Action & Brain Type

Physical & Metaphysical sporting aspects

During my life as a sports trainer and coach since my 16^th year, it appeared that training at the lowest level was mostly involved with the physical an physiological aspects of the apprentice or student. Of course the necessary aspects of Didactics and Pedagogy were to be integrated in the all over skills of any trainer. Being highly qualified as a sports trainer & coach the main aspect within my training programs is the psychological approach. How is that acceptable ?

Before I was introduced into the method of “Myers Briggs Type Indicator”, I had sufficient knowledge and experience of all disciplines although more fragmentatedly approached. If I regard the content of this book of mine, I thought that it might be recommendable, if it really works what I am writing. Yes I does. I did lots of research in the backgrounds of MBTI, where it came from and what other research results proved why MBTI could also be associated with Brain & Action Type. MBTI is based upon Carl Jung’s philosophy of duality within the human being. Mainly Jung relied on his principles of the energy duality of “Introversion & Extraversion”.

Normally speaking interaction and intercommunication can only be both energies, no doubt about it, while Jung was talking about energies, that can be considered in an everlasting looping, continuingly exchanging directions – intro vs. extra. Earlier I compared this process in relation with bio-chemical elements within someone’s system (no one ever proved or disproved it yet). Where introversion is related to the Oxidator within the Tabel of Chemical Substances by Mendeljev and extraversion may be related to the prominent biochemical activities of Reductants. Where this table contains 9 main groups to complete nature’s content ?

Based upon dualities of Jung’s Katherine Benziger showed the world that preferred behavings were to be appointed to highly energy concentrated brain activities, the 4 divisions of the brain. With this information other dualities were located in the brain; based upon the research of the Myers-Briggs family. With simple terms : front left implies “logical thinking”, front right implies “intuitive perception”, back left implies “sensory perception” and back right implies “social thinking”. Further on they discovered combinations of this divisions. Firstly Benziger categorized people because of 1 partial, 2-, 3- and total (4) brain types. MBTI elaborated this knowledge into 4 categorizes and called these thinking styles : “Artisan-Guardian-Rationalist-Idealist”, the so-called “4 Brain Types”.

So here we have specified the preferred brain activities, that result in certain behavings including the physical activities. Within the sporting world Bertrand Théraulaz and Ralph Hippolyte discovered the relation between each brain type and the activities, that were specifically different according to each brain type of the player. So the way of thinking was in correlation with the way of moving. They called that aspect “Action Type”. Together with my good friend Jan Huijbers – writer of the Dutch version of the book “Totaalcoachen met Action Type” (together with Peter Murphy) – I expored the game of Action Type more deeply. So now, I look in the face and eyes of sporting individuals, observe their anatomy and motor skills. I listen to the choices of words and style of sentences. Thereby I know in 2 ways their thinking style and their preferred learning style as Kolb does in his own way.

A simple story as I tell it here to you. Is it sufficient ? No, it isn’t, because MBTI can’t tell the whole story. It does not describe the communication processes like Will McWhinney does with his “The 4 World Views”. These 4 world views of Will matches about 85 % with the 4 brain types of MBTI. It also doesn’t tell much about the way the decisions are to be made, energetically speaking like the bodygraph of “Human Design”. It doesn’t tell the kind of Intelligence and the related level, such as Dabrowski’s “Emotion as the motor of one’s individual development” at e.g. High Gifted children and people. And so there exist lots of different methods to profile individuals mostly focussed on the will to predict people decisions and actions. Why should you ? I don’t. I leave it up to one’s own “Autopoiesis & Concrescence”. All that I do it facilitate my players in the team.