Podcast - Episode 0265 - Myers-Briggs Judging Function Idealism

31 comments

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  • Catlyn
  • March 3, 2019 at 12:58 pm

  Hi Gada,

  As a fellow INTJ, I have a few thoughts I’d like to share. When INTJ’s overshare information, I think it tends to be in situations that lack proper context. We don’t know how to answer the question succinctly because the question wasn’t framed well — too broad, too vague — so we answer ALL the questions that we imagine the person might be trying to ask. Hence, oversharing and overthinking.

  Context is so important for me to be able to actually find the requested information inside of myself. I think this is would be true for most INTJ’s, which is why we tend to ask that pesky question —“why do you want to know?” It’s not necessarily an attempt to withhold or guard information. I’m usually happy to share what I know. It’s literally a case of not being able to access the information properly until I know how it’s going to be used.

  By way of personal example: I used to work as a personal trainer and I had a client ask me about creatine in a very general way. I couldn’t answer his question until I knew more about WHY he was asking the question. I needed more context to answer his question properly.

  Inside of my mind, there’s a bookcase that holds all the information I currently possess about creatine. So when he asked me about creatine generally, I went to that bookcase in my mind. But now I need to know which shelf are we looking at in that bookcase. Are we looking at the shelf entitled “types and brands of creatine”? No. Ok, how about the shelf entitled “creatine dosing and supplementation protocols”? Ah, yes, that’s the one the client wants. Ok, now lets find the specific book on that shelf that you want. Do you want to know what So-And-So says about creatine supplementation, or what Other-So-And-So says about it? Both? Ok, sure.

  It was only by walking through that process with him that I could answer his question without oversharing. I hope that makes sense.

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  • Rachel
  • March 1, 2019 at 9:25 pm

  The way you guys described the Fi drive for purity at about 11 minutes in is absolutely the best articulation of this concept that I have heard. I COMPLETELY relate to Joel’s fussiness, but Antonia is so right in it showing up a little differently in INFPs. It’s this absolute need for me to express a perfect self, to show up most authentically, and have nothing distract from or tarnish that representation of myself. I can be a stubborn perfectionist sometimes, and other times, can’t be bothered to do anything above the minimum. It’s those times when the output involves some insertion of myself, some subjective input, that I go hardcore crazy about every last detail, and it never felt like it was entirely Te-driven. There’s something deep and fundamental and values-driven underlying that need for perfection. I have been aware of this tendency over the last year and a half and have never been able to find the language to convey it, so thank you for hitting the nail on the head. I feel affirmed, but also empowered to keep that behavior in check. You guys are brilliant, and please keep PH going eternally.

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  • Alex
  • February 28, 2019 at 2:17 am

  (It doesn’t allow me to reply to your most recent post so I’m replying here)

  Ha. Yes it seems we are in the murky swamp of language lol. I think I get the other 50% of what you meant (or intended) now… hehe.

  You’re right, the abstract stuff is hard, especially when people are trying to talk about something that they have different perspectives on as a result of being different types. Like I feel that I have a very small understand of Ni, for example, and I know that people who use it are just totally on a different plane than me. Likewise when I talk to a friend of mine about Fi- there’s just so much she understands implicitly that I don’t get and it’s hard to translate that across types because it’s like we are using different languages :)

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  • Justine G
  • February 27, 2019 at 8:40 pm

  Cheers – I like that you appear to realise that people should be given the chance to modify, add, subtract etc. from what they have said earlier, e.g. to correct, clarify, add new layers etc. And speaking personally, there’s times I would have liked to have felt freely able to say ‘that thing I said yesterday, on reflection that sounded pretty dumb, can I retract that now?’

  I sense you understood what I meant for about 50% of my post, and this leads me onto the problem of language, and particularly when communicating in text-only form. This ties in with what we mean by the word ‘intent’.

  Different people often interpret the same word somewhat differently, even when presented in the same context, and the more abstract the word, the more malleable the interpretation of the word becomes. I became particularly aware of this issue in the Myers-Briggs/Enneagram communities, as people are trying to explain highly abstract concepts.

  Thus when I used the word ‘intent’, I was in effect using 2 different meanings (albeit not simultaneously), which I may have failed to parse out sufficiently. The one meaning I intended appears to have been correctly ‘received’ by you, which relates to pesky things like underlying motivation, bias, manipulation etc. The other meaning I intended by ‘intent’ however, is basically illustrated in this very sentence. So this could be described as ‘the basic information, idea or meaning I want to transmit to your conscious mind, minus any extraneous underhand baggage that may (or may not) be attached’.

  Thus I intended you to understand what I meant by ‘intent’, only I complicated it by using 2 different meanings, which could be summarised as 1) ‘underlying’ intent and 2) ‘face-value’ or surface intent.

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  • Alex
  • February 26, 2019 at 11:40 pm

  Actually I just thought of something… you described misinterpreted intent as “If the receiver gets it ‘wrong’ and as a consequence thinks you’re stupid or terrible.”

  I realized that that actually describes the Fe side of my polarity. My Ti ideal wants to transmit the data (using language) so that it “makes sense”. It doesn’t even fathom that anyone could possibly conflate clarity with adjectives like “stupid or terrible”. My Ti wants everyone to take information with a wide open, flexible mind that understands that everything is relative and changeable and additive and subtractive and is never one sided or deterministic. Even if I am pretty sure the information would be useful to the person I’m talking to, accuracy is completely open to accepting corrections. In other words, information that I transmit should NOT have intention, really. But I want it to be clearly transmitted so that the person will be able to understand it and use it correctly. But at its purest, it’s just because clarity is just awesome and satisfying.

  The judgement of what this information says about ME (my values and “intentions”) (e.g “transmitting this information makes me a terrible person”) I think comes from the Fe side of the polarity. Obviously they are inseparable, but if we are talking about Accuracy having an agenda, it definitely does not want to have to deal with social truths and the fact that “people are going to think I’m mean.”

  If I think my values/intent are being or are going to be misrepresented, it’s because I’ve gotten feedback from people that wakes me up to the disharmony that I caused. And then I’m just irritated because my Ti ideal just doesn’t even want to have to deal with that, because “people shouldn’t be adding all these layers of intent and implication onto information.”

  Information is a fantiastic, beautiful thing that I idealistically see as completely separate from the person themselves who are transmitting it. Non-idealistically, though, I don’t ignore context (like their biases and intentions) but I try very hard to parse out intention and information into a multi-noded system that can be viewed from different angles and be arranged and interpreted in different ways.

  I think that the example that Antonia used in the episode represented a Ti that was more closely tied to Fe (which would make sense since it’s her copilot/10year old). She talked a lot about the ideal being “info transmitted clearly to others so that they don’t misunderstand”, if I’m remembering correctly. I think it may have been easy to conflate the idea of “intention” with the desire to be understood, liked, and not viewed as offensive or stupid or unthoughtful.

  However i’m a Ti dominant and I remember finding that example to be a little less refined than how I would describe my experience with a “pure” Ti agenda. As I described above, since my Fe is “further away”, my ideal has always been “information is transmitted clearly because that’s freaking awesome and when things aren’t clear and modeled well it’s like basically physically painful.”

  Idk if this description of my experience clarifies anything about a broader population… but this topic has been on my mind since i read your question! I hope this makes sense because I didn’t realize how long this message got ?