Myers-Briggs: ESTP

So, the interesting thing here is that a few years ago, when I was still in Junior or Senior year of college -- maybe as early as Sophomore year, I can't recall -- my family had the opportunity to "do the real thing." My dad's work was having a psyche guy come in to evaluate them all for some kind of work-place efficiency, "how can we all work together" thing, and families were invited by said psyche guy to participate. We all filled out paper surveys and turned them in, and then Mr. Psyche-guy gave us personal results and said a few things about how our family probably operates. In particular, my family is a whole bunch of P's. P's tend to want to leave their options open and are more likely to say what they *don't* want as opposed to what they *do* want, like when deciding on where to go out to for dinner. It has been established that I am more likely than not a P out of necessity rather than true preference -- I'd rather things were more ordered and decisive, but I'd rather have no plan at all than risk changing plans at the last minute (as is likely the case with all these P's).

My report came up just like this, with middling-to-strong preferences. I haven't read what this site says about ESTP, but the report I got then said that we were very much centered in there here-and-now, what's actually in front of us, concerned with hard facts and action. At the time I was hesitant to accept the result; it didn't really sound that much like me, to me. Except that (contrary to my occasional bashfulness), I am more extroverted than introverted, and I am more in tune with my senses than my intuition, and I do function more on reasoning than on emotions. Over the years I've had many opportunities to observe that I am more focused on the concrete Now than I am on the Future, and though I enjoy thinking about theories and possibilities even then it all comes back to how it relates to the way things ARE. And I am definitely more interested in action than in-action; nothing frustrates me quicker than being denied the ability to act.

The only thing I think I might still complain about is that P. I think that as far as preferences go I am naturally an ESTJ, and the P is just a result of 20+ years of frustrated preferences. When we're going out to dinner, Gene says he doesn't want Italian, Josh says he doesn't want Mexican, and I say we should go get steak.