In my search for something  new and interesting to do with my life I decided to make a visit to my local career center. This was something that I had not done for many years  and although I thought that it might be interesting to see what was out there, I was not sure that I really wanted to work for anyone else or even had the skills to do so even, though I had ran my own successful business. Working for myself gave me a great deal of freedom and flexibility and to be quite honest the idea of being disciplined enough to show up at work at 8am and go home at 4 or 5 pm seemed a little beyond my comprehension, even though millions of people do it each day sucessfully.

The Myers-Briggs course started on line and I had to answer 92 questions that where designed to inform me of the type of person that I am and also what would be a suitable career choice for me. I took the test on line and turned up for the course a week later. The were about 20 of us in the room and they handed us our results, (all very exciting) and expand them to us. There are 16 categories and I turned out to be an ENTP , “cool letters!!!”. As I read through the Myers-Briggs results  it was really interesting how close the description of me was, in fact I was amazed at how accurate it was. There where however a few things that I did not agree with, such as, I was assertive, had strong opinions and a few other points. I headed home with the results and found my wife in the garden. As she gardened I read my results to her to which she either laughed or agreed because they where truth that she had come to know about me. Even when protested and said that this one is not true her reply was that yes it is.

I concluded two things from this.

1. One was that some of what I believed about myself was not correct and this explained why I did not get where I was going. I could not see how others were seeing me and so had come up with my own stories to fill in the blanks and justify why things had happened the way they did.
2. The  second part was we all come with a predetermined set of qualities, some of mine are creativity, discovery, freedom and also ways of being such as extrovert or introvert that are just  the way we are. The words” Resistance is futile” are words that came to mind. The great thing about knowing this is that now I can stop trying to be different than who I am at the core and make choice that both support me and use the talents that I do have in a constructive way to get to where I am going.

I found a  site on line that allowed my friends that where interested in taking the Myers-Briggs test and also one that gave a description of  the 16 personality types. The recommendation I was given was to take the test at diffrent times, such as when I am happy,stressed etc, to make sure that I got an accurate reading. In my case it came out the same each time.