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In this episode, Joel and Antonia go on a journey of discovery where they showcase the need for positively expressed Introverted Feeling in today’s world.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Introverted Feeling (Fi) – “Authenticity”
- Identity crisis – Fi struggles to know who they are
- Because of that, they recognize that people, in general, have the same struggle
- Fi sometimes resists the notion that it is okay to follow their core identity.
- Fi gets the message that it is selfish to pursue what feels right.
- Fi is very internal and subjective
- Not selfish so much as self-focused – the self is the guiding star for Fi
- A lot of the self is not acceptable to the outside world.
- “The more personal something is, the more universal it is.”
- The gift Fi gives is the ability to tune into core values and share the nuanced fidelity of human interactions and emotions.
- A coal miner for your heart
- Without Fi, you mistake one motivation for all motivations
- “This person voted for this candidate, which means they are this type of person.”
- No one ever has a single motivation.
- FPs end up in the arts because it explores the complexity of human motivations.
- People don’t know why they do what they do.
- Every public defender’s office is probably staffed with a lot of FPs because they see the need to defend the complexity of human emotion.
- No one is 100% pure evil like no one is 100% good.
- Good vs. bad is a social construct.
- Life-affirming things over life-negating things.
- “Doth Protest Too Much” when people are judgmental of other’s motivations.
- Every villain began as a victim.
- Civility is a thin veneer.
- The darkness is there, and it will come out eventually.
- What we resist persists.
- Fi uses emotions to find truths others would find offensive.
- It feels impossible to Fi to describe an incredibly complex emotion.
- Fi is better at demonstration than explanation, which is why they are usually artists in some way.
- Introverted Thinking (Ti) is better at explanation than demonstration
- Fi deals in narratives and stories and finds the truth inside the story.
- Motivations = gas in your car
- Core values = guard rails
- We are making up our reason for doing things all the time. We think they are legit, but they are arbitrary.
- Bullshit reasons = rationalizations
- We get what we want at the end of the day then we rationalize why it happened.
- Fi understands that we have stories for everything, but it doesn’t make them true.
- People don’t want to give up their victimhood.
- Something happens to us then we create stories to explain why it happened.
- Our stories are malleable. We can choose the more empowering one.
- Healthy Fi allows us to look at our narratives and ask ourselves if our stories are limiting us.
- When Fi isn’t healthy, it will take an event and paint it in an impenetrable, inarguable way.
- Because Fi is so good with stories, and it can’t make things happen in the outer world because Te is a weakness, so it tries to paint a picture to get the outcome it wants.
- Fi people often couch things in a way that isn’t completely accurate to get the result it wants.
- Stories/narratives are extremely powerful.
- Learn to spot the Disingenuous spin
- Spin your narratives in a way that makes you feel empowered.
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Narrative casting is a way to unlock a pathway forward to avoid getting stuck.
- Why do I care about this?
- What am I preserving?
- To what end?
- Drive down the motivation road. Keep asking why.
- Narrative casting is proactive.
- Diagnosis needs to come first.
- Fi is the most closely tied to ego/identity
- Every new way of experiencing things is an identity change.
- Narrative casting spins the story in an effort to protect the ego.
- “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” Davy Crockett
- Gain mastery over yourself first.
- We are all going to die alone.
- Who you start life with will be different from who we finish our lives with.
- You are the origination point for the decisions you make.
- You are sovereign.
- I’m the only one who gets to determine what I want to be.
- “Why does your selfishness of how you want to be trump my selfishness to be who I want to be?”
- Fi can go within and be incredibly self-reflective.
- “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron
- Shadow artist – no permission to be the artist you want to be so you hang around the edges of those who are doing what you won’t permit yourself to do.
- Roles are shadow artists to the true you.
- Your life is the character. You are the art.
- Don’t spin the narrative; become the narrative.
- People who are exceptional at Fi become the models that we all need.
- Fi sees the benefits of seeing people more kindly.
- Fi provides Kindness training – Kindness toward others and ourselves
- Fi can inspire others because it believes in people beyond reason or logic sometimes.
- Fi can create magic in the world because it can see the magic in the world.
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27 comments
I feel like I need to actively practice people with cognitive functions I don’t have to be a better human being, so I’m going to write a list of things I envy about FPs as a TP. It’s not like I hate Fi users, I’m close to a few of them, it’s that I don’t particularly like or pay attention to their ideas either. I just tend to ignore them, unless we get close enough. My lower Fe feels this is unfair and thinks this is akin to “typism”, or type racism, so since I can’t get the thought out of my head, as well as all the advice for me seems to point to “following my heart” (groans), I’m just going to show my appreciation.
I know an FP who told me about the “Envy Conversation” activity, which is basically increasing each other’s confidence by telling each other what we envy about each other, and somehow this gives a list of strange essential insights I never noticed before. If I find a person working in personal development, often I seek to ask them to join this conversation. It’s also just a good honest way to deal with feelings of envy in general, rather than my Fe just telling me to keep quiet about these feelings to not offend people, but in reality, without being honest about it, it just gets locked in there in the short term. So here you go,
What I Envy About FPs as a TP :
1. FPs tend to be skilled in understanding the nuances and deeper reasons behind feelings, where I constantly struggle to understand what I’m feeling to find the root causes of my stress.
2. FPs seem to understand how emotions are not black and white. In logic, there are only two binaries. True or false. So while I can work to understand this with effort, the idea of a person having two or even more contradictory emotions gives me a heart attack. Especially if it’s me.
3. FPs seem to be good emotional storytellers. I personally have struggled to express what I’m feeling, because something about the lack of Fi makes me unable to put emotions well into words, and this has caused a lot of relationship problems growing up.
4. FPs seem to be good at holding space for others to listen. When I listen to other people’s emotions, it freaks me out, because I can’t process as well to understand how their feelings work. Especially if it’s contradictory, again. I usually have to make a habit of communicating in writing in close relationships, so I can read things over and over again to understand. And I can communicate slowly with responses to not say something stupid.
5. FPs seem to be able to understand their emotional needs best and know how to present self care. Sometimes when I’m tired, I struggle to understand what activity will emotionally help me to relax. I try an activity that helped make me relax before, but then I find out it doesn’t anymore, and vice versa. I just can’t seem to find the “pattern” of emotional triggers that allow me to choose activities that can allow me to choose what to feel at some level, so due to Fe, we’re more dependent on the feelings influenced over to us in relationships, or pieces of art — whether in films or novels.
What FPs Envy About Me as a TP :
(From my personal experiences having this conversation with them. Might not apply to some FPs.)
1. I took this for granted, but somehow they envy my ability to give long term logical advice to people for their problems. Some seem to express frustration that they can listen to friends over and over again, but they can’t find a long term solution, so they keep coming back to drain their emotional energy, especially as empaths. My presence with logic seems to prevent this. This seems to be the top thing in their mind when I ask them this. Interestingly, FPs seem to be more interested in more of my brutal honesty advice than many immature (not all) FJs, hence I know some. And I have enough Fe to make the advice as least offensive as possible.
2. FPs seem to envy that my career options from my talents often allow for more monetary security than them. TPs, on some level, are less respected than TJs in career culture today, but are still much more valued than FPs. I think, even compared to FJs. FPs seem to struggle with Te security around competence, while TPs seem to struggle with profound issues of emotional loneliness with Fe. FPs, in turn are not immune to problems of loneliness, but seem to have a better job of dealing with it than TPs, because due to less developed Fe, can lead to many friends, but rarely any close relationships. So there’s another.
3. FPs seem to envy TPs ability to know who to trust. Us TPs tend to make good lie detectors in everyday life, but it’s a struggle to have logical security in knowing whose advice to listen to more during everyday life. Can you trust this study? Is this guy scamming me? Something I tend to do at ease, and why sometimes I attract some FPs around me. You might want to look up informationisbeautiful’s website article on logical fallacies if you’re curious.
4. FPs seem to envy how we don’t take things as personally as they do. I can take things personally, sure, especially when I’m tired and cranky, but generally I tend not to. They ask, “How do you do that?” I notice FPs tend to filter things on a value oriented lens, and see a lot of arguments as an attack on your character or morality, than just your ignorance or less experience like I do. I don’t see my logical beliefs as personal values, but just. . . just an object of my curiosity. On the other hand, I seem to struggle judging complex moral situations in turn by my own, and use Fe to study several opinions on it until I can choose the most reliable one with Ti. I noticed, my choice of moral options tend to come from FPs.
5. Lastly, FPs I know tend to envy that I have a lot more security on just knowing the logical truth when it comes to my own personal development. FPs, particularly the unhealthy ones, tend to be more likely to use their Te to find someone else as a source of trust on logical opinions, and can be attracted to some kind of cult attitude. Not just religious cults, mind you, but business, self help, and political cults. See Ted-Ed video on Youtube, “What is a cult?” and you see what I mean. This is something most TPs don’t admit, but due to our inability to read people’s deeper motivations, we tend to be more easily manipulated in closer personal relationships, namely romantic relationships. So FPs need TPs, and TPs need FPs for this.
Thank you for reading.
Loved this so much. Thank you. I’m definitely an ENFP but only now starting to dig into Enneagram and I think I might very well be a 6w7, just like you, Joel.
I thought it was interesting, and sad, that your Christian upbringing made you feel at odds with your Fi for such a long time. I was raised in and still practice the faith, and that’s never been my experience. Instead, I was — and to a lesser extent still am — in battle with my Fi because, as an ENFP of course I long for connection, community and closeness but my my internal compass often puts me at odds with the prevailing mores and values of those around me. I’m always torn between wanting acceptance but knowing in my heart that I have to follow my own drummer even though it makes me suspect to many: a person of faith in an atheist metropolis, a libertarian in a socialist country, a childless singleton by choice in a sea of couples with 1.6 kids, a human who recognizes the humanity in even the most odious of individuals…
I’m new to your podcasts and have enjoyed all I’ve listened to. One request I have for you is to please define some of the language you use, or try to also use other terms for the same concept so it’s easier to understand what’s meant when you say certain words. For example, in this podcast, Joel used, “Fidelity” quite frequently in one section and I had no clue of what he meant by it. Also, “Holding space for…” what does that actually mean, please?
Keep up the great work!
Thanks for all the great podcasts you put out there! I’m listening all the way from Denmark, by the way. Now you know you have reach ;)
I bought your book just yesterday and I am so happy to know it had multiple functions. My first, (and only) preparation for a zombie apocalypse…
Honestly, this was one of those podcasts that I’ll have to get back to. I’ve followed your podcast on/off almost since the beginning, and sometimes it strikes me how difficult it is to follow your line of thinking when you dig deep. Don’t get me wrong – it is not meant as a critique. Rather, it just shows me that “I’m not there yet”, and that is what motivated me to finally comment here; I’m not sure how developed my driver is, and the fact that I am not sure tells me that there is probably something there.
I am sure I’ll find something in your book when I read a bit further, but I was wondering if you would consider doing a podcast on how to engage with your driver when you’re off track? Or something like that.
It seems to me that INFPs are all supposed to be creative; playing music, painting, drawing, acting, you name it. And it is just not me. Honestly, it leaves me confused as whether I am a good at being an INFP – I don’t belong in the artistic world, but my god it is difficult to carve my own way being an economist.
I personally think my driver is underdeveloped because I am surrounded by people (norms within my country and my social circle) who do not value anything off the beaten path. It constantly leaves me confused about who I am because it is so difficult to separate from who I think I should be.
Anyhow. Long story short: will you please do a podcast on how to engage your driver when it is underdeveloped?
Personality-love from Copenhagen, Denmark.
I am a infp dating a isfp the podcast was really inspiring and i could relate to a lot of it as a infp
Thank you for using words like “intention/motivation” in your descriptions of Fi. It was something I had pattern recognized as important to Fi-Te users, but the confirmation is very helpful!