MJO, here is a brief overview of the 8 available letters and the four categories: http://www.personalitypage.com/html/info.html

The other two are

the second letter: S or N, depending on whether one relies more in perceiving on sense observations or by "intuition" (grasping the whole of a thing/situation);

the fourth letter: J or P, depending on which is more predominant: the "judging" faculty (indicated by the third letter) or the "perceiving" faculty (indicated by the second letter)

The nuance that I've heard is that J's extrovert their main judging faculty, and P's extrovert their main perceiving faculty. Meaning that if you are an introvert, the J or P faculty that you extrovert is your 2nd best one. I think I am saying it right...

It wouldn't be a good idea to use this for pre-employment screening of any sort, since, if I understand right, the scientific value of the classification isn't accepted as part of mainstream psychology practice. But it might be useful for understanding one's own way of thinking, and for understanding others' differing approaches, which could well be helpful in collaborating with others.

Here's a piece about the subject: https://blog.criteriacorp.com/4-reasons-you-should-never-use-the-myers-briggs-test-for-hiring/

And here, incidentally, is an overview of the test, from its source: https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/home.htm?bhcp=1

I took it came out LIAR. It didn't really capture me so I guess I am a LIAR and not in tune with myself.

Dear Ken of Sarum,
ENFP.
Best,
Fr. Drew

Chonak,

I don't think it would be appropriate to use this as a pre-employment screen either, but why else might one inquire as to ones typology on this test among church musicians?

I can imagine a parish liturgy committee getting Father's ear and asking him to secure a person of [ ] type for the position.

Could it be a pick up line in a bar (once the SIP has been lifted)?

Chonak - you are so correct about my interest in it and you are so right in that it is not considered a valid or totally reliable means of evaluation. I simply find it very interesting since it has been, like much I read, food for thought and reflection. I have taken all those quirky test and personality puzzles and I always come out very introverted, meditative and highly / extremely empathic, but to meet me, you'd never guess it - LOL. As a side note, I find Carl Jung interesting and strange since he was supposedly an INFJ like myself. Yet, officially by supposed non-religious shrinks, I'm thought of as a Christian mystic similar to St. John of the Cross, while Jung seems to me to be almost agnostic. One thing I have noticed in my humble way, is that to me empaths seem to be more musical and artistically sensitive.

ps - We don't have an organ or keyboard. All singing is done unaccompanied and we only use plainsong chant; especially our rosary recitations.

ESFJ. Pegged me correctly!

Typologies of this sort are not intended to convey a static "type", despite their common usage for that very purpose, but *default tendencies* that people manifest under certain conditions, but that they likely have also developed the opposite tendency under different conditions (sometimes so strongly that other people may not realize the default tendency much if at all). And they can modulate over periods of time. (I have tested consistently over decades, but I also realize that other people don't typically see me as having those default tendencies but the auxiliary opposite.)

In the corporate context, they are classically used in team exercises to identify where a team may be overrepresented and underrepresented in skills sets.

I remember an early Y2K team exercise 25 years ago this year, where 14 teams from the company were cobbled together in a variety of task groups. All but one of teams was overweighted in extroversion, only one was dominated by introversion.

That one team: the phone reps group, who had to front face to the public (front trench, as it were). The stress brought out their introversion in reaction - members needed more time by themselves to reenergize, as it were.

America largely rewards extroversion.

BUT

The Catholic church's leadership grooming rewards introversion (there's an ancient Roman distrust of combining charisma and power without lots of checks, going back to the late Republic, and it was transfused into the Church's institutional blood type - there are exceptions for charismatic money raisers, and after time passes those exceptions often have the effect of reinforcing the distrust) and passive aggressive approaches to dealing with conflict.

The book "Prayer and Temperament" by Michael and Norrisey relates the four classic temperaments to elements of Catholic spiritual tradition: for example, to the four gospels, and to the prayer approaches of various saints and religious-order traditions.

The angle of the book was to relate the four classic temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) to these spiritual characteristics. If I remember, one of the types was compared to Franciscan spirituality, another to St. Augustine, another to St Ignatius, and I forget the fourth -- maybe the Dominican tradition. It wasn't much about the biographies of those saints, but of the characteristics of their prayers and the meditative or imaginative approaches they respectively pursued. The purpose of it all, of course, was to give readers ideas about how to find material for their own prayer lives in those various parts of the Catholic inheritance.

Incidentally, the authors did not place the Carmelite and Benedictine traditions within their schema, perhaps on the grounds that they were both too broad to fit in any one category.