Empowering career search and enrichment

Written by Catherine Rains

Over the last 15 years I have taught hundreds of MBTI workshops all over the U.S., and during every one of them (yes, I mean at EVERY one), someone will come up to me and “out” themselves as a P for the first time. Why does this always happen to me?


Maybe because I always share my story about being trained to have a Judging preference as a child, a process I liken to being trained to use your right hand even though you are naturally left handed. This never fails to trigger a career counselor in the audience to start questioning their preference for Judging, and by the end of the workshop, they excitedly confess their true preference for P, as if discovering a long lost best friend, or being let out of jail.

Knowing that you are really a P doesn’t suddenly change how you get things done – you still get things in on time, make lists, set goals and accomplish them. However, it does open up a world of new choices for how to integrate the world of P into what you had been trained to do as a J. What might that look like? Stay tuned for next week when we talk about how a P survives with grace (and humor) in a J world.