As a kid I was lucky to be moderately gifted at football - by which I mean the soccer variety. Though never likely to make it as a professional, I was good enough to be on the school team, and very occasionally to create some minor magic on the field of play. For a scraggy and rather shy 14-year-old just transplanted to a new school, being good at football did great things for my personal branding.
And yet I can still remember how much of an ordeal it was for me to travel to and from those matches on the team bus. While most of the squad was in the back rows singing raucous songs and horsing around, I was somewhere near the front desperately looking for some peace and quiet. Not that I didn’t like the other guys – quite the reverse. Or that I didn’t enjoy singing. It was just that I needed some personal space, and I found it a real strain to try to generate what felt like artificial bonhomie in order to fit in. My inner dialogue from the front of the bus ran something like “I wish I could be part of the fun. They must think I’m antisocial. Am I some kind of an alien?”.
We grow up and mature. We find ways to compensate for our perceived deficiencies, or ways to avoid situations which make us feel uncomfortable. We develop a professional veneer. And yet I found myself carrying this sense of “otherness”, a mild sense of guilt or inadequacy, well into middle life. It’s only quite recently, as I’ve been led to a deeper understanding of personal psychology, that it’s finally begun to dissipate. For that I must thank the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, and his work on “Psychological Types”, first published in 1921.
Picked-up by the typology community, and now best known through the Myers-Briggs Type Index (MBTI) and its counterpart the Jungian Type Index (JTI), Jung’s ideas continue to resonate. Jungian typology is not an exact science. What it gives us is a framework – a language – which we can use to gain insights about ourselves. It’s a tool for personal understanding and growth. The “introvert-extravert” dichotomy is a particularly fertile concept for understanding how we respond to people and situations. Through this lens my compulsion to be at the front of the bus comes into focus as the natural inclination of an introvert – someone who can find social situations energy-sapping but who recharges through solitude or contemplation, or in deeper one-to-one conversations.
I’ve been struck by how my clients respond when they first receive their JTI profile – when they finally get to co-ordinate themselves on the typology landscape. There’s often an immediate sense of recognition, followed by surprise at the accuracy of the description. There may be a feel-good about how something hitherto inaccessible has suddenly become understandable. And every once in a while there’s a heart-felt expression of relief - when I find that my personal preferences are actually somewhere on the scale of normal, that there are others out there who are quite like me. That I’m not, after all, some kind of an alien.
These last few years there's been a growing acknowledgement of the value of typology both for personal and professional self-awareness. Susan Cain’s well-researched book “Quiet” is just one of several welcome steps in this direction. This trend has been great news for anyone who's experienced that light-bulb moment of recognition, and a new-found self-acceptance. For me it's a growing sense of pride about what it means to be an introvert. It's a realisation that us folks at the front of the bus can have at least as significant a contribution to make as all the noisy guys at the back. We just deliver it differently...
