What is your favorite theory?

I've always been partial to Carl Jung and his theory on psychological types.  I would have loved to hang out with him over coffee on a veranda overlooking a Swiss landscape and discuss his thinkings.  He seems like he would have been a cool guy! 

When I meet people, I ask them what their Myer-Briggs is and it's interesting to note not many people know what I'm talking about.  I thought that everyone who moved into the realm of higher education got that experience in Psych 101.  Guess not.

I enjoy knowing as it serves me to see how this person sees and perceives the world.  It also gives me an understanding and knowing about how they hear information and process - helping immensely when I've been in a management role "in service" to my employees and staff.

A bit of info from the Myers-Briggs Foundation:

Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961) who wrote that what appears to be random behavior is actually the result of differences in the way people prefer to use their mental capacities. He observed that people generally engage in one of two mental functions:

• taking in information, which he called perceiving, or
• organizing information and coming to conclusions, which he called judging.

Within each of these, Jung saw people preferring to perform that function in one of two ways. These are called preferences.  He also noted that, although everyone takes in information and makes decisions, some people prefer to do more taking in information (perceiving) and others prefer to do more decision making (judging).

Finally, Jung observed, "Each person seems to be energized more by either the external world (extraversion) or the internal world (introversion)."  What Jung called a person's psychological type consists of his or her preference in each category.

In 1921, Jung published Psychological Types, introducing the idea that each person has a psychological type. The academic language of the book made it hard to read and so few people could understand and use the ideas for practical purposes.

During World War II, two American women, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs, set out to find an easier way for people to use Jung's ideas in everyday life. They wanted people to be able to identify their psychological types without having to sift through Jung's academic theory.

My second favorite theory is Quantum Physics (mechanics).  I also thought Einstein was a cool dude because of his thinking of wearing the same thing every day, so he didn't have to take mindspace in the mornings to decide what to wear and could focus his brain on studying what was at hand.  I also enjoy his quote, "God does not play dice with the universe."   Einstein seems to have liked to ruffle feathers and shake people up to consider other avenues of thought.  I love him for that, because that's how I connect with the world also, not so much ruffling and shaking, but suggesting and consider....