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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
INFP here. I loved what Joel said about you ARE the art. I play piano for audiences. When I play, people come up to me and tell me how moved they were. Some tell me they were moved to tears. I love playing the piano, because music allows me to express all of those fine nuances of emotion. I will play a phrase over and over again to suck all of the emotion out of the music. When I play, I am expressing all sorts of fine nuances of emotion. Like, there is not just one kind of sadness, joy, anger. If sadness were the color blue, joy the color yellow and anger the color red – there would be 100 shades of blue, yellow and red that could be felt and expressed. When I play I AM the art. So true. I’ve felt that for a long time. Nicely expressed.
When I do have a feeling, especially a sad or negative one, I do always question, why. I would think that everyone does that, because who wants to be sad or have some other unpleasant feeling? You want to get rid of it, right? So, you question and try to get to the bottom of it to end your suffering. Or you could take the Buddha approach and just sit with the suffering. But if you are happy and joyful, you don’t often ask yourself, why am I happy?
I think one reason the world needs Fi is that we think about these things. We are the worlds psychologists, therapists, those who help ourselves figure ourselves out, create theories and then help others. Of course, INFJs and other types are good at this, too, but from a different perspective. Carl Jung, an INFJ, IMO, looked at how the mind worked in a very Ni way. Carl Rogers took a more Fi approach, a client-centered approach, how “I” the client react to the world.
Of course, we are more than therapists. But in whatever field we Fi people go into, we bring that personal, subjective, “why am I feeling this way”, approach to the job. Then once we figure that out we can help others figure out “why are you feeling this way”. Is it the narrative you are using? Is it something from your past? Are you transferring, associating? It’s Fi and Ni, I think that have come up with answers to the questions of the humanities. That includes psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, etc. The Fi is important for that deep feeling, subjective, qualitative approach in understanding the human species.
We are also good at inspiration. Find a great inspirational speaker, writer, etc., you have likely found an Fi user. We figure out things for ourselves and then we go and inspire others. My piano playing is one of my inspiration devices. I play to inspire. And I love it when I do.
I loved what Joel said about digging deeper and deeper into the why. I believe that that is one of the greatest strengths of Fi, knowing why and who you are at the core, and then everything you say or do flows out of that. As an INFP, and only recently getting deep with M-B Typology, and cognitive functions, I am still amazed at how much we’re influenced by it, yet there are still so few people who are aware and get it. It’s like being a car and not being aware that you drive on gasoline, or that the octane of the gasoline you drink makes a difference. “you are the art, or the expression” – I loved that.
Also, Joel almost sounded like a different person, as he was in the Fi flow, it was actually quite comical and I chuckled a few times. My wife talks about how I enter a time warp sometimes, as I’m just sitting in my Fi, and time just floats by. Or I’m in my car pondering something, and then snap to and for a brief second wonder if I’m in the right place or not. The Fi flow is a real thing!
Lastly, I feel like Fi is so deep and broad and rich, that even an hour and twenty minutes can’t begin to cover what it is really like. You guys scratched the surface and dug in a few places, but I think there’s still so much more that could have been touched. Alas, you can’t talk about it forever….
Thanks again Antonia and Joel, you’ve helped me understand myself and others, and I listen to several of your podcasts each week. Take care.
i loved this podcast. (INFP here.) i think Fi is often misunderstood and i think joel did a great job of describing how it is experienced in great detail. when you were talking about the idea of sovereignty, i was saying YES out loud to myself and nodding my head like a big ’ol nerd.
and also the thing about the shadow artist…i loved that SO much. i’ve been hard on myself for not always going for the creative things i want to be doing but as i get older i’ve recently been thinking that the way you live your life can be an art. your personal expression, your values, the way you connect with others, etc. though i do need to get back to doing more creative expression like i did when i was young, cultivating the self as an art form in a way really spoke to me on a profound level. i look forward to listening to the other podcasts in this series as well!
Thanks for presenting this discussion. I can tentatively agree with Joel’s comment that we’re all making up our motivations, even when we feel they are justified by objective factors, such as consensus (everyone else agrees with them) or logical thought (it makes rational sense to us).
It seems like Introverted Feeling here in this talk is contrasted against Introverted Thinking. I wonder if it can also be contrasted against Extroverted Feeling? This contrast can perhaps also suggest some concepts for why the world needs Introverted Feeling.
I notice, for example, that Extroverted Feeling seems very adept at noticing when someone’s needs are going unmet, and more importantly, identifying what actions can be taken to get those needs met. I wonder if, as another human-focused (Feeling) function, Introverted Feeling can also be used to provide for others, but in a different way? I can think of the analogy of giving a man a fish vs. teaching a man to fish. This analogy is typically used to suggest that teaching is better than giving, but I don’t think that’s true in this case – both are equally useful. Extroverted Feeling is good at determining that “this person needs a fish, let me get him/her one” – this sounds like a simple conclusion that we should all be capable of, but not everyone is adept at drawing that conclusion (I am not, for example, very good at noticing the external needs of others). This act provides immediate assistance to someone without requiring much on their part. In short, if you’re starving, you don’t need to learn how to fish. You need a fish.
I think Introverted Feeling may be better equipped to teach someone how to fish – or, by analogy, teach someone how to identify their own needs. Why? Because those who heavily rely on Introverted Feeling will naturally parse out their own motivations and emotional needs with detail and accuracy. It seems natural, then, for Introverted Feelers to help others not by getting their needs met, but rather by helping people to understand their own needs and motivations. This is an important difference because Extroverted Feeling often knows what others need, and Introverted Feeling may not. However, Introverted Feeling can perhaps help others to identify their own false motivations and come to deeper conclusions about how they really feel. The Introverted Feeler may not know what someone’s deepest motivations are, but they may be able to identify whether or not someone’s narrative reflects their own deepest motivation.
As an example, my wife likely uses Extroverted Feeling in the back seat in her car model (and she is very good at identifying when someone’s needs are not being met), and I likely use Introverted Feeling in my back seat. My wife will sometimes discuss problems she experiences at work or in life (often related to getting someone’s needs met) and ask me for advice on how to solve such a problem. I will hear her out and sometimes I conclude that the problem she posed to me is not the real problem, often because the reasons she gave for her frustrations do not seem genuine to me (the frustration is genuine, but the cause implicated may not be). So I don’t know what her solution should be, but helping to re-frame her problem to better address her motivations can nonetheless be helpful.
What does everyone else think? Can Introverted Feeling be compared to Extroverted Feeling in such a way that both are useful, in different ways, for getting the needs of others met?
“What I’ve learned from you is kindness toward myself…you see me better than I see me.” Antonia, as an ENFP I couldn’t imagine a better compliment as a partner. And so much of Joel’s points ring true, that Fi users struggle with believing in others more than ourselves.