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96 Power Up Your Mind

It was Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who first described this area in
detail. He divided people into feelers, thinkers, sensors, and intu-
itors. Jung’s thinking has influenced many of the current tests used
to describe individual personality styles. One of the most widely
employed is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator™. This seeks to
uncover a person’s natural preferences. There are 16 basic types,
based around four main styles: intuitive thinkers, sensing thinkers,
intuitive feelers, and sensing feelers. These four styles will tend to
react in predictably different ways when they gather information
and deal with the world. So, for example, sensing thinkers will pre-
fer to rely on concrete facts, where intuitors will rely more on over-
all impressions. One of the advantages of the Myers-Briggs approach
is that it is nonjudgmental and transfers well between home and
work environments.
You have already seen this kind of approach when you
learned about the two sides of the brain and the theories developed
by Ned Hermann.

WORKING OUT YOUR LEARNING STYLE

British psychologists Peter Honey and Alan Mumford have devel-
oped a test that is widely used in organizations of all kinds. The test
mainly focuses on the third of the three elements that go to make
up an individual’s learning style, how information is dealt with. It
identifies four learning styles: activist, reflector, pragmatist, and
theorist.

Without knowing any more, which word do you think best describes you as a learner?

Honey and Mumford’s descriptions offer an accessible way of deter-
mining the way you prefer to put information you have absorbed
into action. While they do not describe all the key elements of a
learning style, they give a realistic and accessible view of your learn-
ing personality.
If you are an activist, you are the kind of person who is quick
to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in. You enjoy the immediacy of