Questioning & Wondering
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posted by Vicky Jo at 2:59 AM
Thursday, June 15, 2006
About Me
- Name: Vicky Jo
- Location: Los Angeles, California, United States
I coach people to identify and develop their natural personality strengths in order to maximize their potential.
Please contact me to arrange a free strategy session -- I would be delighted to speak with you.
Previous Posts
- Don't Worry Be Happy
- Tertiary Talk
- Psychic?
- Two Kinds of Bosses and Jerks
- The Time Machine
- Cognitive Dynamics
- The Self-Disclosure Facet
- A Simple Truth
- Fe Organizing Principles
- A Great Website
11 Comments:
Excellent observation! It's a great way to activate the Se <---> Ni tandem processes.
Ha. You're learning! ;-)
The thing to know about Ni is that it's reliable but not infallible. That's an important distinction.
Mmmm. I have a friend like this. She's got all the answers, even when they're wrong.
On the other hand, I have a very hard time giving a definitive answer, and when I do, I'm sure it was the wrong one, or that I should have added something, or taken something away.
When a friend tells me about a problem she's having, it's often hard for me to tell her what to do or what the answer to her problem is -- even if I think I know.
Have to confess that sounds more like an INFP pattern to me than INFJ. INFJ's tend to LEAP to giving advice, with little or no hesitation. :-/
How do you turn it off? I'm tired of never getting to feel like I know.
LOL! Good question. I don't know! The temptation is to suggest using more of your judging function, but I don't know if that sounds lame. I guess I wonder why you *want* to turn it off if it's one of your best gifts.....?
It relates to having a wife and many friends who extravert a judging function I guess. It often feels like I never get to know anything.
I would definetly agree with the statement "I object to being labeled and yet I have an innate desire to understand and categorize myself." I myself have often struggled with this.
The way that I now look upon it though, is that I take what I can from labels but don't define myself by them (or at the very least try not too). It's basically just noting similarities to the label(s) you're looking at, but never once feeling obliged or forced to change anything that youa are. It's almost like this, don't let the label define you, you should define the label. The purpose of labels is to try to map through yourself, not define yourself. As the only person who can ultimately define oneself is non other than oneself.
In other words, don't let the label define you, let yourself define the label.
Well, Thundersun, I confess you've hit me at the Catalyst (NF) core. I whooped and hollered (well, on the inside), and just loved it
Then I thought about it for a minute and realized that what you propose is a conflation of introverted Feeling and introverted Thinking.
What's the most wonderful is when they align -- that starts approaching truth. That's golden.
But I've seen certain people do what you propose with type -- they decide THEY DEFINE THE TYPE PATTERN. So... for more than 16 years now I have witnessed individuals posting and talking and declaring things about type and insisting they are "true" because they believe they represent a given type pattern.
And.... they're mis-typed.
Trust me, I meet people nearly everyday who insist they have INFJ preferences and yet they have no such thing. At times like this, it's simply unavoidable to use introverted Thinking to sort things out (inasmuch as that's furthest from conscious for INFPs, and it feels so good to trump with our best gifts of consciousness).
So reality sets in, and once again complexity is simply unavoidable.
Namaste,
-Vicky Jo
(I still loved it though.)
I'm glad I made you holler and whoop, even if it was only on the inside. I am genuinly curious though, could you explain further on this combination of introverted feeling and introverted thinking, as oppossed to introverted feeling and extraverted thinking?
I confess I am somewhat new to type, and it wasn't my intention to define the style pattern, by no means. Perhaps I simply didn't choose my words correctly? I was basically saying don't try to push yourself into a label (or even a type), it should just be natural. You should fit the category, not the other way around.
This is somewhat relative to this concept. A friend of mine was once truly struggling with his faith. He said he just wasn't sure what to beleive anymore, and at times he forced himself to believe. I simply told him, don't try to push yourself into something you are not, one of two things will happen if you do. One, you will lose valuable parts of yourself, or two, you will break through what you tried to force yourself to be.
I think that better explains what I was trying to get across. If not, again, I'm not trying to define types, sorry if it may seem like that.
Regardless, still glad I made you holler and whoop. ^_^
Thundersun, I apologize for confusing you. I did not mean to intimate that you were defining type. I was saying that *some* people try to define type according to their own values, which is nice and all, but it leaves out what type is intended to describe.
Again, as a values-based coach (and as a person who has struggled with this and has had to learn it the hard way), I work with people so that they do define themselves by their values. I think life purpose comes through that kind of alignment, and it's beautiful to witness. As someone famous said (was it Gandhi?): "my life is my message."
It gets sticky when labels get in there. This is an ongoing problem in the type community (especially online I think). People will say things like, "INTJs should never date ENFJs because I'm an INTJ and I dated an ENFJ in high school and it was awful!" I'm sure you've seen declarations of that sort.
Well, what if the "INTJ" really has ENFP preferences, and that "ENFJ" they're complaining about really had ISFP preferences? Now what? And how much can we trust that their challenge was a universal one?
So I was finding the downside (after cheering) with this idea you shared: "don't let the label define you, let yourself define the label."
I think it's fantastic when we define the label and become the "poster child" for abstract things. I would like to "define the label" for "integrity," for instance. Or perhaps "master typologist." Or "Co-Active Coach." I want to inhabit those labels fully, and be thought of as demonstrating mastery and excellence in that way. YES! to that.
On the other hand, I can't call myself a "zebra" all of a sudden, and expect people to go along with that story. I will never be able to embody the essence of "zebra," regardless of how hard I try (darn it).
And this is the problem we have in the type community -- that people spend waaay too much time trying to "redefine" type and make declarations about type (particularly moral declarations!), and not enough time reeeeally understanding what it is that defines type.
And of course as I write that, you should know I'm a little bit of a freak in that respect, because my type discovery programs are all about helping people "discover" themselves inside the type dimensions, and I sell a groundbreaking program that teaches people what the essences are of the 8 cognitive processes: www.virtualtypeworkshops.com
And even after all the time and energy and effort I've poured into learning how to recognize these various forms of consciousness, I *still* get fooled on a regular basis. Type is NOT EASY.
As John Beebe reminds me, it is gratifying to see people try to use psychological types WITH PRECISION.
This is what I aspire to. I would be gratified to define myself by that standard. ;-)
Namaste,
-Vicky Jo :-)
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