Using Your Personality Type to Improve Your Creative Practice

Does how we perceive the world and make decisions according to psychological preferences affect our creative practice?

The personal development guide, Creative You: Using Your Personality Type To Thrive by David B. Goldstein and Otto Kroeger has the answers.

Creative You: Using Your Personality Type To Thrive by David B. Goldstein & Otto Kroeger

Imagine a glossy mag personality quiz written by Eric Maisel and you’ll have some idea of where Creative You is coming from. Based around the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) a Jung-inspired self-inventory designed to identify our personality type, strengths, and preferences, the book starts with a simple either-or questionnaire to ascertain which of 16 creative types we belong to.

Having ignited our curiosity as to what our personality types have to reveal about our natural creative assets, next comes a detailed descriptions of all the types. 

16 MBTI Personality Types
Image from Wikepedia

MBTI for Artists and Writers

Although I had some initial resistence to assuming the label of a particular type, it was soon dispelled by the book’s warm, encouraging and affirming tone tone. Having recently ‘met’ David Goldstein on social media, I can testify that this warmth is not something contrived just for the book. MBTI certified and having spent over six years researching the connection between creativity and psychological types, David is an artist as well as a successful entrepreneur, researcher, speaker and writer.

David’s co-author, the recently deceased, Otto Kroeger was an organisational consultant specialising in the use of the MBTI Assessment and the author of numerous bestselling books including Type Talk.‘Mr. MBTI’ - as Kroeger was known - had a unique talent in breathing life into the presentation of psychological type, ‘making the complicated understandable, actionable and…entertaining’* and Creative You certainly delivers on these counts.

As well as interviews and stories from the author’s lives there is plenty of anecdotal wisdom from acclaimed composers, performers, artists, writers, and scientists - all of which gives a feeling for the creative ‘personality’ tribe to which we belong.

David Goldstein & Otto Kroeger

Using Your Creative Type to Enhance Studio Practice

Artistic practice is, by nature, isolated with little opportunity for direct feedback and constructive criticism. We stand back and squint at our easels or elicit feedback on our poetry from peers, but it's hard to be objective about our art and to know whether we are getting our point across.

According to Creative You, for ‘Intuitives’ like me - and likely you, as 69% of all artists and entertainers fall into this category - clear communication can be an issue and we could benefit from being less obscure in getting our point over.

The Ladder 
50 x 40cm, Mixed-media on canvas, © CherryJeffs 2014

This advice sparked my recent decision to radically rework The Ladder to make the vision in my head more tangible on canvas. Remembering the baffled faces of two acquaintances who had recently visited my studio, I asked myself,"What is it I want to say? Is there more I could be doing to get my point across?" The answer was yes, and I found myself empowered by enacting it.

Creative Type for Career, Criticism and Collaboration 

“Knowing your creative differences gives you confidence, like the way you feel when walking into a party wearing perfectly tailored clothing; when you’re acting creatively within your personality, it fits.”
David B. Goldstein and Otto Kroeger, Creative You

For me, some of the most interesting parts of the book lie towards the end with discussions on how to:

• orientate your career to take advantage of your creative type
• react to criticism, criticise others and be your own critic
• use collaboration to compensate for your weaknesses and blind-spots

There is also a section on how to encourage creativity in children according to their type which would work equally effectively to encourage your creative ‘inner child’.

Should I Read Creative You? 

With a book on personality types, there are going to be parts that you don’t want to read. Unless you can persuade your nearest and dearest to do the questionnaire - and share the results - it’s difficult to guess what other people’s profiles are.

But Goldstein and Kroeger do a good job of including sufficient information on each type without making huge sections of the book uninteresting for everyone else - particularly in the latter part of the book where they give general scenarios in which knowing your type can be helpful, with examples of the types most affected in those situations. Although this left me wanting more, it made for a coherent reading experience and stopped me skipping as much of the text as I might have.

So does Creative You convince? I think it does. Offering us a framework of tools and techniques, it helps us maximise our innate traits and mitigate our weaknesses. I certainly recognised myself in lots of the descriptions and reflected in the examples of my type as well as engaged by the recommendations for maximising my assets. Curiously, I share my personality type with Einstein. Although I doubt I’ll be winning any Nobel prizes in the near future, I gotta tell you I also share his birthday…

*Hile Rutledge, President of OKA

• Read: an excerpt from Creative You
• Comment: Have you done an MBTI test? What personality type are you? (I'm INTP)