Can Your Myers and Briggs Personality Type Change Over Time?

Maybe you don’t particularly like your personality test results, and wonder if you could work to transform yourself into another type. Maybe you’ve seen yourself change so much over the years, you think your Myers and Briggs personality type must have changed too. Or maybe you’re just wondering if your personality type is fixed or is likely to change with time and life experiences. All these scenarios boil down to one question: can your Myers and Briggs personality type change over time? 

The answer is both simple and complicated. But before we get to the answer, it helps to understand what your personality test results are telling you in the first place.

A Quick Overview of the Myers and Briggs System 

Your Myers and Briggs personality type is a combination of four letters, each leaning toward one side of a spectrum of two opposing traits:

• Introversion/Extraversion (I/E) describes where you get your energy from: either from within yourself (Introverted) or from outside sources (Extraverted).
• Sensing/Intuition (S/N) describes how you gather and process information: either through concrete facts and details (Sensing) or through patterns and possibilities (Intuition).
• Thinking/Feeling (T/F) describes how you make decisions: either through logic and objective analysis (Thinking) or through empathy and personal values (Feeling).
• Judging/Perceiving (J/P) describes your attitude towards the outside world: either through structure and planning (Judging) or through flexibility and spontaneity (Perceiving).

Let’s say you’re an ENTP. That means you lean more on the side of Extraversion, Intuition, Thinking  and Perceiving. However, you may behave quite differently to an ENFP, even though there's only a one letter difference. That's because each personality type is more than just a sum of its four parts—all of the parts work together in a way that’s unique to your type.

When you receive your personality report, you’ll get an overview of what your type means, how you make decisions and approach a variety of life situations, what you’re naturally good at, how you see and define yourself, and how others are likely to see you, among other things.

You probably will not fully identify with everything in your type description, and you may wonder why you seem so different from a fellow ENTP. Each of the traits exists on a spectrum, and your placement on each spectrum can create a highly individualized personality. For instance, one ENTP may be extremely Extraverted while another may be more of an ambivert. Other things go into your make-up as well, such as your personal values, upbringing, choices, relationships and experiences. All of these factors contribute to making you a unique individual, even within your personality type.

That said, Myers and Briggs is one of the most widely used and researched personality testing systems. Truity's TypeFinder® has been independently researched for reliability and validity, and you should see yourself enough in your test results to be confident that it is your true type. 

Can Your Personality Type Change?

The short answer is maybe, but not dramatically. It's more likely you’ll just grow and change within your type rather than becoming another type entirely.

We know from observation that it's possible for our personality type to mature and mellow as we age. Overall, people tend to become more Introverted and more Sensing (concrete in their thinking) after middle age, so an ISFJ (or whatever) at 50 or 60 will look different than the same type at 20 or 30. However, drastic shifts in personality are very unusual. Most people find that changes are gradual and subtle. In most cases, they will not be enough to nudge someone from one type to another.

On that note, here are some ways your personality may change within your type:

You become a more mature, balanced version of your type

Whatever your Myers and Briggs personality type, you (hopefully) will grow and change over the years—maturing is part of being human. The person you become, while the same in many essentials, might be different in other ways decades later.

It's a fact of life that time and experiences will change how you look to yourself and the world around you, and to a degree how you think and express yourself. In an ideal world those changes will be for the better, showing an increase in maturity, authenticity and self-understanding. But however different your personality may look, it's similar to how your appearance will change. There may be a few more lines on your face, but you are still the same person underneath it all.

One way this balance and maturity may express itself is through a softening of extremes. If, say, you’re an Empath temperament (Intuitive-Feeling (NF) in the Myers and Briggs system), the passionate, uncompromising fire to change the world you felt when you were younger will likely have mellowed. You may still cherish and live by your ideals, but you will perhaps develop a more realistic and forgiving view of what you can expect from yourself, others and the world around you. 

Your opposite traits become a bit more developed

Let’s say you’re an ESFJ.  When you first tested your personality, years ago, you scored strong on all your individual traits: Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling and Judging. But as you’ve gotten older, you’ve become more comfortable with solitude, learned to value hard data more than you used to, and you find it easier to cut those who see things differently a little more slack.

You’re probably still an ESFJ; you’ve just honed your opposite traits a little more. As each preference on the dichotomies—E/I, S/N, F/T, J/P—is a place on a spectrum, you can, and probably will, exhibit your opposite traits to some degree. 

It’s possible that one of these, say your Thinking function, is especially developed now, to the extent that you might wonder if you’re still an ESFJ. That kind of change—slipping from one side of the spectrum to the other—can happen, especially if you spend a lot of time in an environment that values the opposite preferences (at work, for example). But it’s more likely that you’ve just slid over on the spectrum a little toward the T side. Fundamentally, you’re still an ESFJ.

You lean a little differently in your different roles

The demands of your job and your different roles as a spouse, parent, friend, committee member, etc. may require you to emphasize different traits at different times. Some roles require even the shyest Introverts to behave in a more Extraverted manner for a while, while others may require Perceivers to put on the shoes of a more decisive Judger, etc. We can all access all eight of the traits, it’s just a matter of preference and degree. 

The problem is, if you answer the test questions based on the way you fill a work role or another role where you use your less-dominant strengths, you might get a skewed result. Just because you network like a boss at work after years of dedicated practice doesn't mean you get your energy from being around people, or take away from the fact that you're actually an introvert. You're just more skilled at leaning into the demands of that role.

Takeaway

We’re all works in progress and each of us is more than a label. That includes our Myers and Briggs personality type. As we mature and are shaped by life, some individual traits might change somewhat, though in most cases, the shifts will be subtle. Most of us stay the same personality type we’ve always been—we just manifest that type a little differently now that some years (or decades) have passed. Think of it as you, the 2.0 version.