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Personality Profiling: Mental and Physical Predispositions
What if I told you that you think you know your athlete, but you don’t?
What if I shared a tool to assist you in understanding why your son, daughter or student acts the way they do? What if I explained why different personalities are better suited for different sports, styles and/or positions? What if I said, to accelerate growth, it is essential that you get into your child’s world instead of forcing them into your world? What if I explained how motivating within their genetic guidelines will maximize their potential at a much quicker rate?
The old school teaching/coaching methodology demands the student get into the coach and/or parent’s training philosophy with total disregard to the student’s unique brain and body design. (Remember our friend Jose in the previous section?) More often than not, this archaic approach produces average athletes at best. At its worst, it quickly causes gifted athletes to leave the game.
Let’s begin by recognizing and respecting your child’s inborn characteristics.
Personality Profiling
Because the most universal personality type indicator is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I chose to use it to help you understand athletic/personality profiling. It must be noted that although profiling brain and body types is not a hard science and I am not a neuroscientist or clinical psychologist, I am qualified to maximize athletic potential.
Also worth noting, the founders of the MBTI, Katherine Briggs, and Isabel Myers, were not licensed, psychologists. They were students passionate about the findings of Carl Jung, the “father” of analytical psychology, and nurtured their love for their chosen field as they designed the now famous MBTI questionnaire.
The MBTI is grouped into four categories with 16 different possible configurations of personality profiles. The four categories list opposing brain types. Each person is assigned a four-letter acronym to best describe their primary tendencies. While each of us exhibits multiple sides of our personality, we possess a genetically dominant trait. For example, we all exhibit extraversion and introversion to some degree, but most of us tend to have an overall preference for one over the other.
Listed below are the four MBTI categories with their opposing personality profiles. To help identify your athlete’s personality profile, it may be in your best interest to first categorize yourself. Simply read through the four groupings listed below and choose your dominant brain function.
