Empowering career search and enrichment

Regaining Balance with Insights from MBTI® Type Concepts

Written by Patrick L. Kerwin, MBTI® Master Practitioner

When your computer is acting all out of whack and nothing you do fixes it, there is one surefire solution: Control + Alt + Delete. Knowing how and when to use this combination of keys can help us take a frustrating situation and return it to normal. The same is true of our personality. When we’re stressed out, it helps to know what to do and when to get back to normal.

ISTJ and ISFJ:

Written by Patrick L. Kerwin, MBTI® Master Practitioner

Sometimes, despite your best efforts to keep yourself chill for the holidays, at work, family reunions, etc., you can feel yourself going down that slippery slope of being totally stressed out. One of the ways you know you’re headed in that direction is when you start “overdoing” your personality type. And every type has its own “special” way of doing that! Find yours below, and watch for those signs…


ISTJ and ISFJ: Obsessing about details
INTJ and INFJ: Over-swirling about connections and possibilities
ISTP and INTP: Over-focusing on finding logical conclusions
ISFP and INFP: Over-analyzing how you’re feeling

ESTP and ESFP: Being obsessively active
ENFP and ENTP: Bouncing from one possibility to another to another
ESTJ and ENTJ: Overly-controlling situations and people
ESFJ and ENFJ: Over-focusing on creating harmony and pleasing others

Often just recognizing that you’re overdoing it is enough to get you off of that slippery slope!

According to Introduction to Type® in Careers by John K. Ditiberio and Allen L. Hammer, people tend to be attracted to, and are most satisfied in, careers that provide them with the opportunity to express and use their preferences. When students learn about their personality type, they can be better prepared on their search for a career. Knowing the type of work settings they can expect from certain occupations (which is something they can research) can help them decide if that will fit with their personality. A great example is the article I shared in my last blog.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing how each of the sixteen types chooses a major on our facebook and twitter pages. I encourage you to check out the booklet. It is broken out in six main sections which lead to more specific insights for each of the sixteen types:

1. Choosing Courses, Majors and Careers – includes how students choose majors and what majors students choose. 
2. Learning styles – each of the sixteen types has a different style that works best for them.
3. The tasks of a college student – includes writing, studying and taking tests.
4. Its not all work - this section focuses on dating and relationships.
5. Living with a roommate – learning how to deal with other types in a situation where there isn’t much control on the student’s part. 
6. Dealing with stress – each person copes differently, but knowing what works best for one’s personality type can be helpful.

If you haven’t connected with us yet, find us on www.facebook.com/cppeducation and www.twitter.com/cppeducation. Don’t forget to visit us to collect all sixteen insights!

So what does stress have to do with MBTI® type? Plenty. Learning about your MBTI type and how you can leverage your personality traits into different aspects of your life can be very useful. For example, my ENFJ tendency is that I try to take care of others more than myself. In college, when I needed to study for an exam and had limited time to do it, that in itself was cause for stress. Yet if I had a friend who was struggling with something, I always felt the need to help them first, thus reducing the time I had to work on my own studying. This would cause me much more stress.

College is a stressful time and students aren’t yet equipped with knowing how to handle stress. Here I list some possible causes of stress as well as some tips for dealing with it which I pulled up from our Introduction to Type® In College booklet. These are specifically for ENFJ’s, but the booklet references all MBTI types:

Possible Causes of Stress:

-May try to take care of others more than themselves
-May overidealize others
-May be oversensitive to indifference and personalize it
-Their need to socialize may interfere with work
-May try to live by others’ “shoulds”

Some Ways for ENFJs to Alleviate Stress:

-Like going to movies with friends to relieve tension
-Naturally rely on friends for support
-Naturally give their personal best to any task
-Learn to identify and take care of own needs
-Must make time for studies in busy social schedule

Teaching your students how to deal with stress while in college, will help them develop these skills for when they graduate. They can learn to apply these in the workplace and in their personal lives.