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The first time I ever took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was in high school for an English class. I had never heard of the indicator before but quickly came to appreciate it when I found out that I was an ENFJ (Extroversion, Intuition, Feeling, Judging). I felt like this designation made so much sense and really used my results as a tool to guide the way I understood certain situations that I found myself in throughout high school. In particular, the "intuitive" part stood out to me because I always felt that I was very skilled at reading people, picking up on emotional cues, and showing empathy for others.
It wasn't until I was a junior in college when one of my favorite professors literally laughed at me for saying that I was "intuitive" according to Myers-Briggs that I had to start reconsidering how I defined intuition in my life. In general, intuition is defined as "quick and ready insight" or "the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference." But, when it comes to Myers-Briggs, intuition means something a bit different.
According to the Myers & Briggs Foundation, intuition is the opposite of sensing, and explain opposing ways of how we pay attention to the world. With sensing, we use our five senses and focus on the details of an event or occurrence, while intuition focuses on patterns and impressions. People who are intuitive generally prefer abstract ideas to concrete realities.
As an extremely detail-oriented individual (and someone who has taken the Type Indicator multiple times), I now realize that my preferences lean more towards sensing than intuition, but at times I can swing more towards the N side of the dichotomy. I often find that this correlates with events going on in my life, and periods of stress versus calm sometimes cause me to sway one way or the other.
However, I have spent a lot of time over the years wondering why it could be that I feel so intuitive if I really am a senser. While I truly disagree with the idea that your Myers-Briggs type is permanent and never changes, I think that ultimately my feelings of intuition are really strong capabilities in emotional intelligence.
Popularized by Daniel Goleman, who wrote a book of the same name, emotional intelligence is "the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically." Sounds an awful lot like the intuition I was describing above, right? Well, the Emotional Intelligence Network says that emotional intelligence is a head thing, while intuition is a heart thing. And in a post on Daniel Goleman's website, a colleague says that the set of skills we would associate with being able to read a room or have an intuition about an environment is a type of sensing. So in the end, this ends up being a pretty confusing distinction. Right now, my opinion is that intuition, in its most popular definition, is more of a "sense" and that emotional intelligence also falls into this category, while intuition as Myers-Briggs defines it is definitely a different concept altogether. Leave it to MB to choose the most confusing wording EVER. (If you are interested in learning more about the history of Myers-Briggs, this book was great and full of really interesting information!)
I have yet to read Goleman's book, but it's at the top of my to-read list, so I will definitely update you all on anything I discover by reading it. I'd love to hear what you think about intuition, sensing, and emotional intelligence. Can they coexist? And how do you feel about the way Myers-Briggs defines these words?
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