MBTI Step 2 – a bit more detail.

I recently wrote a short blog about the differences between step one and step two MBTI profiles and promised to explore things in a bit more detail. With apologies for the delay, here’s a bit more information…

Remember that the Step 1 profile simply defines you as E or I (for example). The Step 2 profile breaks that down into five subscales.

As an example of how it works, the first subscale looks at how ‘immediately approachable‘ you are. I often describe it along the lines of “suppose you’re at a party – this is the measure of how easily you can go up to strangers and say ‘Hi, my names’s Fred’…”.  That’s a bit of an oversimplification but it’ does well enough to start to conversation going.

Notice that all this does is measure the initial E-ness (is that a word?). It doesn’t measure the other things to do with being an Extravert such as how you recharge your batteries or how much of your thinking is done out loud – there are other subscales to measure those.

Importantly, the different subscales can now start to measure different aspects of how E or I you are. You may be generally an E but find it difficult to initiate conversations with strangers – so your overall E score might have a value for the subscale I’ve just described which is much less E… in fact your subscale might even by I!  (These are called OOPSs by the way – Out Of Preference Score – was there ever a better acronym? 🙂 )

With 20 of these subscales to play with, there’s a wealth of information available in the Step 2 score.  And, of course, it gets even more fascinating in the hands of a skilled MBTI facilitator (us, anyone?) because they’ll be able to look at how these subscales interact with each other.