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In this episode Joel and Antonia dive deep into the needs and desires of the INFP personality type.
In this podcast on INFP Personality Type you’ll find:
- Why are INFPs misunderstood?
- The cognitive function is a mental process that helps you learn information or make decisions.
- The 4 letter code tells you how your brain is wired. It’s like an entrance on how you learn processes.
- Authenticity – Is a way that you (as an INFP) make your decisions which is more inclined what resonates with you the most as a person.
- INFPs understand emotions on a whole different level.
- Questions to ethics become very intriguing to INFPs. For example: “what determines an ethical or moral action?”
- Authenticity is very in touch with the subjective human experience.
- Authenticity is where we humans find conscience. Because that’s when we ask, “how do we honor people’s individuality?”
- Oftentimes, INFPs become masters of human experience in general.
- The ability to determine that something resonates is a maturity of the Authenticity process. As it matures, it understands that not everything they experience is the same as everyone.
- Do INFPs truly want to be understood?
- Nobody could be 100% understand them apart from themselves.
- INFPs feel being marginalized and dismissed way more than being misunderstood.
- INFPs seek validation.
- We want to acknowledge that they have a specific type of pain based from their personality type.
- Authenticity type should be balanced with Exploration. Exploration (the co-pilot function) is about advanced pattern recognition in the outside world – thinking behind the curtain.
- If you want more description or definition, check out our episode “Introverted Intuition VS Extraverted Intuition”.
- Your superpowers are developed when you learn to master your co-pilot.
- Art is one of the places where INFPs thrive.
- Art is a communication of feeling and INFPs simply flourish in this context. They create art that’s impactful.
- For INFPs, they tend to recall how they felt/reacted in the past.
- They have the ability to mirror emotions. They don’t need to mirror emotions in real time. For example, the can look at an art piece and mirror the emotion to themselves.
- Authenticity people tend to recall how they feel/how they imagined they would feel and then instantly replicating the emotion inside them.
- The emotional language can be transferred in long extensive periods of time.
- In order to be authentic, you need to have a mature and vast understanding of how the world works.
- Intent: The Darker aspect of Authenticity. INFPs tend to try to give a reason that’s combated with logic.
- INFPs tend to defend their intent, because they see a wide array of positive and negative intent. They understand how people can easily go and slip into bad intent.
- Healthy INFPs view everything has positive intent.
- Being able to understand that darkness is universal and part of the human experience will help you accept yourself.
- How to go about making a living as an INFP?
- Getting something done can sometimes be very challenging for INFPs.
- INFPs have the desire to make an impact and be an inspirational leader. Oftentimes, they will disregard the passion they have. Passion is extremely important.
- Authenticity people can have the tendency to marginalize people. Make sure you do what you’re passionate with. Check in with yourself what you really want.
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215 comments
Hi from Germany,
About Lise’s comment above:
“Also I am highly aware of wether or not people actually listen with empathy or not; if they don’t I won’t open up of course; cause what’s the use? Then I would only do it to entertain or bore them, not to connect and grow from the experience together.” As an INFP, I couldn’t agree more. This is EXACTLY how I go when I am interacting with someone. In the case the person is not interested in listening to my story and under the condition that I am about to spend some time with the person anyway, I shift gears and go fishing for the person’s story – which I am most of the time interested about anyway. Though I keep a note in my mind “beware of one way relationships”. I am perfectly fine with genuinely listening to people for hours. I love hearing their story and them opening up to me, though I can’t be friends with someone if the pattern always remains this one-way dynamic.
About the podcast:
I can related to INFPs wanting to be validated more than understood. People are so complex and have so little grasp over their own mind – for most of it lies in the subconscious anyway, staying out of reach – that I don’t think we can understand each other fully anyway. About validation: if I don’t feel validated by a person whose opinion or love matters to me, I have a hard time dealing with it. It can be so overwhelming that my mind might kind of get numb, making me lose access to any possible rational or logical thought – and sometimes to any thoughts at all. I hate this situation so much – and fortunately it doesn’t happen as often anymore – that I would elaborate strategies before hand to make sure the person validates me in some way.
Joel said in the podcast something like INFPs can choose to mirror an emotion or not. He was referring for instance to people calling the XNFPs “cold-hearted” when they might expect them to show a specific emotion. YES!!! YES!!! YES!!! I can totally relate to this as well. My ESTP partner – yes, communication is a hell of a challenge at times but totally worth it – didn’t understand this part of me at first and thought I was really cold in situations were he would have expected me to be more demonstrative. I am so clear about my intentions in my mind that I sometimes don’t feel the need to physically express them for the outer world to see it.
In the podcast, you also underpinned the way INFPs can see how bad people’s hearts can go. It is even draining my energy like crazy if I spend to much time with people spreading a negative energy. It’s enough to me if that person criticizes others all the time. According to that person, there is always someone doing something wrong and – oh my – that person is so stupid. I am putting so much efforts in trying to grasp other people’s intents and perspectives that it makes me sick to my stomach when people judge each other so negatively and without trying to see thing from a different angle. A 10 minutes discussion going this direction can be enough to drain a considerable amount of my energy.
Thank you to Antonia and Joel for these insightful inputs on personalities and growth. I am a rather silent listener but I can tell you that am truly excited about your work and that reading a Personality Hacker article or reading a podcast on a bad day makes me feel better. So thank you for that too!
Of course INFPs want their friends to understand their emotions and their choices in life, we do like to bond with other people. I find it extremely difficult to open up about emotions to other people, physically difficult and verbally difficult. I am lucky to have really empathic friends who sometimes push me to go beyond the boundaries of what I would comfortably share, and we are closer for it. But when I speak it is incoherent and it’s difficult to understand for people who express themselves in a different manner. I tend to spew out abstract terms for my emotions rather than down to earth terms, and that’s not always so relatable. Also I am highly aware of wether or not people actually listen with empathy or not; if they don’t I won’t open up of course; cause what’s the use? Then I would only do it to entertain or bore them, not to connect and grow from the experience together.
The self-awareness and fear of rejection is kind of high as a result of both the inherent introversion and the experiences of being misunderstood in the past. And by misunderstood I mean that people don’t understand and validate what I am saying to express something deeply personal and emotional – maybe laugh at it or joke about it or says something insensitive.
It is a great feeling to connect, it’s universal and infps share that need. Maybe that’s why many use art to express themselves so that their feelings are validated.
It’s astonishing to meet ENFPs, INFJs and connect with them. They inspire and fascinate me. Meeting more of them recently I enjoyed connecting with them, learning from them and in their unique ways they helped me to embrace myself more too.
Ok, thanks for sharing thoughts and life experiences in this podcast!
“I do feel like a jack of many trades and you know the rest”
I understand how you can think like this of yourself. It is the notion of this “public image”… the idea of how people might see me, that makes me shudder. Because I know, I am not. We want to be validated in a positive way , not stamped with a negative label of something that society views as ‘bad’ (and there is the key, we too often perceive it as ‘bad’, because to view it as ‘bad’ is normal and widely accepted). For me it is like a fear of being categorized ( Someone in here mentioned: not wanting to be thought of as a “happy hippy” – which perfectly fits in with this thought pattern). It undervalues the opinion we have of ourselves. A negative label can effectively make my confidence crumble, cuz I dislike being labeled, especially when it is something people that associate with something negative. (Which leaves a lot of space for interpretation, as that depends on your social background, personal values and dislikes and so on).
But overcoming this dislike starts within you. Someone I recently met on a new job simply phrased this process of going through many jobs, etc. as “he’s studying life”. He too was struggling to find a “proper job” (as society calls jobs that bring in a fixed (good) monthly or annual income.). There are many people like us. So teh first step we too have to do is, look at them as society does, that is looking down at them. (You’re over thirty and still have no proper job or carreer? What are you wasting your life for?) I think finding something your passionate about (I too am working on it, but I have a notion where I might find it!) is definitely worth the time. After all you only live once. And while I struggle and take on random “low” jobs to financially survive, I know it is feeding that ambition to find satisfaction at work. It’s not easy for everyone to find that, and many resign from that hope, shrug their shoulders and accept living and working the same to them boring job, because – put in any excuses you like -. A popular one being " I have a family and need to feed them". It’s an absolutely valid (in society) excuse to use. Personally, I don’t have a family, but I know the way of thinking too. I use “I have work” as a valid excuse to procrastinate stuff I don’t want to do, or make big decisions.
The point is, you might not be able to quit right away, but you can start working on it – do online schooling or similar courses to gain knowledge in something of interest. Once you have finished it, you might be able to find a job in that field, or you might even stay where you are but get different projects, that are more creative and challenging to you. Unfortunately there are no fairies who give us a dress, glass slipers and a coach in this world, but it does not mean we can’t work slowly and deliberately towards it. But I’m getting off-topic. Normal for us, I guess? :)
Back to “studying life” – it is the way you view yourself and what you do, your attitude towards it, that makes a great difference. Stop labeling yourself as jack of all trades! You are, like everyone else, a student of life. And like at University, not everyone is studying the same material. Point. If someone calls you that, that might hurt, but see it the other way around. To them the idea of losing the stability (and maybe prestige) that comes from their job, would mean a great change and most people dislike changes or fear them. As for you, it might be a Problem, but you know(!) you can handle it. You can find work (anywhere), you you have proved that before. See it as a strength. At least I do, I took on this point of view, when I realized after traveling for many years, taking on whatever job, that all my friends and people from high school, were starting to get settled down – kids, married, stable jobs – great for them. But was my “experiencing life while traveling” worth less? I don’t think so. No matter how “low” in societies eyes my job might have been (fruitpicking, tree planting, cleaning hostels, dish washing), as long as it was honest and did not go against my values I can live with it. Indeed it gave me more appreciation for the hard workers of orchardist and farmers, gave me appreciation for the back breaking and sometimes quite disgusting work dishwashers have to do every day.
So, for any of you, who might be stuck with such a job for a while. It is, in a way, a good education. Try to see it in a positive light – whatever you might have learned from it, all these soft-skills like handling stressful situations, and be thankful to those who are still doing this work every day for you. And often, if you use your intuition, you can use knowledge obtained in one work place to improve another work place (if you are allowed to) or maybe one day, in your career you can you those skills as a foundation.
As for the idea that I have of what I’m passionate about. Travelling made the world grow into me – seeing and hiking through beautiful landscapes and learning about how people destroyed parts of it, how they were threatend and protected, how people try to rebuild what was destroyed and so on, it all showed me which path I want to take. It is towards conservation, “to help leave the world a better place than I found it”. I’ll use my creativity and “big picture thinking” to find solutions. My last employer’s business… I still think about how this and that “bit of information” might be useful for his business, how he could improve it, get better working conditions for workers, improve business standarts, etc. In my head I’m rewritting dreadful procedures into encouraging welcome notes and explaining rules rather than just deciding on them. I guess, being an “inspirational leader”, though I’m dreading the idea to openly lead, but if I can influence people towards a better direction (for themselves) than all the self-studying of types, psychology and so on, was not wasted, but stored to be used at a later point in my life.
So maybe this is the approach, for all INFPs who realize they are not passionate enough to write books – you your writing skills in a different way! – or create amazing art – use your creativity to design websites, flyers, picture books and so on, for something you care about. There are after all a million ways to be “creative” other than the standard Arts “act, write, paint, play instrument,..”
So, start by changing how you view things! Question labels we put on each other (that we hate so much anyways) and dare to swim against the stream for your authenticy!
I am wondering how many INFP’S like me have been abused in childhood. I am of the understanding..that early sexual abuse can sort of rewire the brain. In my journey of trying to heal…(memories started making it through years and years later) I have encountered many people that are introverted and seem quite similar to me. I am curious to see if those dots have been connected.
Also yes….since the squeaky wheels get the grease…being dismissed is a real issue for me.
Hi guys,
First thank you for your work and time doing these podcasts.
I found out I was an INFP last year and it made so much sense to me, as to why I am the way i am.
Im 29 in two weeks, and have floated from career path to career path. I am currently studying Nutrition and Health Promotion and through that have learnt I have a disorder called pyrolle disorder, which causes anxiety and depression… so I am finally on the road to recovery, i believe through listening to mu intuition and not allowing western medicine prescribe me medication that has side effects.
I absolutely reasonated with being an inspirational leader as I want to be help educate others about the link between the gut, the brain and mental illness ! and combat all this crazy pharmaceutical business going on ! Its definitely the Joan of Arc in me….. however in terms of passion,… i love art and I’ve become fascinated with drag and makeup….so who knows where ill be in a few years time, maybe a drag performer educating the world at the same time. Logistics is absolutely my downfall…
Cheers Nick, Australia