INFJ Dealing With Personality Type Skeptics
In this episode Joel and Antonia answer an INFJ listener’s question about how to convince family and friends on the legitimacy of Myers Briggs.
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We invite you to ask questions about personality types, relationships, and personal growth. Your questions may be addressed on our audio podcast “10 Minute Type Advice ”
In this podcast you’ll find:
- “A prophet is without honor in their hometown” – why Joel and Antonia find this week’s question so relatable.
- Why are some sensors into type, but not others?
- What intuitives get out of type – and why some sensors can relate to this.
- Antonia shares the one thing that might just win over the type skeptics in your life.
- Why you sometimes need to let the skeptics be skeptical.
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PHQ | QUESTIONS: Can Sensors Speak Intuitive Language?
What Are The Most Compatible Personality Types? | 10 Min Type Advice | S01:E02
3 comments
Ha! What serendipity. We had been compiling recordings, always expecting to do this exact show. This is the Year of Implementation on our older ideas, which means we either take action or let the idea go. This podcast became one of the ideas we finally pulled the trigger on, and here were all these recordings. We’ve been sorting through them, and I picked this one at the very first because it’s a question a gazillion people have.
Welcome back, even if it’s just a stop-a-long. :)
A
…I genuinely can’t believe this.
I haven’t visited the personalityhacker website in years. Today, a friend of mine wanted recommendations on good MBTI websites, so I gave this one.
So, I decided to take a look at the website for old times sake.
I was curious about the latest podcasts, clicked on this one.
I was thinking….why does this voice sound familiar?
It’s me.
But….I must have submitted this question 6 years ago. Y’all’s kept this audio for 6 years?! I’m flattered.
….and I didn’t find a way Antonia, to convince my family, ha!
I was 25 when I recorded this, and my outlook on MBTI has changed. I agree, sensors can be just as interested in personality types (and intuitives just as resistant. Can’t get my ENFJ best friend on board with archetypes).
I’ve noticed Si and Ni are the minds functions which explain “The story” of time. Are all things the result of past events, the arrow of time (Si)? Or, do all things stem from repeating cycles and patterns, universal time (Ni)? Physics tells us time has no direction, but we perceive it as having an arrow. So, it’s both. Everything is a result of both past time and universal time, and both stories are running at together.
I think in order for people to be on board with MBTI, there has to be some acceptance that our story is more than just the summation of our past experiences.
While I haven’t cracked the code to getting people to believe MBTI, I did come up with a metaphor a lot of people, at least musicians, like:
Type is like a musical key signature. The key simply determines what will be harmonious, but it doesn’t determine what the song will be. That is still to be written, and has infinite possibilities.
It’s also less important to me now that people believe MBTI. I think….all data from introverted functions, whether it be the emotional facts from Fi, past experiences from Si, logical proofs from Ti or universal patterns from Ni…can only live in the subjective world of ones mind. Emergent reality doesn’t really care about the data points, much the way a trend line doesn’t care about each dot. So I think it’s more about carrying the information of MBTI with you personally to make better decisions and help others….than it is about performing conversions or making people “see it”.
Thanks again guys for getting to my question.
I would like to add to this, that even when you’re dealing with type sceptics, your own understanding of type can still be beneficial for improving the relationship. And it’s oftentimes still possible to communicate a lot of your type wisdom to them anyways – just without mentioning that it’s actually meyers briggs related.
My grandparents (who raised me) are both type-sceptics as well. When I start talking about type, my grandma just says: “I don’t see how understanding this would make the world a better place,” and my grandpa says: “that’s too abstract and there is no scientific proof.” And then the conversation is declared to be over. So, I do know the problem.
But when I explain to them something along the lines of: “Look, grandma, you are harmony focussed, you need routines, you have some great new ideas and adventures as long as they don’t disrupt your routines too much, and you are horrible in logic” and “Look grandpa, you are very goal and effectiveness- focussed, you sometimes have some awesome perspective shifting future insights, but you don’t trust them enough because you’re too stuck on focussing on what’s going on around you sometimes, and you are pretty much completely helpless when it comes to reflection, emotions and relationships” and “Now see how this effects the dynamics in this family. See how it affects your relationship, your conflicts, your agreements, your archievements, your world views, your opinions, your struggles with me as well … and see how we could use that info to shape the dynamics in a better way.” – Then that is all stuff that they can understand, identify with and work with. They don’t need to know that this is all type stuff, they just believe I’m some person-understanding-genious. If I told them that it all was type related wisdom, they wouldn’t eat it, they would immediately deny any truth within it. But as long as they don’t smell a type system behind what I say, they can actually accept it quite well.
So my advice when dealing with type sceptics: Just try to feed the type wisdom to them anyways, but give the info a frame within which they can accept it.