The Concept Behind the Magnificent 16
I find Jung's model of human differences – and the subsequent refinements brought about by Myers and Briggs – disturbingly beautiful in its elegance. Like an elaborate ecosystem, it describes how each of the different elements fit together to create a whole that heals and renews itself.
It tells each one of us that we belong, that we have a purpose in being, that we have something unique and wonderful to contribute that is essential to the whole – whether the whole is a family, a classroom, a business, a neighbourhood or a nation.
The model's power, depth and breadth can be unleashed when it is introduced to a group of people; differences come alive as each person stands for his or her individuality. Biases fall to the wayside as differences are carefully sculpted into assets.
Removed from the group experience, I find that the intensity with which these differences are experienced in everyday life is somehow lost in translation with most mediums: words have precision but are dry, images are inspiring but nebulous, and interviews are insightful but idiosyncratic.
In marrying all of these mediums to each other in a joyfully polygamous collage, the grace and magnificence of the model come to life. What does it feel like to approach life with sensing, intuition, thinking, or feeling? What does it feel like to be faced with one's gifts, or one's Achille's heel? We not only learn what differences look like, but how it shapes each individual's subjective experience of life.
It is my understanding, my belief and my hope that by understanding differences from within – by inhabiting for just a moment another person's world as it is experienced by his or her typological predisposition – we will come closer to opening our minds and find a more compassionate way of being with them. We will eventually cease to feel threatened by the other's difference and grasp what the promise of wholeness really holds for us as individuals and as a society.
Understanding the individual is one of the keys that unlocks the secrets of our social ecosystem. As diversity thickens the plot of human interactions, finding meaning and purpose in our differences will give us the needed humility and courage it takes to embrace it in our everyday lives.
Danielle Poirier
It tells each one of us that we belong, that we have a purpose in being, that we have something unique and wonderful to contribute that is essential to the whole – whether the whole is a family, a classroom, a business, a neighbourhood or a nation.
The model's power, depth and breadth can be unleashed when it is introduced to a group of people; differences come alive as each person stands for his or her individuality. Biases fall to the wayside as differences are carefully sculpted into assets.
Removed from the group experience, I find that the intensity with which these differences are experienced in everyday life is somehow lost in translation with most mediums: words have precision but are dry, images are inspiring but nebulous, and interviews are insightful but idiosyncratic.
In marrying all of these mediums to each other in a joyfully polygamous collage, the grace and magnificence of the model come to life. What does it feel like to approach life with sensing, intuition, thinking, or feeling? What does it feel like to be faced with one's gifts, or one's Achille's heel? We not only learn what differences look like, but how it shapes each individual's subjective experience of life.
It is my understanding, my belief and my hope that by understanding differences from within – by inhabiting for just a moment another person's world as it is experienced by his or her typological predisposition – we will come closer to opening our minds and find a more compassionate way of being with them. We will eventually cease to feel threatened by the other's difference and grasp what the promise of wholeness really holds for us as individuals and as a society.
Understanding the individual is one of the keys that unlocks the secrets of our social ecosystem. As diversity thickens the plot of human interactions, finding meaning and purpose in our differences will give us the needed humility and courage it takes to embrace it in our everyday lives.
Danielle Poirier