Type interview: INTP
Robert McHenry, OPP's Chief Executive Officer talks about the development of his type.
'I was not an especially introverted child. Up to the age of twelve I mostly acted in an extroverted way. I think this was to do with the way I was brought up and the people who were around me at that time. My mother had preferences for extraversion and feeling. I remember how she was notorious for taking a long time to get anywhere because she would have to stop to talk to so many people along the way. I admired and valued the way in which she expressed her extravert feeling preference, and imitated a lot of it.
From around the age of twelve or thirteen until when I went to university I was more introverted. During this time I also realised that I had a more sceptical, rational view of other people than my mother, and I became aware of my preference for thinking. But the emphasis that was placed on feeling behaviour early in my life has continued to influence me: I now find switching from thinking behaviour to feeling behaviour relatively easy.
The same is true with extraversion. I can switch more comfortably to extraverted behaviour than to sensing and judging. At university I behaved quite extravertly, much more so than I had been between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. As I got to know more about psychometrics through my academic study of psychology, it was this aspect of my own personality about which I was most confused. When I was later introduced to the MBTI types, I found I could guess my preferences for intuition and perceiving, but I was uncertain about my introversion/extraversion and thinking/feeling preferences.
Discovering the MBTI instrument helped me a great deal - both in terms of my work as a psychologist and consultant, and in terms of the way I could use the instrument to understand my own personality and ways of working. As a psychologist I thought that the MBTI instrument had great potential to help people in the UK - as it had already done in the US.
The instrument also alerted me to the limitations of my own ways of working, and I learned to appreciate much better the strengths of other approaches. I was becoming frustrated: I always had a lot of ambitious ideas for my consultancy work but I never seemed to be able to realise them. Up to then I had done most of my work on my own. Like many INTPs I tend to be a perfectionist. At that time I found it hard to delegate because I was always worried that other people would not be able to do the work to the standards I set myself. Without the help of other people, though, I did not have enough time to do the work needed for what I wanted to achieve. More importantly I did not have the benefit of people with other type preferences who could offer new perspectives on my work - someone with a sensing preference, for example, to challenge or to fill in the details in my ambitious, 'big picture' ideas.
Isabel Myers's type theory made me aware of the contribution that other people could make to my work. I learned to value their ways of doing things - for example the importance of speed as well as perfection and the importance of action as well as analysis. I also tried to copy some of those ways of doing things, just as in childhood I had learned to act sometimes as an extraverted feeling type. I decided to set up a company, OPP, which would allow me to bring in other people, and other type preferences to help me. And I decided to train people to use the MBTI instrument through OPP.' |