“I started this blog to give voice to what is in my head and share important issues in the fields of personality type, organizational change, coaching, and development.” – Linda Berens
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Web-based Type Technology: What is its role?
Is a web-based type instrument enough? Are they accurate? Will web-based technology substitute for working with a professional coach? There are an abundance of personality type ‘tests’ and descriptions on the internet. They are very easy to construct. It is not so easy to be sure they are accurate. Some of these have well-researched foundations like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) ® instrument and others are just constructed by enthusiastic, but naive type without the depth of knowledge to know if what they are describing is accurate. And some fall in between these extremes. In my many years of experience,... -
Leadership Starts with Self-Leadership
In my early morning reflections, I thought about the experiences I want to provide participants in the upcoming workshop, Mastering the CORE of Self-Leadership that is also part of our Berens CORE Facilitation Training. Self-Leadership requires self-awareness and type lenses help give us this self-awareness. But then what do you do with it? That is where the CORE practices come in. Centering: Once you have the awareness of how you are naturally inclined to respond in situations and you get off track when your core needs and drives are not being met, you can engage in some centering practices to... -
Why Personality Type Instruments Don’t Work…
The MBTI® instrument has come under lots of criticism recently in the popular press. For those of us who have trained people to use this instrument and have found it useful, this can be painful. We realize that the criticism often comes from wanting the instrument to do things it isn’t designed to do. And usually it is a result of not following best practices such as the ones Jane Kise has described very thoroughly in a recent blog. I’ve been teaching people to use Psychological Type, Temperament and other models of individual differences since 1976 and conducted MBTI® Certification... -
Thank you Dr. David West Keirsey
A brilliant mind and a caring soul is no longer with us in body, but his legacy will live on in the many lives he touched in his 91 years, not only through his books, but through his many students and the lives we touch. I first met David in 1969 when I was searching for the office of the Master’s Program in Counseling to turn in my application. My recalled image was of him sitting at a table typing on a typewriter, with no other furniture in the room. He gruffly answered my question and went back to typing.... -
Best of Two Worlds—Just the Beginning
July was a busy month and one in which I immersed myself in two of my favorite worlds—The Association for Psychological Type International biennial conference and the Integral Theory Conference, also a biennial event. These two worlds have some things in common. Both address the concepts of types and valuing individual differences and in both the participants are passionate and dedicated to making the world a better place. Yet, no one from one context showed up at the others’ conferences. In a series of blog posts I will share some of my experiences and insights from both of these worlds,...
