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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about the frustration that some can face when they are either mistyped or can’t find their best fit type and the benefits of going through this journey.
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In this podcast you’ll find:
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The value in starting your discovery journey with the wrong best-fit type.
- How does it feel when you find your best-fit personality type?
- Why this journey puts the Myers-Briggs® system in its proper role.
- Why we may relate to functions that are not in our stack.
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How landing on your best-fit type can become conflated with your ability to understand personality types as a system.
- Why this can feel like an ego hit to someone within the type community.
- The signaling we project when attempting to correct another person’s type.
- What’s a helpful way to reframe this topic if you don’t know, or are re-examining your best-fit type?
- Why type-specific growth advice can still be helpful – even if you turn out not to be that type.
- Why we can sometimes be unconsciously drawn to the “thrashing” phase of our type journey.
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What makes it so difficult to land on your best-fit type in the first place?
- A note on the intuitive bias.
- The role stereotypes play into our ability to understand the opposite preferences.
- “Falling in love with falling in love” – why we can be tempted to stay in the exploration stage of our type journey.
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What happens when we serve ”type”, rather than use it as a tool to serve us?
- What does a healthy and rewarding relationship with type look like?
- A note to those feeling discouraged in the discovery part of their type journey.
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Podcast - Episode 0406 - Personality Is Who You Are NOT
Podcast - Episode 0408 - Neuroscience - Genetics - and Personality Types (with Dr. Denise Cook)
13 comments
Dear Antonia and Joel,
this comment is basically a follow up of my comment about your episode 406. I was just listening to 407 and later 405 and now I am unsure where to post this comment.
Anyway, I really love your brains/minds. It is so inspiring to have people like you explain all these intrinsic subtle details that you only get to see when you are advancing along the timeline that you both speak of.
It is also very valuable for me to see the different kind of delivery styles you both have. Like Antonia takes her TiFe-stance and Joel puts it into a more palatable form for Fi/Te-users to grasp that concept. By the way, I have started out as a NiTiFe in my life and now I am developing the other missing parts with Te and Si being the most difficult functions to get a hold on.
What I actually want to say is that I have arrived at the Buddhist teachings many years ago. The concept of anatta (non-self) was a real eye opener in my life’s journey. Like the Buddha actually taught the concept of us being not a fixed entity 2500 years ago.
However, attaching ourselves to the things and people around us including ideas about who we are as a person and the narratives we tell ourself around our beliefs and concepts is the main reason for unnecessary suffering in life.
After having read about this concept of non-self (and I am still trying to grasp it), I initially thought, well then it makes no sense to think of myself as being any type of any model. Because in the end I am just holding on to an idea of myself. This idea I will then have to defend to myself or other people. This in turn will make me upset, because I can’t live up to my standards.
However, now I believe that knowing these type models even so we are no fixed personalities can aid our path to letting go of the ideas, of who we initially thought we were. Because if we don’t have these categories, we have a much harder time to see how we hold on to these ideas about who we think we are or should be with regards to our persona.
Antonia did mention this thought in a previous podcast. Knowing your type speeds up this process of self-discovery including figuring out how the word really works and not how we want to see it work because of our fixed ego or the limited usage of all our ego functions.
I want to give you an example. I was and felt like an INFJ even before I knew that I had this type. Looking at the system made me realize my own fixed ways of looking at the world. This knowledge than was helpful to counteract the one-sidedness (like the NiTi-loop) of my personality type.
These days I am aware of these functions just being tools that I have happened to develop more or less proficiency with. However, they remain tools, and there is no reason for me to stick to a hammer if I need tongs. Or put it differently, I use a hammer I am not a hammer. This approach helps me to stay flexible in any environment and not to be a professional idiot. Type and the ideas of Carl Jung have helped me to realize that such things as a persona does exist and what it looks like on me and I am more or less aware when my ego is triggered so that I can be a bit more flexible in my response without needing to serve my ego’s need all the time.
Anyway, knowing these models of MBTI and Enneagram helps me to see more of the other parts of me so I can develop myself to the point where I can actually say my type doesn’t influence my life anymore and I can really let the world just happen to me without being pushed to respond in a conditioned way alas it is a long path.
And in the light of this insight, it makes no sense to stick with a type, however you only know this if you recognize that types exist and be able to look out for it, so can you counteract it.
As you had mentioned in a few of your podcasts in the end of the day if you continue along this timeline, you will be able to transcend your ego eventually.
It can be challenging to profile people who use Introverted Feeling (Authenticity) since you see so many versions of yourself and report it honestly. And while I trust our consultants, our philosophy at Personality Hacker is that at the end of the day, you are the expert on who you are. You’re the only one that has been with yourself 24/7!
If you believe that INFP is your best-fit type, then I would recommend you give yourself permission to fully ‘try it on’. Rest into it. If it’s right, it should fit like a glove. :)
A
When I was first introduced to MBTI and was administered the type indicator, I was in the midst of caring for my mother in the last stages of dementia and was functioning in a very ISFJ Caretaker mode. I knew in my bones that that evaluation was situational rather than intrinsically accurate. I read about INFP and that resonated deeply in many ways. I went into intense psychotherapy with a male INFP, whom I felt was my alter ego. Once I learned he was an INFP, I literally said to myself, I can’t be an INFP because he’s an INFP! It was as if I were committing identity theft! I have mistyped myself many times as an INFJ when I start replicating my mother’s primary EJ personality, which I admired immensely, in the outer world. My clue to my INFP authenticity :-) is the degree to which I get exhausted, stubborn, and histrionic when I’m not honoring my driver and co-pilot functions. One of your associate profilers identified me as an ENTJ, and when I got the results, I was blown away! I couldn’t imagine how she arrived at that conclusion! But then I thought, I’m in my early 70s and exercising growth in my least comfortable 3-year-old function of extraverted thinking. Perhaps I’ve gotten some facility in that area and that is what she is seeing! I still struggle with trusting my ownership of my INFP self-typing. In my worst moments I “think,” I can’t be an INFP! They’re too gentle, nice, easy-going, knowing full well my stress personality that moves to a very unpretty ESTJ. As Naomi Quenk says, Was that really me?? But if I have to choose one theme, then I feel sure I am a variation of INFP.
Sounds like an NP type to me.
I’m just over two years into this personality/self-growth journey, and I’ve finally concluded that I was mistyped. I was initially typed out as an INFJ, and I’ve been struggling to develop extraverted feeling ever since. Through all this time, extraverted feeling never entirely made sense to me. I resented using it. I can laugh about it now, but I even developed this SYSTEM to help myself use Fe by getting into Fi first before consciously moving to Fe.
You nailed it in this podcast; I was someone who needed to learn how to not only prioritize my own needs but not judge myself harshly for doing so, so the mistype still led to growth. I’m a sensitive woman in a culture that values feeler women, and I’ve surrounded myself with “thinkers.” Not only do others in my life rely on me to give them personal advice, but my entire family is on the Ti-Fe spectrum. I never had a firm grasp of their Ti brilliance and thus assumed I was a “feeler”. I’ve finally permitted myself to examine INTJ just over two years later. Te is like a breath of fresh air, and I wish I had discovered my mistype sooner. What a relief.
THANK YOU!