The Thinking-Feeling Choice: 6 Reasons Why It’s Not Always An Easy Decision

Lately, I’ve seen many wrestle with the Myers-Briggs decision-making dichotomy of Thinking or Feeling. They can’t decide how they prefer to decide! The 6 reasons are listed first followed by more background information.


  1. They’ve never thought about it.They are trying to figure this out for the first time in their life and have not previously done enough self-reflection to understand their decision-making process. Remedy: Encourage the client to notice in the course of their days and weeks how they do decide.

  2. Life/work demands that they use one function despite preferring another. Example #1, a Human Resource Consultant. He may prefer making a decision based on what makes another satisfied, yet his role demands he make objective decisions to hire, let go, or follow procedures that do not serve one individual. He develops his Thinking function though it might not be his automatic, default, or most comfortable approach. If he takes the MBTI® with his HR role in mind, he may choose Thinking. Example #2. Someone with a thinking preference may need to consider the impact on employees of a logical strategy for making the company a success. If she doesn’t, she may alienate the very people who will be making the strategy happen. She can and does make those Feeling decisions especially after having been burned when her best laid plans backfired because others rebelled. She may choose Feeling if her family or work as demanded that kind of response. Remedy: Encourage the client to identify which preference is natural and which is learned. Which was most familiar to them growing up and which have they become skilled at in their adulthood?

  3. One decision-making function is their auxiliary or second function and the other is their tertiary or third function. According to Harold Grant’s theory of type development, we develop our second function between ages 12 and 20; our third between 20 and 35. Given many of our clients are older than 20, it’s likely that they may use both functions when making decisions. One usually rules. Remedy: Again, help the client to identify which was most comfortable for them during their teen years. That would probably be the function that would appear in their type code. The purpose is to identify their four-letter type code. Whole type is more than the sum of the parts. Consider that they are sorting between ISFJ and ISTJ. While there is overlap in those descriptions, one whole type description will fit them far better than another. ISFJ has Feeling as his auxiliary function and Thinking as his third. Vice versa for the ISTJ.

  4. The client has painfully learned from an authority figure that one way of making decisions is effective and the other is wrong. They authority either been explicit by correcting or stroking them when they made their decisions as a child. Or, the client has seen unhealthy examples of using the feeling or thinking function. Which ever was unhealthy, they reject in themselves even though that might be their own innate preference. For example, one client was encouraged to make logical decisions by both her parents who preferred thinking. She learned to do just that. She chose a college major that logically would lead to a respected and well-paid career. She spent several years pursuing the line of work that demanded logical decisions. She was not fulfilled, but she was successful. As she neared 30, she wanted to continue her education but in an entirely different field that resonated with her values and what was important to her. Her parents were not supportive. How could she leave such a promising career? She stuck by her values, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the human sciences and is excelling and enthusiastic. That would have been her preference all along, but she deferred to her parents out of respect and admiration. Gee, if you think about that, she made her college major decision based on what pleased her parents, a fine example of a Feeling-based decision. Remedy: This is tough. Ask the client which one they’d prefer to have as their decision-making preference. Why? What messages have they received in life about the “best” way to make a decision? Ask them what is their understanding of the differences between Thinking and Feeling? Get them to talk.

  5. The person doesn’t really understand the distinctions between Thinking and Feeling. They believe that Thinking = Intelligence. Who wouldn’t want that? They do believe that Feeling = Overly Emotional and maybe manipulative. Who would want that? Or, they have a harsh Thinking parent and don’t want to be like him or her even though they may have an innate preference for Thinking themselves. Remedy: You, as practitioner, must be very clear about the distinctions, describe each as a healthy, acceptable, and normal way to make decision, not be biased for or against either preference, and have powerful questions to elicit from the client examples of when they’ve used one or both of the preferences. This is true of all the dichotomies (E-I, S-N, T-F, and J-P).

  6. They might not have developed an effective decision-making function at all.
    In my experience, this is rare but possible. Someone may lead their life taking in plenty of information but never evaluating that consciously with logic or based on a value system. They may indeed take action but without conscious thought. Life may direct them versus them directing their choices through a healthy developed Thinking or Feeling process of evaluation.
    Remedy: Therapy! Have the name or card of a counselor if your client is interested in exploring this dilemma more.

The upshot is that simply taking the MBTI® does not ensure that a person will identify their best-fit type. No instrument is perfect in itself. Add the complexity of the human being and the various situations in which he or she chooses responses on the MBTI, and you have the likelihood that maybe 1/3 of your clients will settle on a type code other than the one the instrument identified.

Be ready to bring all your knowledge of Type, your open-ended questions, and your desire to assist another to identify their type to your MBTI® feedback session. This is not a simple undertaking.

Meg Ellis Myers-Briggs Type Theory



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