I’ve taken more than my fair share of Myers-Briggs assesments over the course of my life. I took it for fun once as a child because my father had a book for assessing it lying around. I took it at the career center in the first university I attended. I took one in almost every single teacher preparation course I took in grad school. An amazing number of the online quizzes I enjoy are MBTI.

Needless to say, I’m fairly in touch with my MBTI.

Generally speaking, I’m clearly an Introvert, but I straddle the line on every other scale in the indicator. Most assessments agree that I’m either INFJ or INTP, but the truth of the matter is, I’m right on the line.

I was taking a quiz that threw out an MBTI result the other day, and realized what the problem is. A number of the questions ask about the person’s decision-making process. You are asked repeatedly if you follow logic or your gut when you make a decision.

It occurred to me briefly that I could have just gone through and alternated my answers and not been lying. It also made me think long and hard about what I base my decisions on. When I am asked to make a decision, I first look at procedure and previous decisions. That’s the logic part. If there are multiple or no possibilities, then I go with my gut instinct. That’s the emotion part.

This decision-making process has served me so well that I am often left with challenging decisions in every area of my life, deferred to by coworkers, supervisors, and subordinates alike. In my personal life, I’m the one who often gets to make decisions if I don’t deflect them quickly enough becasue of this process.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also come to realize that I am trying to instill this same process in the students I work with. I teach them to work their way down to reasonable answers, and then follow their instincts. It may not seem educationally sound, but it does actually help build up their confidence that they do know what to do, even when they don’t necessarily understand it.

My question now is: Is it truly possible to make decisions based purely on logic or emotion?

Posted by Rebecca in Personal development