Type Agility

As you think about development, it is typical to consider that an increase in skill represents a significant learning.  Certainly learning skills is a part of developing new capabilities and is an "adding" to what you may have already learned.  Another more complex perspective on development is a change in mindset.  Rather than an adding to--which is expanding the horizontal skill range--a change in mindset which accommodates the current state of affairs and incorporates what is required to deal effectively in a complex and somewhat more ambiguous situation is a movement vertically in awareness and capability.

From a type perspective, this proposition works like this: an INFP who learns the skills to critically analyze has certainly added to his or her skill tool box and we can even say has accessed some aspects of "Thinking".  For the INFP to develop his or her conscious awareness of how the dominant function, Introverted Feeling, accesses and uses Thinking, and further, how the range of perception (Sensing/Intuiting) and judgement (Thinking/Feeling) function within his or her own type, is a mindset transformation.  The movement from adding a skill to become more inclusive of seeing oneself operating within a system of psychological energies is profound.

An aspect often ignored by writings of development--especially type development--is the role of psychological agility in growth.  To be psychologically--and by extension type--agile means that you are able to both assess the demands of the current situation and adjust your perspective and behavior to satisfactorily respond to the situation, AND you learn from the situation and your response to it for future circumstances. To be agile, you have to know your capabilities, to learn from experience, and apply what is required to be effective.

One of the barriers to type development includes looking at your type in an atomistic fashion.  If you only understand your type as E,N,F,P or I,S,T,J as if the letters were disjointed and disconnected, then you are likely to miss the richness of understanding how these psychological functions operate in different psychological worlds of extraversion and introversion.  Another barrier is to assume that your perceptions or your judgments are somehow complete.  If you behave as though you know what there is to know, you will miss other essential data points. If you believe your analysis is complete or decision well-founded, then you are unlikely to consider alternative explanations or principles.  In both instances, your opportunity to see another perspective, and perhaps find a better answer to current challenges, is foreclosed.  By definition, development means learning in a fluid way where the layers of processes and dynamics become clearer so that actions become more complete and satisfactory.

In a recent activity where everyone agreed to share their type and to engage in type sharing, I had each member of the team share with other members of the team the type each team member experienced.  In other words, everyone received type feedback--"I experience you as an ENTP for these reasons in your behavior."  The goal was to get on the table all of the perspectives of how people experience each other, what they see in each other, and how they respond to each other from the lens of type.  This was literally a mind blowing experience.  The ISTJ who was experienced as ESFJ (always attentive to the specific, pragmatic details and needs of team members) and the ENFP who was seen as ISTP (quiet, picking on specific issues and principles) opened conversations about their assumptions and how these affect perspectives and behaviors.  As these patterns were discussed, each team member explored their natural type, their nurtured type, and now their type brand.  This is so say, they became more fully aware of their type energies and type perspectives.

Catching Up

OK.  It has been some time since I put thoughts here.  I've been in recovery.  After quadruple heart surgery one year ago, I have been getting back into the swing of things and had to decide to let some things simply wait.

And I'm glad that I've had time to reflect and think about what is truly important.  My kids and friends reminded me that sharing the insights about type development would be important to do for those who really care about such topics as I've been pretty focused on this issue for some time.

As I shared earlier, development is best viewed int he context of what we know about development in general.  I feel that Susanne Cook-Greuter's work "Nine Levels of Increasing Embrace" says a great deal about how to frame and consider psychological development and I think that Robert Keagn is on to some profound principles--especially in In Over Our Heads: Managing The Demands of Modern Life.  On the shoulders of these brilliant thinkers we can peer into the world of type development with a greater respect for the psychological system at work.

Peter Geyer recently reminded me of a line from Jung's work, Psychology and Alchemy, in which he wrote: "If we think about psychological functions as arranged in a circle, then the most differentiated function is usually the carrier of the ego, and, equally regularly, has an auxiliary function attached to it.  The inferior function, on the other had is unconscious, and for that reason is projected into a non-ego.  It too has an auxiliary function."

What are you to make to this?  If Greuter is right that she has "outlined one possible path from the unconscious, undifferentiatedsymbiosis of the newborn to the conscious experience of embeddedness in the universe ofmature adults, that is from prerational to metarational and from preverbal ignorance (= not
knowing) to beginning postsymbolic wisdom. Much freedom is gained when people realize the
essential inter-connectedness of all phenomena and the constructed aspects of boundaries,
objects, our self-identities and our stories about life and nature. Much suffering is alleviated
when the automatic habits of mind and heart are unlearned and uncoupled from memory (what
was) and desires (what ought to be) and replaced by mindful, non-evaluative attention to what is
- now."  (BOLD, Underline, Italics are mine).

And if Kegan is right that our primary task is "not to be had" by our psychologies and that what is required is a mindfulness that allows us to dance with our past, our unconscious personages, and to live fully in the present, he (Kegan) and she (Greuter) are pointing to the same truth.  Jung is suggesting that there is an architecture to it all and the more we recognize that the structure serves the self (mind), the better off we will be.

I am fond of sharing that Myers suggested we would be better off if we "focused perception on the world and judgment on ourselves."  And I think she is hinting at the same profound insight.  Being mindful, open to the present and allowing yourself to experience life as it is, will lead to more satisfying choices.  Because of psychological type, we know that there are at least four lenses for seeing and four lenses for making sense of experience and the question is whether we will be wise enough to learn, activate, and attend to them in our lives.