Getting to Know Your Personal Style

Your personal style is something that reveals who you really are. It’s important to have self-understanding in order to learn, grow, and get along with others. But being able to objectively look at yourself and determine what your style is can be challenging. Sometimes some extra help is needed.

HRDQ’s ‘Personal Style Inventory’ is an accurate, statistically reliable personality-style assessment that reveal’s one’s true self. The tool allows people to "see" how they think, act, and feel. Using the self-assessment, individuals respond to a series of 32 statements that relate to four paired dimensions. The result is a personality-style profile abbreviated by a combination of four letters symbolizing a preference for each dimension.

The basis of personal style are the four paired dimensions, developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. They are:

• Extroversion or Introversion
• Sensing or Intuiting
• Thinking or Feeling
• Perceiving or Judging

Knowing one’s own preferences gives you a unique personal style. Below are descriptions of each pair:

The Sensing–Intuition (S/N) pair: How you perceive the world

The S stands for sensing and the N stands for intuition. These are two different ways we pay attention to and recognize what’s going on in the world around us. Jung called these the “perceiving” functions. Though each of us can do both of these things, we have developed either a sensing perceiving function or an intuiting perceiving function as the basis for our decisions or judgments. A dominant sensing perception is a process that attends to specific details that come to our brains from our senses. A dominant sensing person is in touch with the direct data coming to them from the senses. A dominant intuitive person immediately begins to search for relationships among the facts. These people are interested in cause and effect.

The Thinking–Feeling (T/F) pair: How you make decisions

The T stands for thinking and the F stands for feeling. These are two different ways for judging the meaning of the data or perceptions we attend to in the world. Both of these judging processes have consistent rules and processes. They are simply different ways of deciding on actions. The thinker is the logical, scientific, rational person. A thinking person establishes rules for deciding how much weight each perception or piece of data should be given in making the decision. Feeling decision makers decide what is right and wrong. Their decisions are value-oriented. They make decisions by comparing how close the data brings them to the way the world should be.

The Judging–Perceiving (J/P) pair: Your attitude toward life

J stands for judging and P stands for perceiving. Regardless of the decision process used, there exists in all of us a general preference for collecting perceptions about the world, or for making decisions about the world. Perceivers have trouble meeting deadlines, prefer to leave things open-ended, and are always consulting just one more source. The perceiver is interested in the data. The judger makes decisions and close off the data to make a decision.

The Extraversion/Introversion (E/I) pair: How you orient yourself to the world

The E stands for extraversion and the I stands for introversion. A person’s general attitude and approach to life is measured by the E/I pair. This attitude affects both our perceptions and our judging functions. Extraverts are people who seek out the values, beliefs, and expectations of the world around them, then they seek to meet those expectations. Introverts do not step into new situations, seek out the rules, or become what is expected by the group. They develop an internal set of values, beliefs, and personal definitions of who they are.