What appears to be random behavior is the result of differences in the way people prefer to use their mental capacities, wrote Carl Gustav Jung.

Some people you just click and some make you tick.

Some daydream while some scream “show me milestones” or “give me tasks.”

It would be convenient if you click with everybody, wouldn’t it? People get you, agree with you and don’t mind whatever comes out of your blabbering mouth. They tolerate your behaviors. They understand your logic. They consider your feelings. They share your goals and purposes. They believe and value the same things you do.

Dream on. Every-body-is-like-me planet is not going to appear anytime soon.

We are different due to our ages, gender, religion, nationality, cultural upbringing, educational background, and career environment.

Many disagreements, arguments, conflicts, and pains we have resulted from clashing with the people with whom we interact, not knowing how to relate to them, understanding their view of themselves and their world.

If you don’t know them, how do you know them? This question seems strange, but seriously think about it, if you don’t know someone, how can you know them?

Unless you know someone personally or work with them for a long time, chances are you don’t know much. Have you ever felt that sometimes you don’t even know the person even after years “knowing” them?

Imagine you have a mental model, a human guideline to help you guess the “what”, the “how”, or the “why” that are essential to him. This model can get you closer to understanding his preferred mental zone.

The Jungian psychological type provides an interesting way to have a glimpse of yourself and others.

I first dabbled into Personality Type a decade ago. A friend of mine sent me two introductory booklets about the Myers-Briggs (MBTI), a framework built on Jungian psychological type theory. According to the MBTI model, there are four building blocks of a person’s innate personality type.

1. Where we recharge our mental energy (Extraversion – Introversion)
2. How we prefer to gather information (Sensing – iNtuition)
3. How we prefer to make decision (Thinking – Feeling)
4. Our preferred approach to the external environment (Judging or Perceiving)

European psychiatrist Carl Jung published this concept in the early 20th century. A couple of decades later, two Americans, mother-and-daughter Myers and Briggs introduced it to the American audience and developed the now-popular MBTI tool to assess people’s preferences, represented by a four-letter code. For example, someone has a type code INFP most of the time prefers Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, and Perceiving.

However, a Type is not a label that locks people to a box with specific traits or skillset. It is only an indicator of what that particular type prefers to do.

To learn more about type, check out the MBTI foundation. 16 Personalities and Type Finder are two other good websites I often refer people to try out the free assessment.