A Blog in Review

Having discovered my Myers-Briggs personality recently and now that I understand what it all means, I now understand why I keep flitting through life from one career to the next and never really staying focussed for very long.  It appears that my personality type - INFJs - enjoy new learning experiences.  When the task at hand becomes repetitive or there is no longer much of a learning curve, we tend to want to move on.

I found a list of vocations that INFJs generally prefer which explains why I enjoy writing, psychology and have often thought of being a counseller.  It seems a shame that it took me this long to discover my true calling.  Or perhaps I did know my true calling - I was just too afraid to follow my heart…

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to be a writer.  I used to write a lot of poetry.  Being a teenager full of angst, it wasn’t very hard to get inspired to write.  I also had an ongoing novel that I would write on and off.  I was a little shy about it and never really told anyone about it, except my first boyfriend who was pretty impressed with my storyline.  He was of the opinion that I should write my book and get it published but I shrugged it off because he was my boyfriend at the time and I didn’t think boyfriends were particularly impartial.

I never took the desire to write very seriously because I come from an Asian family and well, Asians are rather practical when it comes to making money.  What good is a career that can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to put food on the table and pay off the loan instalments for the house?  Since I wasn’t at all confident about my writing skills, the concept that I could earn a decent living out of writing didn’t seem very feasible.

So I became a dentist instead.  Except, I hated it so much I couldn’t bring myself to accept the fact that I was going to be looking into my patients’ mouths for the rest of my working life.

I had thought of doing something related to psychology when I was still in highschool. I got talked out of it by one of my teachers who thought it was a “mickey mouse” subject and therefore a waste of my academic intellect.

Even though we had careers counselling in school to help guide our selection process of the University courses we considered, I felt I slipped through the net.  Careers counselling at my school was aimed at students whose aspirations were aimed at career paths that were believed to be above their academic abilities.  Since my abilities were never in doubt, the careers teacher never really felt the need to counsel my decisions.

I think schools should consider making students take the Myers-Briggs personality test as part of their careers counselling.

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