It happens

I didn't know her.
A friend rang to say I should meet her, that she was a New York writer staying in West Australia to research a book.
He passed the phone to her. We spoke. Nothing much happened, but we agreed she would visit for an evening meal.
When she arrived I was cooking. I went to the front door, opened it, looked at her and something happened. It kept happening.
She stayed a week and in that time we talked about her Buddhist beliefs and my partner and I mentioned Carl Jung and she asked if she could take the MBTI® questionnaire.
It took no time at all for all of us to agree, she was an Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiver, ENFP, just like me.
Once we got talking life stories, you can imagine, so many parallels.
At the end of the week, as she drove away, she said: "I feel like I've found family."
So did we.
These things happen. People click. And confirmation of innate similarities can add depth and a connectedness to relationships.
It's wonderful when it happens.
Sometimes the opposite occurs: you don't click, you clack.
And then you discover the person has the same profile.
The question to ask yourself is: Am I seeing in her/him all the things I don't like about myself?

The Day After...

It happened again yesterday.
I was in the middle of a full-day MBTI® workshop when someone asked: "Do you change, because I reckon if I filled out this form ten years ago I would answer very differently?"
I replied: "Well, I know very clearly my profile but if I answered the questionnaire yesterday, true to my style of yesterday, I would look very different."
And I would.
I am a natural Etraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Perceiver (ENFP).
The day before I would have looked more like an Introverted, Sensing, Thinking Judger (ISTJ).
Why?
Well, the day before I was in preparation mode, very different to my presenting mode.
Presenting is easy, because that's who I am, naturally, the innate me, one who likes to be in front of a group, having fun, telling stories, revealing intimacies, inspiring insights.
In preparation I am alone, intense, working step by step, analysing structures, organising handouts, working against myself.
And the day after?
Difficult question, but it seems to me I become introverted, very practical, sensitive, controlling and inflexible.
A bit like an Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judger (ISFJ).
I seem comfortably, uncomfortable in the profile, almost locked in, and I experience some tension, especially if I feel let down in any way, if someone does not do as I wish, as if if they seem unaware of all I have done for them and are unable to complete simple tasks that are important to me.
I take matters very personal.
It seems best if I spend most of the day on my own, away from people, especially those used to my exuberance, flexibility, happy nature and desire to please.
It is as though I have given so much to so many, in such an intense setting, that I have to replenish the Self in a way that shuts me off from the outer world and closes me up in an inner world.
It doesn't always happen.
Sometimes the day after a workshop, I am quickly back to my innate ENFP self, but when the ISFJ mood takes me it does seem to have a weird, natural-unnatural, feel to it.
It never lasts long. I couldn't live like that. The sooner I'm back to me, the better off we all are.