Hey look! It’s a video in a new series, “Q&A Quickies” where we finally start answering your many many questions! 😀 Yay!!
Hope you’re all having a good October!! More aLBoP on its way!
Tag: Q&A (Page 2 of 3)
Hi everyone! I hope your summer (or winter, down under) is going well! Lots of fun and informative stuff coming your way the next while, but one thing we’ve been working on a lot is Personalized Personality Typings. Thank you if you’ve ordered one, or even if you wanted to! This time the first two tiers of price points got sold out in 24 hrs! So we’re sorry if you didn’t get to order yours at your desired price point this time, but when we finish this batch up, we’ll be releasing more (and if you miss that one, same dance next time!).
In the meantime, since we put so much love and care into these, and since they include so much information that we’d like to share with *everyone*, we’re starting this new series, “PPP Show and Tell”, where we share quotes from the various Personalized Personality PDFs we’ve personalized to people (enough Ps, eh?) While we’ll never share quotes from *your* email, because obviously that’s personal, we do want to share what *we’ve* said to you. In your PPPs, questions and things about personality typing come up that have either come up many times before (like this post’s content), or that we might not have thought of addressing otherwise, that the whole class could stand to hear.
This time we have lots of quotes from a bunch of *different* PPPs, about the common misconceptions people have about Feelers’ relationship with logic, and what defines F in general. All these quotes happen to be by my INFJ because, even though we read through your emails, determine your type, and figure out bullet points of what you need to hear, together, he has been writing the vast majority of the PPPs themselves to free me up to write blog posts, comments, social media stuff in general, and not go out of my mind with laundry. Also, he happens to be an excellent writer and has a sexy grasp of principles. But, you know, that’s why I married him 😉 (Well, that and he’s a good kisser.)
I hope this clears up a lot of the comments we get regarding “That person couldn’t be a T, their decisions are too emotional,” and “That person couldn’t be an F, they’re too smart,” that make me feel :(. And hopefully this information will help *you* feel better about the person you are personally, and help you understand others and where they’re coming from. Because any person can be both useful and meaningful, logical and human. ~
“Now, regarding F, there is a plentitude of misconception about both F and T, to the point that both are often mischaracterized into narrow parodies that are true of only the unhealthiest people of any personality type. Many of the misconceptions about F are in fact true of unhealthy Ts, and vice versa. Originally and empirically, those who cognate in the way we refer to as ‘Feelers’ focus first on the meaning and significance of things, and in practice that has complex effects. For example, a Feeler who had been led to believe that it was cooler, more fun, or in any way better or more meaningful to be a T… would place great meaning and significance on trying to behave as a T, even to the point of attempting to focus on the use of things before meaning. But through all that, their root motive is still meaning, the meaning of themselves as a person in this case, which they feel requires them to be a T. Different types will often do the very same things, but for very different reasons. This is part of why it’s dangerous to type someone based only on what they do, rather than on why they do it, and this is also why attempting to change one’s own actions in order to try to behave as another type tends to result in only a mimic of the other type.”
“Remember, none of this means that you are limited to these strengths. You can develop the strengths of all the types, of Ts, of Is, of Js, and of S-es. But in order to gain the strengths of other types, we must first master the strengths of our own type. If we seek other types’ strengths before first mastering our own, then our own type’s weaknesses will be left unmastered, and they will get in the way. People who try to master the strengths of other types without playing to the strengths of their own type become merely a parody, attempting to mimic other types without truly becoming them, and trying to hide their own weaknesses without having mastered them. But as you learn to be proud to be a meaningful F, an observant E, a thoughtful P, and a conceptually-minded N, as you learn why your own strengths are good, then you will naturally and easily begin to develop the entirely new strengths of other personality types.”
“…to be human is to have emotions, but frequently Ts are portrayed as being unemotional, while only unhealthy people, F or T, suppress their emotions. The quickest way to be controlled by your emotions is to pretend they’re not a factor, thereby letting them run unattended through fields of fear, insecurity, and pessimism, usually.”
“Healthy people of all types should cultivate logic, and healthy people of all types should cultivate carefully bridled emotions, since without emotion logic loses context and perspective. There are many unempirical stereotypes which suggest that logic is a T trait, but it is simply a trait common to all healthy types. And an attempt to be unemotional is simply unhealthy, the same for Ts as for Fs. Healthy Ts are not unemotional and certainly not detached from others. Again, an attempt to act like another type without first mastering one’s own results in mere parody that fails to master the strengths of either type.
“The desire to be unemotional tends to be a very emotional desire, common among unhealthy Ts and unhealthy Fs alike, usually resulting from emotions such as fear, pessimism, doubt, or insecurity. These negative emotions tend to hinder logic much more commonly than the more cliché, bubbly emotions do. Negative emotions are emotions, and when we try to ignore their presence they are left free to color our vision and skew all our thoughts.
“A prime example of this is in your references to religion. ‘[Quoted description of unhealthy religion].’ This description, which you use to refer to all religion, seems to fit only a very small subset of particularly foolish religious people. But since this unhealthy version of one specific religious group made you feel invalid, telling people that they would go to some hell because of the person they are, which is a fundamentally invalidating thing to imagine, you have formed an emotional opinion against religion as a whole. The logical act is to acknowledge how much the beliefs of this one group of people made you feel incredibly invalid, and then perhaps to carefully note apparent trends among other groups of people who seem to share the same sort of unhealthiness. It is not logical, however, to make blanket statements about religion due to the negative emotions that fill your descriptions of these particular groups of people. In short, to be human is to feel emotions, and that is good because emotions, when mastered, give us perspective and remind us of points that thoughts alone are unable to keep track of. But the people who tend to be the most hijacked by their own emotions are those who pretend their emotions are not affecting them, thereby turning a blind eye and allowing their emotions to go unmastered.”
“Significance and meaning [F], when approached healthily, must be just as objective and measurable as use [T]; subjective reaction is neither F nor T; it’s simply human. While platitudinous oversimplifications often stereotype Feeling as being irrational or subjective, that has nothing whatsoever to do with T or F; no healthy person, of any type, should indulge in irrational subjectivity, and yet all types are equally vulnerable to it when unhealthy.”
“This doesn’t mean you’re doomed; no type is destined to have some laundry-list of weaknesses. It just means that _______ is a weaker area to keep an eye on. The thing about weaknesses, however, is that if we face them, they can become stronger than if we’d never had the weakness in the first place, due to the focus that we have to put on them! And we face them best by using the areas in which we’re strongest, rather than denying our weaknesses or trying to compensate for them.”
Learn all about receiving your own aLBoP Personalized Personality PDF here!
I haven’t done a comment response post in a while. I usually just comment back to the person individually, or answer their question in a Q&A, but I when Cody asked me the following question, I started responding and this post ran away from me, in the best way ;D There is just soooo much to talk about on this subject, and what I’ve written here is just the tip of a large and beautiful iceberg.
Cody asked:
So question for you, what is the difference in your opinion, between an entp male and entp female?
Thanks Cody! This is an excellent question! And actually one that I could write posts on forever 😀 There are endless things I could say about the differences in male and female versions of *every* type! I *love* gender; it’s actually one of my favorite topics ever… which goes along perfectly with your question!
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Good morning boys and girls! {Good morning Ms. Calise} Today we have a very special lesson on the Scientific Method from our favorite guest teacher, my INFJ! Aren’t you all excited to know about how the scientific method really works in practice and how to apply it to anything in your life so that any topic can be scientific? {class cheers, roses are thrown}
But little Bobby is unimpressed. Bobby reads science magazines and writes on internet forums; he’s got this crap. He knows how to wield black holes and Occam’s Razor like a boss, so that the other kids look stupid. Yeah, that’s right!
But what Bobby doesn’t understand is, just because something sounds like “Science!” doesn’t mean it follows the scientific method. Bobby may be good at Troll Tactics that make it look like his argument holds up, but if the other kids were to follow the scientific method, they would be able to see that what Bobby calls “Facts” are really hypotheses that don’t hold up under experimentation.
Don’t be like little Bobby; understand the scientific method so that you can apply it to every area of your life, not just “sciencey” stuff! Check out the playlist of all three videos below 😀 or go here to watch them on YouTube. For Science!
So there weren’t any posts in April. Not one. Not a Type Angst or a blog update, and certainly not Type Heroes: INTP – The Alchemist, or Group Dynamics: The Avengers, which I said in the Live Q&A I wanted to post in April. Nope.
Now, until last week, the hundreds of drafts I wrote of this post in my head were all apologies. “I am sooo sorry I didn’t post the things I said I would! I am sooo sorry you had to wait! I am sooo sorry I haven’t responded to everyone!! I am sooo sorry I suck at life!!!!” All those drafts were full of excuses too. “I was organizing my house” (which I was), “I was reorganizing the blog” (which, doesn’t it look lovely?), “There were personal and family issues” (true also, and those happen), “I was having multiple nervous breakdowns” (eh, also true). But all of those were excuses; not because they weren’t valid and real claims on my time, because they were, but because all of those things were just excuses in my life for me to ignore the real reason I didn’t want to write.
And oh, how pissed I was at myself that I didn’t want to write! Here I was, at the end of March, coming down from this insane blog high; we had just finished our first Live Q&A, that was amazing! Everyone was so supportive and loving and awesome about it! We were finishing up our first wave of Personalized Typings and there were so many of you begging for us to release more (and we haven’t forgotten you! I just hope you still want them…). I was getting daily emails from amazing readers gushing about how they’d never read anything quite like aLBoP. It was humbling and often brought me… well, I was going to say to tears, but I’m more of a can’t-stop-smiling-till-my-face-hurts when I’m touched, type person. So when everything seemed to be going perfectly, just what I’d always wanted, then why couldn’t I write? Why would I seek out other activities and “responsibilities” to *avoid* writing?
I could write about all the myriad of possibilities I considered these past two months for what *could* have been the problem, but that would take a long time lol. It’s amazing how many possibilities with merit an ENTP can come up with in two months. But, while some of them were useful in their own ways, and I learned a lot about myself this past while, none of them were the root cause behind why I was dreading pulling up Blogger.
The real reason? I was sick of MBTI culture.
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Hey everyone! Just popping in to do two things. The first is to remind everyone that the first aLBoP Live Video Chat Q&A is tomorrow night!! :O And we’d love for you all to tune in and chat with us if you’re free! It’s at 8pm, EDT (GMT-4), March 29th which is tomorrow! And we’re super stoked. Remember, you can email in questions ahead of time to aLittleBitofPersonality (at) gmail (dot) com, or just chat with us right on YouTube while we’re chatting up a storm. You can ask us about anything!
Go here to watch and chat… and hopefully there won’t be any technical difficulties…
The second thing I’m here to do is to introduce a new series on the aLBoP YouTube Channel, “Tactics by Trolls,” talking about some of the most common and predictable tactics internet trolls use to make it seem like they have an argument, when really they got nothin’. Here are 5 new videos and this time they star my INFJ so you get to see him on video too! (I think he’s pretty cute, but you can’t have him ;D) It’s the internet and trolls are everywhere, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel beholden to their foundationless arguments. Watch to see how.
Here’s the A Little Bit of Personality Intro video!! (Go ahead and watch it… you know you want to!) Both for the brand new Start Page, which will help those new lost souls find their way around aLBoP, and so that, if you’re trying to introduce aLBoP to your friends, you can help them easily understand what the crap you’re talking about! 😀 *Also* it’s going to serve as an intro to the aLBoP YouTube Channel, which is going to play a big part in the content this year on aLBoP. Starting with…
Hi everyone! Blog interest, emails, etc. has *jumped* up lately, and I wanted to thank you all for coming to read these things I’ve poured so much of my love into 🙂 And thanks to everyone who has sent me emails 😀 it’s been great to hear from you!!! Apologies if I haven’t gotten back to you yet! I swear I will reply to everyone… but I’m a little backed up and I want to give everyone the attention they deserve… plus, you know, I still have a blog to write 😉 And laundry to catch up on…
But I really do enjoy hearing from you and replying to you, so don’t let any of that scare you away 🙂 Being correctly typed can make a world of difference in your life and I’d be happy to help… if you’re patient 😉
Emails have also shown me areas of information I could stand to cover better. For example, I had an awesome girl whom I typed as a Sensor ask me why I typed her that way, and how to tell the difference between Sensors and iNtuitives, especially because she didn’t feel good at the types of things Sensors are “supposed” to be good at. Here is some of my response (made generally applicable through the use of handy-dandy brackets), because I think these are common concerns. I said:
“Well, to start with, Sensors don’t have to be athletic and iNtuitives can be (though I’m not lol) and Sensors can really enjoy school and learning etc. and some iNtuitives don’t. I really believe that any type can get good at any skill, they don’t have to be limited to a certain branch of interests…
“Like I said last email, Sensors think in puzzle pieces, where everything has a spot and snaps into place. iNtuitives think more in a web or word-cloud [I meant word-net], where one thought connects to lots of others through little strands of patterns. They’re both equal, but they look different when you know what to look for. So when Sensors talk, they focus on a single puzzle piece, be it a situation or information of whatever kind, that’s whatever they’re dealing with at that moment, and figure out where that piece fits. They don’t have to look at all the pieces at once because they can look at pieces in isolation, without them being attached to all the other pieces. An S will pick up one ‘piece’ of information, and just evaluate that piece by itself to figure out where it goes. An N can’t pick up one part of their information ‘web’ without everything attached to it coming too; they have to orient all the strands at the same time because otherwise they have no reference point and their web totally falls apart.
“Was that a really weird analogy? So, when [a Sensor talks, they] hold up individual ‘puzzle pieces’ of topics or information, and discuss basically, ‘I have this piece. It has this picture and is this shape. Hmm… I think it goes here; do you agree?’ and [the Sensor puts] it in [their] mind where [they] think it fits in the puzzle 😀 Then [they] move on to the next piece. As long as a piece is working where [they] put it, and the picture looks like the puzzle box, [they] don’t have to worry about what all the other pieces are doing; [they] can take the puzzle one piece at a time. [They] can focus on the puzzle piece right in front of [them] (i.e. the piece of information or whatever [they’re] doing at the moment) and as long as that piece was put in the right place, it’ll line up with later pieces.”
I focused in this email on the Sensor side of it, because that was who I was talking to so the other side wasn’t especially relevant, but I’d like to elaborate on the iNtuitive version now. When an iNtuitive talks, they don’t stay in one place or on one thought. Everything is connected and one string leads to a million others. Now, this could easily be confused with the randomness of Perceivers, trying to explore a million different options. SPs can certainly be random. 😉 No, I’m talking about forays into the conceptual where every thought connects to every other, looking over the whole at once. iNtuitives will constantly be looking for how one thought applies to another and how everything fits into place based on how it connects to everything else.
Now, iNtuitives’ method widely gets viewed as more superior, which ends up causing arrogant iNtuitives and recursively arrogant Sensors, and makes everyone feel defensive of the way they operate. Like I just said, the two methods are equal, but different. Healthy, developed Sensors bring such meaning to looking at the puzzle-piece right in front of them, and I’m always in awe at the enlightenment that Sensors can pull from the world at their fingertips. Likewise, as iNtuitives appreciate and admire Sensors for their abilities and thought processes, they can better value their own abilities.
So when trying to type someone as N or S, or when trying to understand how an N or S thinks, remember:
Sensors will talk in ‘puzzle pieces’—one piece at a time, everything has a place where it snaps in, so there is no need to look at every piece at once. Emphasis is centered on correct placement of each piece, rather than on how it connects to other pieces.
iNtuitives will talk in ‘webs’ or ‘word-nets’—each piece of information connects to all the others and *has* to be viewed in context or things are missed.
Both are necessary and neither N nor S can afford to roll their eyes at the other, pretending that either context or in-the-moment-ness are invalid or irrelevant.
*We need both.*
This personality tip is a bit of a soapbox for me. One of the most common and damaging things I come across in personality typing, as well as just interacting with human beings on a normal basis, is people saying that who they are excuses being a jerk or hating everyone. I’m always incredulous about how many people imply that it’s okay for them to be mean, bossy, self-righteous or like their opinions, thoughts or feelings matter more than others’ just because they’re them. This problem is especially prevalent in T’s but I’ve met my fair share of F’s with superiority complexes as well.
Now, self-confidence is fine. My ultimate objective is for each person to feel happy, empowered and confident being themselves and not someone else. But there is a big difference between feeling content being yourself and implying that everyone that doesn’t think or act like you is weird, stupid or intrinsically flawed. There are some select ways that tending toward being grumpy or arbitrarily obstinate can be endearing (albeit undeveloped) attributes of a person’s character; being mean, dominating or manipulative however isn’t “just something [insert personality type here] does.” That’s a character flaw, not a personality type.
For more information on what all the letters mean, click here, and stay tuned for more aLBoP (a Little Bit of Personality) Personality Tips 😀
Extraverts, whether Extraverted Perceivers or Extraverted Judgers, naturally excel at the parts of the cognitive process that require them to be outside themselves and gathering information from the world around them. Whether this is EP’s Observation of people as whole entities, understanding whether or not they can be trusted as sources, using either their intuition or senses outside themselves (Ne or Se), or EJ’s understanding of the individual Actions of others and the Consequences of their own actions based on applying either their thoughts or feelings outside themselves (Te or Fe), Extraverts are quite comfortable gathering information from people and the world outside themselves.
Because Extraverts prioritize those outside-themselves steps, they feel less confident making decisions if they haven’t gotten any feedback. Even a self-confident Extravert will want feedback from the outside world in order to understand the full effect of their decisions, though “feedback” doesn’t have to mean positive feedback. But Extraverts do need to beware of equating popularity of opinion with accuracy of opinion, whether for or against their own decisions.
Because Extraverts specialize at interpreting either people’s Motivations or their Actions, they are usually acutely aware of how others will react and interact with their plans and decisions. This means that they’re more likely to be aware of people as variables, but it can also make it harder for Extraverts to make decisions that will be at odds with the people they care about.
For more information on what all the letters mean, click here, and stay tuned for more aLBoP (a Little Bit of Personality) Personality Tips 😀
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