Download Episode Here – right click link and select “Save Link As…”
In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about why now more than ever we need introverted thinking in our world.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- As an ENTP, Antonia’s decision maker is Introverted Thinking “Accuracy” (Ti)
- Accuracy = Finding internal logical consistencies and congruities when making decisions and clean slicing info and making distinctions around different pieces of data and being able to pull upon all of that to make the best decision possible.
- One way to frame a discussion of Ti is by talking about Fi (Introverted Feeling) “Authenticity”
- Fi is about what resonates with you personally. Inner alignment.
- Fi users can hold space for dark, intense emotions.
- The capacity to see the darker motivations in your own heart.
- Ti has a similar function around thoughts.
- Fi can sit with heavy emotion.
- Ti can sit with heavy/difficult thoughts.
- Why the World Needs Introverted Thinking – first podcast
- People don’t see the value of Ti in today’s world
- Emotional aikido – find the emotion you want in the sea of all the emotions
- We have to be able to find the dark thoughts within us and the source of those thoughts
- Logical/rational/analysis: does not equal truth
- Rational is an argument that when seen thru the system which created it makes sense to the system.
- Rationale is the thing we say to ourselves to keep believing the things we want to think.
- People think what they want to think.
- There is a level of agency we are trying to strip away from each other.
- It is extraordinary arrogance to believe we can force someone to think the way we want them to think.
- Ti’s primary job is to make space for the worst thoughts. Like Fi users can make space for the worst intent/motives/feelings people can have.
- We are in a period where we are trying to honor people’s emotions. That’s a good thing.
- Everything everybody does makes complete and total sense to them, or they wouldn’t do it.
- When we hear thoughts that disturb or disgust us, we think we can force it out through social pressure.
- Extraverted Feeling (Fe) is collective thinking based on getting everyone’s needs met.
- Reprogramming can’t happen through shaming. It needs to come about through logic.
- The logic of the new environment rewrites the logic of the old environment.
- Antagonism, shame, and embarrassment don’t help someone rewrite their programming. It only forces them to hide their behavior.
- The script remains, but now the person has to act contrary to the programming which creates dissonance.
- Sometimes we have thoughts that are so persistent that they aren’t easy to dismiss.
- Another form of dissonance occurs when we have a thought that runs contrary to everything else we observe, but for some reason, it is compelling to us.
- We allow the thought to continue to live.
- There are some thoughts we don’t even acknowledge exist, so we never address them. We are afraid of them.
- “Don’t believe everything you think.”
- Our brain has a hard time not believing itself.
- Everyone needs to express their personal truth.
- We start to feel disjointed if we have a truth that lives inside of us that we have no way of articulating.
- Instead of creating an environment where people can share their thoughts, our society has lost its mechanism to address differing thoughts.
- We use shaming and bullying to force thoughts out which only forces them into hiding.
- We still have ‘isms’ because we can’t bully people into thinking differently.
- We are doing ourselves a grave disservice by saying, “Hey, we are about to talk about something you may find uncomfortable. If you don’t want to hear it, feel free to check out.”
- If we don’t allow ourselves or others to articulate what is really going on inside we aren’t addressing the thoughts.
- When we create a culture of continually warning people to seek their safe space we are preventing them from addressing their trauma cognitively.
- One of the services that Ti does is that it reminds the planet that addressing thoughts is as necessary as getting people’s needs met.
- When an individual has a racist thought as opposed to attempting to bully it out of existence, ask why the belief exists.
- The more some Ti users articulate their truth the more hostility they receive.
- Truth is the gift Ti brings to the world.
- Fi gets to feel what it wants to feel and articulate those emotions.
- Ti needs space to think what it wants to think and articulate those thoughts without judgment.
- Expressing thoughts in the outside world can sometimes be all that is needed to change them.
- Thoughts are just as emergent as emotions.
- There is lots of code inside of us that is real and dark but runs contrary to our values, so we never act on it.
- When we fear the articulation of thoughts that we don’t agree with, we only force the thoughts underground.
- Dogpiling thoughts doesn’t do anything except allow horrifying factions to sprout up in dark places.
- “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
- The social censure has made these people with the unacceptable thought find compatibility even though they have nothing else in common.
- People’s lives have been destroyed for articulating things that society finds distasteful.
- People that want to bully other people’s thoughts are making assumptions they are right.
- My truth vs. your truth
- People won’t allow themselves to hear any discourse that opposes their beliefs, so they never bother vetting the accuracy of their own conviction.
- Well done Ti goes over the same ground constantly because there are always pieces of info that may be missing.
- Ti doesn’t take anything for granted.
- Ti is very vigilant and rigorous.
- It wants to be in integrity with all of its thoughts.
- We must open up and teach each other how to have discourse vs. burying thoughts we’ve decided are unpleasant
- Our social structures don’t see an advantage in teaching people to use critical thinking because if we teach them to think for themselves they will start questioning indoctrination.
- So we are losing the ability to think critically.
- We should introduce philosophy, debate, and critical thinking at a young age.
- There is no safe place for us to articulate thoughts to in this world.
- We allow a safe place for emotions but not thoughts.
- Cognitive distortions grow when we allow people to believe everything they feel because “thoughts are concentrated emotions.”
- If we allow people to believe everything they feel those feelings eventually will coalesce into thought and they will believe everything they think.
- Focus on your mind
- Be radically honest with yourself
- Develop your sense of integrity around your thought structure
- Be willing to call BS on yourself
- Stop bullying thoughts you don’t like.
- There is a direct correlation between stress and anxiety, insecurity, cognitive dissonance, and cognitive distortions. They all run in the same group.
- The more distortions you have and the more dissonance you experience, the more there is a fracturing of your mind and your identity which leads to insecurity and anxiety.
- The more congruent your thoughts are, the more at rest you are and more peace you feel.
- The more confidence you feel about how you show up in the world.
- When most people experience clarity, they experience a lessening of tension.
- People lack clarity overall. It’s obvious.
- Stress and anxiety are building up.
- The antidote isn’t getting used to people saying things you don’t agree with and biting your tongue, but developing curiosity.
- You can find common ground with just about anyone.
- If you aren’t attacking someone’s thoughts, they don’t feel the need to defend them.
- Someone may give you a perspective you’ve never considered before.
- Actual harmony is creating a space where everyone can find common ground.
- Build the skill of curiosity
- It doesn’t feel good to question your thoughts, but it has to be done.
- Our dystopian world is hostile to thought.
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Subscribe with iTunes
Non-iTunes Link
Download The Android App
Subscribe on Soundcloud
Subscribe with Stitcher
Subscribe on Google Play
Subscribe with Facebook Messenger
If you like the podcast and want to help us out in return, please leave an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking in iTunes immensely! We would be eternally grateful!
Want to learn more?
Discover Your Personal Genius
We want to hear from you. Leave your comments below…
Share:
Podcast - Episode 0269 - Does Ego Work Screw You Over?
Podcast - Episode 0271 - Personal Experience With Energy Awareness
21 comments
Listening to this quite a bit later, but it’s a really good one.
Talking about Antonia’s comment on how Ti is constantly “revisiting old territory,” the analogy I keep envisioning is a landscape which is being shifted & quaked by tectonic activity, where “new information” plugs into the systems of frameworks in a way that “shifts” everything around. As a Ti dom I feel this viscerally in the moment, I learn new things and my brain gets flooded with a subtle “noise” under the surface of amygdala activity and thoughts of… oh wait this doesn’t work the way I thought it did, it’s actually this other way, etc. and so forth.
The most profound thought-shifts that occur with new information are with things I’ve interacted recently; the short-distance bits of the “landscape” I can see immediately, but over a long period of time I’ll get subtle impressions, that if I’m quiet enough to listen to, represent “older” bits of the landscape I’ve encountered in the past; those hills and fields that lie 10 miles away, so to speak. It’s fun to go back in time and think about all the old memories I’ve had, where I’ve been, and think about how different my frameworks and perspectives on “how things worked” back then and it feels quaint. (Ti-Si going on there?)
Brilliant episode. This actually really helped me confirm my type as an INFJ. I have a tendency to bypass Harmony for Accuracy. During the debate between Joel and Antonia, my first thought was that the answer the the problems there were having with each other theories was that the Harmony piece was missing. I felt really validated when Antonia brought the conversation to that context. Thank you for sharing this! As someone who uses Accuracy, a lot of the time people don’t follow my thinking and I get pushback because I forget that the point of all of my introverted thinking is to get peoples needs met.
How to Develop Introverted Thinking — by an Experienced Ti User
So I’d like to make this mini course placed in the comment section for anyone who needs help on this. Though, I’ll primarily have experienced with using Ti with Ne, or occasionally combined with Si. (Ti-Si or Fi-Si is why you sometimes see ITPs or IFPs use numbered lists, where they work to organize their individual judgements on things, as I will be doing now.) I’ll try to adjust this mini course for Se users or maybe even Ni users. Hope this helps.
How to Develop Ti in General :
1. Learn and prevent logical fallacies. Go to the website dataisbeautiful for a list of logical fallacies.
2. I’ll take Antonia’s suggestion, and suggest a formal logic course. See the course, “Logic 101,” on Youtube for an extensive and well explained course on logic.
3. Learn to see things from a detached perspective. If you were giving advice to another person, especially a stranger, with the same situation, what advice would you give?
4. When your thoughts are racing, confused and emotional, slow down somewhat. Take deep breaths, then describe the situation in a more neutral information way. Don’t rush to an opinion yet, just gather information on the subject.
5. Practice journaling, but not to journal emotions as it’s usually for, but to journal neutral observations on things. From reading the book, “How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci,” it’s described that in his scientific work, he had observation diaries where he just observed a certain subject, and worked on coming to certain conclusions from it.
6. There’s also Benjamin Franklin’s virtue journaling (See the Art of Manliness’s blog article on his Virtue Journal) where Ti is used to discipline yourself in life. Often people forget the emphasis on individual discipline from logical decisions Ti does because TPs are perceivers, but it is. Te users are very willing to organize others and their external environment, but not themselves, as in having consistent life beliefs (though Fi users often have more consistent life values) often being open to Ni or Si solitary easygoingness, but whatever.
7. Just practice mindfulness to help you calm down enough to think more clearly. As someone dabbling in Buddhism my entire life, I can tell you for sure the Buddha was an INTP, not to mention a 5 (As the website Enneagram Institute mentions him first in the list of famous examples.) Common Buddhist practice though with non-Buddhists is not to convert people, but to introduce them to secular meditation, so I’m going to do that. (Go to the website Palouse Mindfulness for a free organized course, try the Headspace app, or all the various options of free guided meditations on Youtube.) Interestingly enough, if you lurk meditation heavy forums such as /r/meditation or Actualized.org, there have actually been some online polls done that most people there are NTs. I don’t find this surprising at all. Hell, it’s mostly thinkers in general.
How to Develop Ti for Ne Users. (Including SJs)
1. Learn philosophy and how to make formal arguments in philosophy. See on Youtube, “Crash Course Philosophy.” Debate forums like /r/changemymind or debate.org can help.
2. Learn how to spot fake news with Ne! Look for another course on the Crash Course channel that is about navigating the internet.
3. Use quotes to stimulate Ti reflection. Look up famous quotes online, whether from Goodreads or Brainyquotes, then well. . . philosophize what this means to you and how it relates to your everyday life.
How to Develop Ti for Se users. (Including NJs, from what I know from an STP friend.)
1. Use that observation diary mentioned earlier, but for sensory observations, than theoretical ones. Make your own conclusions on everyday things with that. Incorporate pictures, collected items in a category, and so on and on to make conclusions. Strangely enough, looking up “Mindfulness in everyday life techniques” emphasize this type of observational skills to the extreme.
2. Try to become more self aware of your physical body. Interestingly, and probably not coincidentally, meditations like body meditation, or walking meditation emphasizes this again to an extreme. (See Scott Jeffrey’s blog article on standing meditation). Though you can try this in various exercises and sports. For example, when doing an exercise, recognize how the rest of the body helps rather than just the stereotypical body part with it. So if you’re kicking a ball, don’t just focus on the leg, but how pushing your shoulders and hips in with the ball also helps.
3. Just practice making Ti conclusions on everyday experiences regularly during everyday conversation. Use sensory words more. Visual, auditory, touch, smell and taste. When describing your day to someone for example, just work to use words like this more. Try a hands on hobby to describe something with your senses more. Look up a list of hobbies online, and you’ll get what I mean.
I was reminded of a liberal activist friend who lives in Florida. She is always respectful of angry conservative replies to her Facebook posts. When I called her out for offensively attacking and rejecting conservative commenters after Trump’s win, she politely but firmly defended the need to continue. As an INTP, it seems to me we don’t have a choice but to listen. Why did they vote for him, what values, thoughts, reasoning came in to play? You simply cannot refuse to know this, much less push them to close themselves off. But I guessed that a call for curiosity wouldn’t be enough and so I tried to marry it with compassion in my response to her.
Perhaps there is some Ti-Fe interplay in my mind, but that is how it presents itself. There is a tender feeling that accompanies listening to the darkest thoughts others might have, and especially my own. When I started my first journal in my late teens it was the one rule I laid out at the outset: honesty and forthrightness above all else. All shall be accepted. To do that is a mercy when just voicing them would incur the anger or disgust of others. Sure, sometimes it is a kind of fearless, greedy curiosity needing to know what’s in that dark corner, but when I’m afraid of that truth, when I have an inkling that it’s tied to pain, then it’s a kindly curiosity. That is the type the social sphere is missing most.
As a worker & a tertiary Ti user- Questioning is not necessarily complaining/criticizing or indicative of a lack of confidence. It is not argumentative to add additional information to a conversation. These behaviours are about seeking or providing clarity. Likewise, I think it’s very important that kids (of all ages!) be curious & that university students debate. How else do we all learn & grow?