Name a movie or TV show and somewhere on the internet you can find someone’s blog, “The MBTI Types of the Characters of…”
Name a well-known personality and chances are, you can find opinions on his or her type as well.
And, they’re usually wrong. I mean, Harry Potter lived under a stairwell from age 1-11, for Pete’s sake. He didn’t have a single caring adult in his life all those years. Do you think that might have hindered normal type development?
Join Ann Holm and me for an interactive session on The Promises and Perils of Typing from Afar at BAPT in April!
The tangles get worse with real people. So many of these “typings from afar” confuse preferences, personas, and chosen behaviors. Those of us officially certified in a type instrument know that it’s actually unethical to broadcast our opinions as to another living person’s type. They are entitled to experience the best-fit process for themselves.
Yes, you can guesstimate type and use that to improve how you team/coach/lead/teach/buy presents for someone else. That’s different from broadcasting that you “know: someone’s type.
Yet, people who are no longer with us are fair game. Join us at the British Type Association Conference. We’ll dig into a robust method for “typing from afar.” Using The Bully Pulpit as a test case, we’ll look at the types of
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Their wives
The founders of McClure’s Magazine, the original investigative journalists
Why Americans?
Because THIS BOOK —The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin—is high entertainment. No soap opera matches the real lives of these folks. AND Goodwin includes enough information, including their own writings, not just what others said about them or what they said in public, to hypothesize well about their types.
No time to read the book? It’s a great audio. OR read about Roosevelt and Taft on Wikipedia. OR, watch a few YouTube clips or a Netflix show to gain a bit of background. OR just come to the session ready to play with the book excerpts we’ll provide as a handout. (Note: the session will be repeated at the APT International Conference in Chicago in July).
And come ready to debate. We’ve been discussing their potential types for nearly a year and believe us, there’s plenty of room for varying hypotheses. Our true goal for the session, though, is to build our community’s skills so we can influence all the mis-typing that’s on the internet and promote positive and constructive use of the framework we find so beneficial!
