We live in a digital age and Type does not seem to flourish as a concept as it used to.
If we connect to the original meaning of digital, digital means 0 or 1, true or false. The real world outside or inside of us is an analogic one where every piece of information whether it is a piece of music, a picture, an analysis of a political situation, an emotion or a psychological preference is in fact a continuous shade.
If you want to convert analogic information into digital you need to take enough samples of it and use enough individual pieces of 0 and 1 to characterize this sample*. Unfortunately, if you look at the outside world, in this transition to the digital age we don’t necessarily seem to remember this basic need for enough sampling and enough precision.
Reality shows love to picture people as good or bad and the viewer is invited to make judgmental calls defining what is true or wrong. One of its most worrying excrescences is to bipolarize the news between good or fake news. In our HR world, a half day assessment pretends to define whether a person will be fit for the job or not. And as type practitioners we all probably meet people that summarize themselves by saying “I am a green”.
Type has an urgent role to play in our digital world by reminding us that we are more than a “0” or a “1”, a “red” or a “green”.
For this we need to think in terms of the dynamic at play inside each of us and not have a static view of ourselves. Having an insightful look at the dynamics at play in each of us involves using the multiple lenses that the type world offers us (temperament, interaction style, archetypes of John Beebe, etc.).
In my keynote I would like to contribute to a larger and more dynamic approach of Type. I will share some of the discoveries of Bertrand Theraulaz and Ralph Hippolyte, creators of the Action Type® Approach concerning the links between the type preferences, and the motricity and posture preferences.
I’ll try to answer those fundamental questions:
- Do your type preferences show up in your body posture and motricity?
- Can physical testing of this body posture and motricity provide a reliable way of helping people discover their true type?
I will also explain how I combine the Action Type model with a deep exploration of a person’s type dynamics and archetypes.
Finally, I’d like to share a few examples of how the Deep Motivations that Action Type® enables us to discover seems to influence the expression of our type preferences and the access to all our Jungian functions, a subject that has offered an incredibly rich field of investigations for me.
* a CD uses 2 times 44.000 samples of 16 “0” or “1” for every second of music you are listening to.
JEAN-LUC DUPONT (INFP), Plenary speaker at the BAPT 2018 conference
About the Author
Jean-Luc started his career as an electronics engineer. Discovering the MBTI® helped him understand why his initial career move was not fulfilling and led him to become a type coach and trainer. It became his mission in life to help people understand themselves better and he has a passion for helping people find their best fit, for which he uses Susan Nash’s ‘Finding the Fit’ approach and the Action Type approach of Bertrand Theraulaz and Ralph Hippolyte. Jean-Luc has a particular interest in the dynamic aspects of type. He currently manages two companies: Metamorphoses in Belgium and D&P in Canada. Email: contact@metamorphoses.be. www.metamorphoses.be. contact@detp.ca. www.detp.ca.