My MBTI type is the ISFP, and I am introverted, observant, feeling, and prospecting. For this exercise, I asked my old Japanese friend Matthias Matsunaga to work with me. His personality type is the INTP, and he is introverted, intuitive, thinking, and prospecting. Also, he is assertive, while I am turbulent.
Before completing this assignment, I answered all those questions myself. First of all, initially, my partner was one of my peers (who did not provide me with her own answers), and secondly, I did it for myself to better understand what kind of answers are possible. My own answers were very long and had several details and examples, so I was very surprised to see those of my new partner.
The first set of questions was:
What is a positive attitude? To what extent do you have it? If you have a positive attitude, what actions might you display? How do you communicate it? What does a positive attitude “look” like to others? How do we differ in expressing our respective positive attitudes? How are we the same in expressing positivity?
Matthias said,
“A positive attitude is when you do not give up and are optimistic with logic. I usually have a positive attitude in this meaning. It depends on the situation, and what actions I display. For example, I communicate a solution. I guess, my positive attitude toward some people may look like I’m stubborn. I can’t say how we differ and how we are the same in expressing positive attitudes because I do not know the opinion of other people.”
First of all, my understanding of a positive attitude is quite different. At first, I did not even understand why Matthias started speaking about logic and solution, but suddenly thought about reading his MBTI profile. Of course, he was a Logician. While one of the traits of my personality is “feeling”, he is “thinking”, and he is rational. Sometimes Logicians can see other people not like their colleagues and someone to communicate with, but as distractors. When I look at Matthias’s answers, I feel like he did not really want to think about the feelings and behaviors of other people – he probably found them not important and decided not to lose time on imagining them even hypothetically.
The second set of questions was:
What is a negative attitude? If you have a negative attitude, what actions might you display? What does your communication look like? What does a negative attitude “look” to others? How would you teach others to be more enthusiastic and motivated?
Matthias said,
“A negative attitude is when you are pessimistic without a reason, and when you reject new stuff. One of your actions is rejecting something. My communications look like I’m trying to end something as soon as possible. For others, it might look like I “shut the door”. To be more enthusiastic and motivated, I usually explain to others why and how nice they are”.
Again, my understanding of a negative attitude is different. But after completing the first part of the assignment, I realized how different from me Matthias is and tried my best to understand and accept his point of view. In fact, I recall seeing such behavior from people around me. These reactions used to be annoying and weird, but now I see, that someone can see them quite logical.
During completing these answers, Matthias mentioned that he was a bit worried about the result. I told him, that correct or wrong answers for this exercise simply did not exist, and he needed to tell me about his thoughts and feelings, and nobody would judge him or laugh at him. After he finished, I shared with him my opinion about how interesting and unusual for me his answers were, and that now I felt the urge to read more about his MBTI type. In fact, Matthias and I know each other for more than 10 years, and I have never felt that we are too different. Sometimes I thought that he is not very talkative because he is busy or simply in a bad mood, but now I see, that it is because of his personality type, and he never meant to be impolite or not talkative.
Finally, we had to come up with the exercise from the training manual on NVC. I like exercise number 6, while Matthias finds exercise number 1 more important. As soon as it was easier for both of us (especially because we are located in different countries now), we decided to try completing exercise number 1. Therefore, we discussed what violence is, and one more time I learned how different we were. While my answers were more emotional (for example, for me violence includes harming people’s feelings), his answers were more logical (for example, for him violence means harming people’s belongings and physical well-being). In the end, we were able to come to the conclusion that such a term as violence can include many different aspects and, at the same time, can be different for different people – therefore, their reactions to the same thing can be extremely different, too.
To sum up, I learned a lot by completing this project. The main point for me was that all people are different, with different backgrounds, different personality types, different opinions, and different feelings about the same things. Now I will try to be more conscious when communicating with others and will try to understand them better, instead of feeling annoyed, offended, or angry. I also realized that positive and negative attitudes can be changed if you understand how exactly you behave and why. For example, you can cultivate positive feelings and, at the same time, analyze why you have negative ones and get rid of the factors that cause them.