Types are fascinating patterns that are best discovered holistically.

Welcome to Beyond Personality Types, the original InterStrength podcast. Every week we provide you with the better ways to use and talk about personality theories. I am your host, Olivier Caudron, a self discovery facilitator. With me is Dr. Linda Berens, internationally renowned for her innovative typology approach. Come with us beyond the indicator results to rethink what you know about personality types. Have you ever wondered if calling someone an introvert really captures the depth of their personality? Or if it might actually be limiting them? Hello and thank you for tuning in. Today on Beyond Personality Types, we're diving into the true meanings behind introversion and extroversion, challenging some of the stereotypes of oversimplifications that abound in our world of type theory.

Whether you're a practitioner or an enthusiast, this episode will broaden your understanding of these fundamental concepts, giving you a more holistic, nuanced way to talk about type. Let's see how adapting our understanding of introversion and extraversion can help us go beyond personality types. If you are gregorious, they say that you are an extrovert. They call you an introvert. If you are alone in a corner, is it the correct meaning of those two words? Linda, among the two of us, you are the one who will explain the concept of extra and introversion the best. I'll give you the stage.

Oh, wow. Thank you. Okay, now where to start? Let me start with history. When I was doing my dissertation on personality type, I had to do a lot of reading about the history of personality type. Many things written in the 1920s. At the same time that Carl Jung was writing about personality type, I found a reference about how Jung first came across idea of extraversion and introversion in some literature from the previous century, actually the late 19th century. He took that, and at first he saw that distinction and he talked about extroversion and introversion, or extroverts and introverts as types. Then he decided that wasn't enough.

And this is me just interpreting what Jung thought. And he talked about, well, there are mental functions. He described ways of perceiving and ways of judging, different ways of taking in information and different ways of making decisions. He called it sensation and intuition and thinking and feeling. And those, of course, were translated from German. Then he realized that that wasn't enough to talk about the differences. So he discerned that there were really eight personality types. There weren't just four, those with a preference for sensation and a preference for intuition, but there was Extroverted Sensing and introverted Sensing.

And so he describes eight types in the Personality Types book that he wrote. The term of extroversion and introversion as a noun became then an adjective in the type world. Since it was an adjective, it was a modifier of a noun. It was not something in and of itself. It didn't stand by itself. Now, I haven't read all of the Jung literature, so there's some experts out there who might have a little more to say about how much he talked about extroversion and introversion. And in his writing, he said something to the effect that extroversion is a focus outside the self, and introversion is where the focus goes inward. That got picked up from him by a lot of other people.