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In this episode Joel and Antonia walk through the four decision making processes of all 16 Myers Briggs personalities and demonstrate how they can show up developed and undeveloped.
In this podcast on developed vs undeveloped decisions you’ll find:
- What is the difference between developed and undeveloped decision making?
- In the Myers Briggs system, there are mental process or cognitive functions. Among these mental processes, there are 8 in total. 4 of them help us understand information and the other 4 help us make decisions.
- All of our “should” statements are wrapped-up in the parts our brain that evaluates and make decisions in life.
- This is also the parts of our minds that take action to accomplish the should statements.
- There’s a limitation as to how many should statements we make. There are 4 different ways our brains make decisions. Depending on your Myers Briggs type, you favor one of these 4 as your primary evaluative mechanism.
- We will take a look at what these mental processes will look like at their best and when they’re not at their best.
- Quick review of the 4 decision-making processes.
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Extraverted Feeling (Harmony) – ENFJ, INFJ, ESFJ, ISFJ
- Harmony is all about getting needs (other people’s needs met). They’re interested in making sure the people’s needs are met, happy and getting along each other.
- Focused on relationships. Relationships are important and so obvious to harmony people. They walk into the room and know the culture of the room right away.
- When harmony is working at its best, it acknowledges everyone else’s conflicts. When a harmony person fears conflict, he/becomes ‘nice’ instead of being ‘kind.
- Nice vs Kind. Being nice means not creating any conflict or issues that causes discomfort. However, in a world that’s full conflict, nice is not going to generate true and authentic harmony. It’s just a temporary fix that will soon fade out. When you’re being “kind”, you deeply understand what people authentically need. It’s calling out the negative feelings and addressing it properly in order to get to a true harmonious outcome.
- Are you developing all qualities of kindness or are you just being nice?
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Introverted Thinking (Accuracy) – ENTP, INTP, ESTP, ISTP
- Accuracy is all about what makes sense and data. Is this logical and true? Does this make sense? This is the opposite of the harmony process. They focus on analysis and data.
- Undeveloped Accuracy. Because accuracy is always looking for the beautiful and logically consistent argument, and because so many people don’t have developed processes like accuracy people does, Accuracy will favor a well-argued point or an elegant argument OVER the truth. When they engage in a debate, they have the tendency to agree or lean towards an argument that’s beautifully presented. In addition, accuracy people tend to reject other people’s arguments and believe in their own reasons. You’ll hear them say how dumb people are for not understanding things or they’d say “that’s stupid, why would anyone do that”.
- Because there are so many premises that can’t be proven right or wrong, an accuracy person at the height of their development will frequently say “I don’t know” to a lot of stuff and they become very comfortable with saying it.
- The more ungenerous you’re going with an idea, you’re probably in an undeveloped phase and the more generous you are, that’s where you’re headed to a healthy expression.
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Introverted Feeling (Authenticity) – ENFP, INFP, ESFP, ISFP
- What feels authentic and is alignment with the core values of who I am as a person, what I stand for, my convictions and identities.
- Sometimes we like to feel emotions. It’s a feeler process and the emotion of righteous indignation.
- Undeveloped Authenticity. Not having to hear or experience something that makes you feel uncomfortable is self-indulgent. Not having to take in any information that has you challenged how you feel something about the moment, is self-indulgent.
- Mature Authenticity. Are willing to have their values challenged and questioned. They acknowledge that they might not be seeing something that put a stress on their values and make sure that they’re still in alignment with me.
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Extraverted Thinking (Effectiveness) – ENTJ, INTJ, ESTJ, ISTJ
- Effectiveness is about what works, what accomplishes the task or goal?
- What works in the external world? It may not feel good but as long as it works, that’s all that matters.
- Ultimately it’s all about what in the system works and is functional.
- Mature Effectiveness. When it’s at its best, it’s really thinking in terms of sustainability. What is long-term sustainable. It’s understanding ecology and systems and the impact of your decisions.
- Undeveloped Authenticity. If an effectiveness person is not willing to put the time and effort into building and managing truly sustainable models, they tend to short circuit into efficiency. With efficiency, sustainability is not taken into consideration or ignored.
- Effectiveness VS Efficiency. When something is effective, it’s efficient long-term but it’s not efficient in the moment. Efficiency is almost always a very myopic short-term goal.
- Anytime you’re going to grow, it’s going to be hard and you’re going to resist it because you’ve built patterns in your life to get a result that’s easy and doesn’t feel difficult.
- This is the core of really making your life better and increasing your productivity
- We believe that growth is something that’s worthy and important to focus on.
- Ask yourself if you are implementing some of these less healthy expressions in your life and begin charting/observing it.
- Ask yourself, “How can I make this better and mindful of these less developed manifestations?” “How can I practice my mental process in order to be at my best/optimal level?”
Follow this link to find a quick reference for healthy vs unhealthy ‘perceiving’ cognitive functions.
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23 comments
Loved it. Just a comment about effectiveness vs efficiency. Effective is when you have the goal in mind. You go in the right direction toward that goal. Efficiency is when you improve the process of going somewhere. So basically you can work out a beautiful process that is efficient, but if you do not have the Goal in mind you might be going in the wrong direction even. If the latter you are climbing up is leaning at the wrong wall, you will never get where you wanted to go. So make sure you keep the eyes on the price. What is it what you really want to achieve here? I know someone who repeatedly creates the need to get things done. ENTJ, has to get stuff done. That person created a cleaning obsession and has habits of creating tasks, managing other people’s lives (labelled as “helping them”), getting involved in topics at work that should not be that persons concern… Basically running on effectiveness and sensation= dynamite (3rd) until it’s too much. Suddenly it was so much work that blaming others that they don’t help with all this “important“ stuff is the only way that person uses pattern recognition= introverted intuition. (“I do all this on my own and nobody helps me”). Stuck in a loop. So do not create tasks for yourself that are not important. And then there is urgent vs important. Urgent is the ringing phone with a scam call on the other side, important is long term oriented like implementing a computer system in the company to improve the entire work flow and saving you 10 hours per week. If you are so focused on doing urgent stuff and you confuse it with importance, you are just keeping yourself busy. Btw: effectiveness is a nickname of the decision making process here, but it applies to all of us actually. Every decision making process mentioned can be made effective. Let say you lead a team at work to product for a client and you have harmony as primary decision maker. Goal is to get everyone’s needs met. That is being done effectively if you achieve the expected results. Your needs are met, the companies needs, the clients and your team is satisfied. That was effective. Your Goal was not to get the client product done, but to satisfy the needs of everybody involved which included the product to be done. Getting back to important and Urgent as well as efficient and effective. If you do what’s important to you, you will be effective. You succeed in getting needs met Fi, or getting the product done Te or getting it right (not being right) Ti or because it feels like it was in alignment with your personal mission and values in live to get that done Fi. You could be working efficiently, but would to ignore yourself and the Goal during the entire process, because it was urgent. Too busy or too scared to be who we are. So let’s a step back and see what’s important before you get too busy to see it. That person I talked about almost had me convinced to learn to use effectiveness as decision making process as well, because there is no time for my feelings. An INFJ it does not work like that or better said: It did not meet my needs to act like an INTJ, just because it was in alignment with that persons Decision maker.
Another great podcast! Having the willingness for and openness to discomfort as a marker of health/development seems like a powerful idea to me.
Your discussion reminded me of your podcast on Systems Thinking. It seems to me that the distinction between developed vs undeveloped decisions would translate to systems thinking vs cause-and-effect thinking – looking for a sustainable, big picture solution vs looking for a quick fix.
Anyway, thank you for the work you do!
Maybe the Fi guy just feels annoyed and harassed every time you bring up money to him. He already has his mind made up about how he wants to live, and he doesn’t feel like listening to criticism or arguments to the contrary, so he door-slams you. That’s what I would do if people kept coming at me with arguments for actions I had already decided against making. It gets irritating, and he doesn’t want to hear it since he already knows the arguments, having lived with his father and being already familiar with that form of reasoning. He feels like you’re questioning his right to make his own life choices.
On the other hand, you’re there when he walks out of the room and you know the tone of it that you feel is behind it. What I just described above is what I would be experiencing if you kept nagging me and I walked out. I do know someone who I thought was ISFP who would walk off to sulk and smoke if we disagreed about anything, and he had an air of righteous indignation as well as attempted manipulation, although my interpretation of his motivation might have been wrong.
Thanks for post.I came out as an infp in the test.my question is that can one person use more than one decision making process? I kind of think that I still use little bit effectiveness
And harmony sometimes .is it possible?may not be in perfect way but can relate to me personally the example situations u mentioned.
Antonia,
For me, your advice, though sound, would not be very effective in helping me understand. The reason for this is because the litmus test you offer is very granulated (in a good way), but can leave one feeling as though they identify with both aspects of the litmus test.
I can’t speak for the person who originally asked the question though. If an INFJ is heavily identified with Ti, then perspectives can offer ways to make it seem as though Ti is what one was meant to do.
I think rather than looking carefully within oneself, the INFJ should look more at the obvious within themselves… what the instinctive urges are in certain situations. An INFJ, though they may forget sometimes, are naturally skilled with Fe. It requires some conscious effort, but if applied, it’s easy to navigate the social terrain of meeting new people or introducing a friend to other people and things of that nature. I imagine an INTJ would struggle with this. An INFJ, on the other hand, may not like to do this, but once in the moment, they will make the most of it because Fe demands it.
It will be difficult for an INFJ to reflect inward to figure this out. Instead, it would be best to recall past situations and objectively look at whether Fe was being utilized or Te.
Te people tend to not be facially expressive at all. An INFJ can carry a default cold look, but can fluidly become quite expressive as well. I’ve personally experienced times when I’ve been extremely upset, but when I had to deal with a stranger, I put on a friendly face because I did not want them to deal with my upsetness. I wager Te-Fi types would not give a flying shit about doing this type of thing. They would approach the stranger in purely Te terms.
Sorry this post is not very organized, but hope it helps.