personality type for men and women? First, what is a sample? A sample is a select group o...

How many MBTI types are there? What is the history of how Myers Briggs arrived at 16? Take a look at the below about how the Myers-Briggs assessment came to be and why 16 personality types exist. Why are there 16 MBTI personality types? When you combine each of the preference opposites (E-I, S-N, T-F, J-P) you get a total of 16 different personality types on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® tool. It’s important to know though that 16 isn’t necessarily some magic number (aside from it being an a...

First, let’s start with the word test. We generally try to steer away from the word test when talking about the MBTI assessment because test implies there are right and wrong answers, and high and low scores that are good (high) and not so good (low). While there is scoring involved to get to one or the other preference, it is a self-assessment that reports out on how you answer the questions – but there is no right or wrong. We covered this a little in a previous post, A Crash Cours...

What’s a simple thing you can take from each MBTI personality types? Each of the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types comes with their own strengths and weaknesses, way of viewing the world, and making decisions, and more. While someone’s MBTI type obviously can’t tell us everything about that person, it can help us better understand and communicate with them by giving both of you a common language to discuss differences. In addition, no matter what your type is, by being aware of...

Even though there’s only one letter difference between ENTJ and INTJ, the differences in personality are rather drastic. Want to learn more about the difference between ENTJ vs INTJ? Though there’s only one letter difference between the MBTI types ENTJ and INTJ, those two letters affect how the other letters interact and are shown to the outside world. How the letters interact with each other is what we call type dynamics. You can learn more about type dynamics by taking the official assessment ...

We know the topics of Extraversion and Introversion are everywhere. We’ve seen them in comics (many of which we find amazing), mentioned thousands of times a day on Twitter, on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, in TED Talks and so many other places. Part of this popularity is due to the immediate relatability (or assumed relatability) of the terms and their ease of understanding. “Oh, he’s an introvert… he’s shy.” Or, “She’s a great speaker because she’s an extravert.” Wait. What? Is that what pe...

Beyond Introversion and Extraversion: The Myers-Briggs ‘Rhythm Section’ Each of the sixteen personality types described by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) assessment is an arrangement of four preferences, each of which is one side of a two-sided coin (or preference pair or dichotomy in MBTI lingo): Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I) Sensing (S) or iNtuition (N) Thinking (T) or Feeling (F) and Judging (J) or Perceiving (P) The first posts in this series walked through this ba...

Extraversion vs. Introversion: Understanding the “energizing” preference pair The MBTI personality assessment was designed to look at people's tendencies to use their minds in different ways. So what are these “different ways”? The best place to start is to look at the four preference pairs we described in our last post, which are the basis of our personality type. To recap, people prefer one of each of the following: Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I) S...