Epiphany on Clifton Hill

 

Memories of a Myers Briggs training course and other matters in Autumn 2006 from an ENTP

 

 

 

 

I have always been a bit sniffy about MBTI. Mumbo-Jumbo. Those charts with the framework of boxes. Each box containing a little smear of text. The entire set of 16 purporting to represent the whole of humanity. Astrology. Mythology. Codology. I guess that was the T in me. Yes, it must have been the T talking.

 

So why did this sceptic find himself last Autumn on a train pulling out of Paddington in the direction of a week long course in MBTI.. Pragmatism? Opportunism? Sentiment?

 

Our service was running out of MBTI trained advisers. We needed an extra body to be trained so why not mine? MBTI was one of the things we offered our PhD students in our Graduate Skills Development programme. Since I was taking over the careers elements of that programme I seemed to have a claim. Or obligation, depending how you look at it. So I was offered the opportunity. Why not take it? It got me out of the office for a week. Sorry. Did I type that? Correction. It formed an integral part of my commitment to my own life-long learning and skill development.

 

Additionally, the course was inBristol. InClifton. This part of that city has an important role in my own personal story. I met my wife here. I took my degree and began my professional career. An entire pantheon of  important influences came within my orbit. The teachers, the writers, the fellow students; people who formed my view of the world.

 

The venue for the course was Emmaus House on Clifton Hill. I had never heard of it. It turns out to be located across the road from where I spent my last year inBristol. I had walked by it every day. I knew it was a place with some sort of religious purpose, but religious purposes were then a blind spot in my life.

 

On the first night of my course I retraced my younger steps.Queens Road, the Triangle, Park Row, Regents Street,Princess Victoria Street. I bought a book at a large bookstore. Titus Andronicus -  a Shakespeare I had omitted to read during my English Studies here.

 

At breakfast we tentatively made acquaintance with our fellow students before convening for the programme.

The course began as courses do. Introductions. Folders. Ice-breakers. Every-one declared their ‘type’ and applied a few self-descriptive words. These were flip charted into the 16 box grid that had been painted like a mural with those nubby thick pens that smell of spirit.

 

This grid turned out to be the key (Key? Noun as adjective?) learning tool (Key tool? Alan key?). In the rest of the programme we worked in variations and mixes of type groups. E’s greeted I’s who responded cautiously. N’s hypothesised for S’s who were underwhelmed. F’s tried to get T’s on board. J’s  filed their hand-outs apprpriately while P’s lost them. On our courses S’s were the thinnest on the ground. Wonder why.

 

It was these exercises that did it for me. To see individual differences, individual preferences being enacted in observable and predictable patterns was the revelation. To borrow a phrase fromSt John( and abuse it outrageously) the word was made flesh. But that’s how it is with us E’s and learning. We need to see it happening before our eyes. The word on its own is likely to leave us none the wiser.

 

That is certainly the case for me with literature on MBTI. Oft have I travelled in the realms of this stuff and found myself like stout Cortez on a peak inDarienstaring in wild surmise at a thick grey fog. It would probably make much more sense if you wereI.(Thats not a misapplied case of the personal pronoun by the way).

 

The second half of the course was rather spoiled by the paranoia induced by impending assessment. We forewent the pub for the sake of revision. However a few of us N’s escaped at 9-30. We had had enough of poring through our folders, line by line. I think most of us who found ourselves on the bar terrace overlooking the Avon Gorge were NP’s. but there was at least one SJ. He knew that he knew his stuff and had scheduled in his drinking time. Wise man.

 

And so on the last day I left Emmaus House, its wondrous Zen garden, my successful exam paper, my memories. I waited at the corner ofVictoria SquareandQueens Roadfor the 8A for some 15 minutes. I watched the University students to’ing and fro’ing. I reflected that yet again these few hilltopBristolacres had provided an experience. If it wasn’t an epiphany it certainly felt like one.

“Day after day, alone on a hill

The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still.”

 

And so toTempleMeadsand a train pulling East towards the rest of my life.