Podcast - Episode 0251 - Is Growing Your Copilot Even Worth It?

19 comments

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  • Eucklase
  • February 1, 2019 at 6:32 am

  Hi Antonia!

  Something tells me Trump was trying to sound tough with that: “I can shoot people and still get votes.” But that is scarily enough one of the only insightful things he ever said. But as with everything insightful he says, it’s hard to determine whether it was a coincidence or not. Probably because of how neglectful he is of his Ti.

  Bottom-line is they are not mutually exclusive he can frame it like a tough guy but still attempt to speak his truth, which was pretty spot on.

  Yeah being tactical and charming definitely points to Se-Fe loop. Could also be Ne-Fe but I can’t possibly imagine the President being an intuitive.

  Flipping the loop would get us ENFJ and I can safely say he is not an Obama and that is not because Obama isn’t charming.

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  • Antonia Dodge
  • January 31, 2019 at 4:33 pm

  I think that’s another element that leads to me to believe ESTP – how ExTPs in general loop when their Fe tertiary has a hold over them. It appears as if he doesn’t care what anyone thinks until he’s in their presence and then he seems to REALLY care about their opinion of him. He implements charm, but if his charm isn’t working he defaults to anger and outbursts. He has these moments of Ti honesty (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” etc…), but I also suspect he’s dealing with a personality disorder which would color his relationship with Ti (since defending the ego is priority number one for personality disorders). Ti is really inconvenient when dealing with cognitive dissonance. So, the Se-Fe loop takes over and he seeks the solace of his base’s love – a symbol he must be doing something right if so many people adore him. Right now he’s in a pickle – the thing he promised them isn’t working out like he assumed it would (regarding The Wall) and now he’s hedging like crazy and looking for any escape route. It can’t appear as if he was weak and rolled over, but the definition of ‘wall’ is getting pretty hazy (including ‘slats’). I suspect of all the difficult moments in his presidency, this may be the biggest to date since he’s in danger of losing the fervency of his base (as was illustrated in the recent Bill Maher interview with Ann Coulter.)

  While I don’t really like to definitely state anyone’s type until I’ve met in person, the system that makes the most sense to me include the nodes of ESTP, Enneagram 8sx, living in an perpetual Se-Fe loop, and personality disorder. There may be other systems that result in his behavior as an emergent but none of them seem to line up as well for me.

  A

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  • Eucklase
  • January 31, 2019 at 8:23 am

  Yeah, I agree that Trump is definitely an 8, I am not sure about the ESTP typing but I agree with that more than ENTJ. He is not intuitive, he doesn’t show any type of foresight or insight, which an ENTJ would still have even if they were looping. Also, he is pretty good at talking his way out of things in the moment, which doesn’t look that sophisticated when you only see him in the news. Seeing his soundbites next to each other easily reveals how inconsistent the guy is. Tactical is about right.

  But that really makes me wonder: does his Ti co-pilot not itch at the blatant inconsistency?

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  • Antonia Dodge
  • January 31, 2019 at 12:14 am

  This was a fantastic story to share. Thank you so much for taking the time to do so. <3

  A

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  • Eucklase
  • January 30, 2019 at 9:23 am

  I am going to tell a story about myself that illustrates two things: 1. how important it is to not to listen to MBTI enthusiasts who seem to know a lot, telling you your typing is off. 2. How effective developing your co-pilot can be if you work from the right best fit type.

  I am an INTJ or that’s how I was typed by the test on this website the first time and a year later, the humanmetrics test, the 16p test, the cognitive functions test and more. Some MBTI-enthusiasts tried to convince me I was ENFJ. I tried to work with that, but ultimately couldn’t because both Fe and Se weren’t going to get much better for me obviously and I already was using Ni. I ended up almost burning myself out twice taking on this crazy task. The only way I averted this was by saving money, cutting costs and stopping my customer service work that was putting me in a highly unfavorable position and stay at home to finish my Applied Psychology major.

  The time I could go back to full-time studying and planning my studies and actually accomplishing things by passing exams and getting good grades for the projects I turned in was the happiest 2 months of my life. The proudest accomplishment of 2018 is that I did a little over a study year’s worth of work in 6 months. Does this sound familiar? I was using Te to safely exit the bad circumstances I was in and getting my focus back in terms of accomplishing my goal which is to finish my major by 2020. I immediately saw an improvement in my energy, mood, etc. Although it never became the same after almost getting a burn-out, I am still working on this.

  The argument that I was an Fe-dom was because I was too socially aware to be an INTJ. The thing these amateur MBTI-enthusiasts didn’t know about and didn’t take into account, because they don’t actually study psychology or anything related to personality theory: I am from a Moroccan family. Although I lived in the Netherlands my whole life, my parents’ Moroccan collectivistic values were inbedded in me.

  I got pinched so many times under the table by my mom because I said something that wasn’t right or I did something that was inappropriate in front of extended family. If I wasn’t secretly getting pinched I got an angry look. And despite all the efforts I put into blending in I still got called ‘asocial’ by my female cousin from Belgium when we were in Morocco and I was shutting myself off from the family gathering half the itme.

  But back to the pinching: eventually I learned to watch people’s reactions from a young age and tried to place them and adapt my behavior accordingly as a defense strategy. As an immigrant’s child I also had to learn how to adapt in school as well, because I was different from the others. Actually I couldn’t even speak Dutch the first 4 years of my life so I had to learn that from scratch in elementary school. All these things meant I needed to gauge people’s reactions so I had an idea where I was at and what people were even saying.

  Being my true self had direct consequences and my Fi got heavily defensive because of that. Early on I was avoiding “social” trouble. I started laying low and using my foresight to navigate social situations or just work harder just so people couldn’t blame or tell me off for something or point out a flaw. I tried to figure out what the right thing to do was, develop a strategy for the context, refine that strategy, and implement that so no one could tell me I had done or said something that could be criticized.

  Just imagine how I react when someone does criticize me in any way shape or form. I just break down, although I try not to show it, because one thing I also learned was showing emotion is showing weakness and people take advantage of that. You can imagine how my Fi took a beating from the Moroccan identity part, to the identity of being an immigrant in an individualistic country to being an INTJ who wanted to succeed in work but wasn’t actually developing my co-pilot instead I used Te to help protect my vulnerable Fi.

  I get why this could be mistaken for Fe if you don’t know how collectivistic cultures think about personality and identity, if your frame of mind is from an individualistic culture and you don’t have the unique perspective I have coming from both worlds. Actually, listening to these MBTI-enthusiasts was really my fault, all I have to say for myself is that I was in such a desperate situation back then where I didn’t have any understanding about my own identity in individualistic terms, I wasn’t succeeding in anything I had set out for myself to accomplish, I was in such a deep rut that in my moment of weakness I decided to put trust in a sympathetic person’s opinion on MBTI and myself for the lack of skills to create my own clarity.

  Eventually, I gave up on MBTI dismissing it as a broken system. No one agrees on what the functions even mean, whether the shadow functions are or are not a thing, what functions can be developed and what can’t and all those people convoluting functions with skills when skills, IQ and all other types of intelligence is more dependent on how many hours you put into practicing and learning a skill and other environmental factors.

  I then sought out a therapist for my problems, mainly in work: I was getting burned out in every customer service job I had before, I knew deep down it was a problem with being overstimulated by people, noise and their emotions and not having enough opportunities to focus and think deeply about a subject. All I was doing was navigating people’s feelings and grievances, which I was good at but I was also in a position where I was being perpetually blamed for something. Imagine how I was feel half the time.

  I wasn’t the cause of and I couldn’t do anything about the customer’s problems half the time I was hardly being effective.
  I was not in my element no matter how great I was at diffusing people’s emotions. I just broke down in tears one day because I had pushed myself into doing yet another customer service job I shouldn’t even have gotten into in the first place. Mind you I was doing that job really thinking I was an ENFJ even thinking stuff like: I am supposed to be an Fe-dom, why am I not getting energized or feeling a sense of challenge in this case and why is it that the thanks of the people who I eventually turned around do nothing for me in terms of generating energy. I was just annoyed and frustrated by the fact how terribly ineffective this company is in its policy and how there’s no one solving these issues from the ground up. Why is it I am being overwhelmed by my colleagues who try to cheer me up or try to reel me in to socialize or make jokes?

  Being an INTJ all that makes much more sense, but no I can’t be one because I am socially aware. rolls eyes.

  Eventually I saw multiple problems happening: I only had opportunities to work in customer service (that’s what I kept getting invited for, because of the experience I have in it) I still had my Applied Psychology major to finish but I didn’t have time for any studying because of all the time I was putting into work and all the energy that was getting sucked up by it, I was generally unhappy and always tired personally so even the hobbies I had that I liked doing I didn’t have the energy for.

  So I did what always works best: I planned. I facilitated my exit out of that job back into my studies. I checked my bank account and calculated how long I could survive on what I had, I cut costs where I could and I looked at my study progress and figured out what I needed to do first, how long I would need to finish that and if I could make that work with the resources I had. I finally decided I had two months to study full-time to get 40 credits and I did. In those two months I was more productive than ever before thanks to a clear goal, structure and plan of action. I was going back to what I am good at and that safely with the least amount of damage. My bills were paid, I succeeded at my studies, just by tapping into Te just a little more.

  I had already decided I’d get help from a therapist though because I still had a defense strategy of making sure people don’t find any fault with me personally or in my work which made me overvigilant in gauging people’s reactions etc. The therapist said something about finding my inner strength and setting boundaries. I didn’t know what to do with the esoteric sounding stuff but I understood boundaries, because I had learned the best way to set boundaries is by goal-setting and structuring your activities. So that’s what I did.

  So what was my goal? My goal at work is to do the best job I can. Does that require me to work really hard to please everyone just to get them off my back? No, that would mean people are always out to get you. They’re not, so let that go. The most effective way of doing said great job is by structuring my work in a way that is sustainable and putting less energy into gauging people’s reaction of me. Ultimately what it boiled down to was giving myself permission to shut myself off for the majority of the time and even taking walks so I can get away from the noise and clear my mind. Also I gave myself permission to help the senior workers there to structure their work which in turn helped me to stop going back and forth asking them to help me with something. So I gave them suggestions how to streamline certain things which they greatly appreciated.

  Another thing they appreciated was how fast I worked and that was only possible because of how concentrated and focused I could be by shutting myself off and the frequent quiet breaks. I “pleased” people by being my best self, although that was never really my goal.

  This story got sparked by Antonia’s and Joel’s story of how difficult the transition period can be, but it’s worth it. I had a transition period of 8 years being HIGHLY ineffective with many downs and even lower lows. The little bit of light I am seeing now is thanks to reintroducing Te back into my life so I am just grateful that life was so tough on me these past years. Failing is the quickest way to learning and I am seeing the fruits of the lessons I learned from my past fails.