An interior, ca. 1978
We’ve all heard about how Edison’s Miracle is filling up landfills and burning way too much electricity that must be made by burning way too much coal that is dug up by West Virginians that now have black lungs. This is all very bad, but light bulbs and light fixtures can cause much unease as well, if not actual disease. Many of the lamps designed in the 1970s make me feel physically unwell, and design standards of that period generally meant that bathrooms looked moldier after they were cleaned than before.
The point that I am trying to make is that I am a little sensitive to my environment, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Regular readers of this blog may recall that my MBTI type is INFP, like my MSR colleagues Michael and Whit. Recently, I’ve done some more digging and come to the conclusion that my best fit type is actually INFJ, which might explain why I take my stress out on avocado refrigerators. Let me explain. The INFJ’s inferior cognitive function is Extraverted Sensing (Se). As is illustrated in Naomi Quenk’s seriously insightful book In The Grip, we often find ourselves at the mercy of underdeveloped inferior functions when we experience significant stress. While INFPs (inferior Extraverted Thinking) Whit and Michael are under the gun, they go all compulsively organized and logical, while I start unscrewing light bulbs and looking for an anechoic chamber to work in. According to at least one MBTI practitioner I’ve met, behavior “in the grip” is a good indicator of your best fit type, and my hypersensitivity to my immediate environment (Se) when I’m stressed points me pretty clearly to INFJ.
All this is perhaps especially relevant to those of us who work in PR, which is consistently ranked as one of the most stressful fields to work in. So you’d think with that much stress going around that the MSR office would be a compulsively organized, impeccably lighted and masterfully Feng Shuied masterpiece of workplace efficiency, and it is.
In all seriousness though, it’s important for those of us who work in high stress fields to monitor our health and stress levels, and at MSR we love working with companies like Myers-Briggs Publisher CPP, Inc. and sleep monitoring app developer SleepRate. They make the tools that actually make it easier for PR agents everywhere (and more importantly, the firefighters, police officers and soldiers who also top the stressful jobs list) to do their jobs and stay happy and healthy. Our big data clients might even be doing work that could save countless lives, as Jim Kaskade of Infochimps discussed at the Strata conference last year.
We’re also very proud to volunteer our PR expertise to the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center, and want to remind you that April is national Child Abuse Prevention Month. Visit sfcapc.org to find out how to get involved in San Francisco, and find out what you can do to REALLY make lives happy and healthy wherever you are.
Well at least with that list of client accomplishments, my sensitivity to the 1970s and loud noises seems a little more bearable. Here’s to our awesome clients that are making a huge difference in people’s lives!