Otto Kroeger - Creative You: Using Your Personality Type to Thrive

More praise for Creative You

Whether youve lost faith in your own creativity or are trying to help others regain theirs, Goldstein and Kroeger provide a wealth of rich examples and practical advice on embracingand making the most ofones own creative style.

J ANE A. G. K ISE , E D D, author of Intentional Leadership and founder of Differentiated Coaching Associates

Today, your creativity is more valuable than oil or gold. Its one necessity that cant be outsourced! This timeless, fascinating book shows you how to be more creative, boost your earning power and job security, and make the world a far better place.

P ATRICIA A BURDENE , author of Conscious Money and Megatrends 2010

Finally a book that explains the two types of creativity in a well researched and logical manner. Some of us excel in adaptive creativity, changing a few features to make something work better. Others exhibit innovative creativity, generating the ideas that come out of nowhere. As an artist, writer, and seminar leader I have found that both are needed and understanding ones own strength is crucial to career success and satisfaction.

S HOYA Z ICHY , author of Career Match and Personality Power

This well thought out and articulate book cries out for us to re-examine the traditional notion of what it means to be creative. Using the frameworks of type and temperament, the authors challenge us to know ourselves, so that we can recognize and nurture our own kind of creativity. More than a theoretical work, the book is bursting with practical information on not only how to understand our creative nature, but how to implement what excites us the most.

C YNTHIA S TENGEL P ARIS , MBTI Master Practitioner and president of The People Skills Group

Over thirty years after his field-defining Type Talk, Otto Kroegerwith his new and wonderful coauthor, David Goldsteinhas created an accessible and much needed volume on creativity through the lens of psychological type. In this age of grinding demands for creativity and change, Creative You empowers each of us to understand and fully realize the creativity that each of us is hardwired to have.

H ILE R UTLEDGE , president of OKA

Do you aspire to unlock and tap into your creative potential? You can by using this books new insights and useful applications. I found it both revelatory and relevant to see my type so perfectly captured. I found it both liberating and affirming. Creative You has enhanced my understanding and appreciation of creative styles, and I intend to use what I have learned to paint, teach, and validate with new confidence and renewed appreciation of creative differences in both process and product.

J EAN K. G ILL , AWS, NWS

David Goldstein and Otto Kroeger have performed a valuable service by helping people of all sixteen personality types to understand and enhance their creative gifts. Creativity isnt just for one type of personality. Each of us has creative potential, and each personality type has a creative contribution to make. Creative You will help you find your own unique pathway to a more creative life, even if you previously thought of yourself as uncreative.

S HELLEY C ARSON , P H D, lecturer in psychology at Harvard University and author of Your Creative Brain

With a range of incisive, insightful, and unique metaphors, Creative You will assist experienced practitioners to explain type concepts more effectively and help those new to the theory to grasp it more quickly and thoroughly. Goldstein and Kroeger have made a special contribution to the type literaturefrom cooking to spirituality to pop art, there is something here to stimulate the creativity of all types.

K ATHERINE W H IRSH , DP HIL , author of three volumes in the Introduction to Type Series

To Gavin and the children of his age, who, with any luck, can retain their creativity as they grow up.

I was honored and pleased to be invited by David Goldstein to write the foreword to this book that he authored with Otto Kroeger, as I have known, worked, and respected Otto for years.

David Goldstein, an internationally renowned artist and an MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) practitioner, presented his early work at the 2011 San Francisco APTi (Association for Psychological Type International) Conference through a presentation entitled Art in Yourself, Type, and Creativity. David had become interested in the connection between the MBTI and creativity when he was taking a watercolor class. The students, who were learning about their own painting style, were asked to fill out a questionnaire to help them determine what that style might be. Through this experience, David saw the link between MBTI personality type and art, and embarked on writing a book on the topic with Otto Kroeger. In conjunction with Otto, his research on creativity and the sixteen personality types spread from uncovering the link between painting and type to all areas of creativity; that is what Creative You is about.

Otto Kroeger is a leader and expert with regard to the MBTI and psychological type, and has been a pioneer in the delivery, writing, and application of the Indicator. This book follows in that pioneering tradition.

When Isabel Briggs Myers died in 1980, she left the Indicator to her son, Peter, and to methe two she trusted most to take care of her baby. With such a great responsibility, Peter and I felt we wanted advice from others. So we put together a team to help us in guarding the Indicators ethical use and in promoting its ongoing development. We asked Otto to join the team, and he acquainted us with a new method for presenting the MBTI assessment and psychological type to groups. This method was to use exercises for helping people to understand their type. Otto drew from Experiential Learning Theory (ELT), introduced by Kurt Lewin (18901947), which had led to the first National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, in 1947. The inclusion of exercises into an introductory MBTI session was a major contribution to MBTI interpretation, and it remains today as the most effective way to present type.

In Creative You, David and Otto have contributed something new and innovative with regard to the application of the MBTI and psychological type theory. They have used their own brand of creativity to give us insight into the area of creativityan application that has not been thoroughly explored in the way that it is here. For example, within the type community, we tend to connect Intuition with the creative process rather than thinking of sixteen different types of creativity. But David and Otto accurately explore sixteen kinds of creativity in this book.

I am blessed to be the recipient of a courtesy copy of many books on the MBTI and Jungian psychological type. Any time a book like this is published, or I am asked to write a foreword, I immediately look at my type (INFP). I always assume that if the author gets my type right, he or she must have gotten everyones right! I can say that David and Otto did a very good job of exploring INFP creativity. Their interpretation gave me a whole new perspective; I had never thought about what kind of creativity I had, and I found it interesting and enlightening. It increased my recognition that I, too, have my unique style of expressing creatively (perhaps it is writing forewords to books!).