Are You Really an ENTP? (Short Answer: Don't Believe the Online MBTI Quizzes)

Dear readers,

Thank you for the positive responses, dear friends! :D I'm very excited to share more with you on my ENTP by ENTP blog!

Before I jump into detailing what joys and troubles life throws you just because you are an ENTP (with some ADD tendencies), let's first of all establish that you or your loved one is TRULY an ENTP.

caption: Question everything... Leave no stone unturned.

Back in the day, and I'm going back to year 2002 now... I was really miserable working for a corporate advertising company in my city, and I started spending chunks of time building a 'raft' so to speak, to unstick myself from the Dilbert Situation. 

I decided that a) I would start saving and finish the deadly credit card cycle, and b) have an inner compass to be able to leave a job that so many locals coveted me for.

I found online help from recovery groups, and Barbara Sher's web board (LOVE!), and read the What Color is Your Parachute, and somehow ended up taking my first ever MBTI quiz. I think my company did tests but they used DISC instead. 

* * *

So, that year, when I first took the MBTI online quiz, I came out 'INFP.' I was doing so miserably at my job, and I felt like a big time loser every day. I didn't have good boundary skills, I didn't know how to say no, and I didn't even know how to take very basic care of myself, physically OR emotionally. 

I just felt like a soft crawling thing without a shell. Like a snail without a house.

* * *

Then, I succeeded in leaving the coveted but actually very hellish & soul-killing job, to find myself in the teaching industry. Which is where I ended up building my decade long career. And when I wasn't sure about going to grad school or not, I think I had another phase about career choices, and took another MBTI quiz online.

I think I took a longer one that time, and I might've ended up with either an ENFJ or something like that, and I didn't really think much of the MBTI test itself. Obviously, the test must be 'faulty' as lots of people say these self-administered, self-perception based tests usually are.

* * *

By the time I left grad school, my dad hooked me up with a local & official MBTI agency, and I was able to get tested with them, using the official set of MBTI diagnosis questions!

And that was me in like my late 20s... Maybe 28 or 29, I think. And whether it is from the 'age' I was hitting, or the set of questions that differed, I have tested ENTP very consistently from that point on.

* * *

OK. I admit I am not a professional AT ALL, on this MBTI thing. But somewhere between 35~55% of the members I know in the Facebook MBTI groups perenially ask for feedback on which type they might be. They often ask how to distinguish one type from another, some settle on identifying themselves as ENFX or XSTX, or they take quiz after quiz, all of them online, trying to find out which side of the fence they fall in.

Well, I just wanted to clear this up, before I got started on the other topics!

Thanks for tuning in!

xoxo

Her ENTPness