I Feel Like I'm Herding Cats...and Enneagrams...and Other Random Thoughts

I struggle with delegation. It's something that I've always had a problem with in the past, and I continue to have a problem with it now. For me, the quickest way to ruin any sort of project is to make it a group project. I do not work well with others, but I work really well if I have the ability to do things on my own. If something does have to be a group project, then I have to make myself stay within strict boundaries so I don't end up taking over and doing everything. It's not pretty when that happens. I end up having lots of frustration and then finish things up the way they need to be done with an attitude of smug "I informed you thusly" and resentment that the people who said that they would do something just didn't do what they said they would do.

I can see what has to be done, and I know how to do it, so I usually just do it for myself. If I don't know how to do what needs to be done, I figure it out.

Lately, I've been reading a bit about enneagrams, more about the Myers-Briggs types, and about other forms of personality tests. I enjoy thinking that we can identify ways to work with each other by understanding our ways of interacting with others and with the world. Enneagrams are the latest way of understanding - I've done some work with learning styles and birth order personality and other theories about relationships. I am constantly trying to figure out why I work the way I work and why others don't work this way. It baffles me, to be completely honest, that others don't see the paths that I see - I want to know more.

There are many people who do not feel that these types of tests have any sort of validity or reliability, but I feel that any sort of information about someone else helps me understand them a bit more. If they identify as an ENTP, then I know something about them that I would have to find out otherwise. I like having some sort of criterion to help me figure out how to relate. 

It's probably no surprise to folks that I am an INT/FJ, and either a Type 1 or a Type 5 on the enneagram index. I tend to be classified as the "mastermind" or "architect." I am almost always right in the middle when it comes to the third indicator in the Myers-Briggs test - both a thinker and a feeler. There are good things about being labeled this particular type, but there are bad things as well. This type is listed as "arrogant, judgmental, overly analytical, as loathing overly structured environments, and as clueless in romance." I am all of those things...but I am also so much more. I am a self-starter, a big picture and detail-oriented person, and a creator of things not previously conceived. I solve problems before others even know that there are problems. I am learning to be more tolerant of people who are not the same as me, but it will always be something that I struggle with in many places of my life.

Do you see why I would love these types of systems? They satisfy my need to catalogue things into specific classifications.

One of the things that I've done in the past with interns is ask them to take a learning styles inventory. I like the one from Edutopia the best. I find it interesting how people fit into learning styles, and I think I've learned quite a bit about my interns and how to help them learn what I want them to learn. Come to think of it, I haven't done that lately...hmmm. I guess that intern #27 will be filling out that inventory during her first month with me. (She won't start for quite a while, so I have time to tweak her assignment calendar a bit.) I found ways to express information to my kinesthetic learners - we used a large piece of paper and some sticky notes to move bits of information around a situational matrix. My visual learners worked best with the same information drawn onto a piece of paper, and my auditory learners talked it through.

This stuff fascinates me, and I feel that there is much more to it than pop psychology. I wonder if there are other INT/FJs out there, and I wonder how many of them live in the music therapy world. Because we are INT/FJs, we probably won't ever communicate, but it is interesting.

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