Ayesha Jaggi and Dhruv Vatsal, two Management Consultants conducted a session on “Know your Personality type” with 14 students from The Mott Hall School. The kids took an individual assessment of their personality type using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), followed by a number of exercises. Through these fun exercises, kids realized that each person is different, and becoming aware of one’s own personality and others’ preferences can help build better relationships.

People are complex, and understanding each other is not easy. MBTI helps us learn about oneself, and appreciate important differences between people. Ayesha and Dhruv started with some history around MBTI, which was invented around World War II, when a lot of women came into the work force, and had very different working styles. They then briefly mentioned the four dimensions (Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling and Judgmental vs. Perceptive) before getting the kids to take an online assessment.

Ayesha and Dhruv divided the kids based on their personality type, and got them engaged in a series of exercises. For example, they got the Extraverts and Introverts to separately plan a party to bring out the differences in approaches. In another exercise, they divided them in groups based on “Judgmental” vs. “Perceptive” and got each group to prepare a house using M&Ms. It appeared that the “Judgmental” group were much better at organizing tasks.

In the last part, kids talked through the various ways in which the MBTI could be used in day to day life, and the kinds of professions where understanding personality types is very important (eg Human Resource Management) . Ayesha and Dhruv ended the session by reinforcing the message that the MBTI is not a predictor of ability, but just an indicator of preferences.

This session was a fun learning experience for kids. They could see why conflict arose between them and some of their friends / family members due to differences in preferences. Many of them walked away with a commitment to getting deeper into the topic of understanding themselves and others.