INFJ OWNERS MANUAL ?!?

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This is not my work, but a highjack from www.introvertdear.com

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INFJ OWNERS MANUAL

As an INFJ, have you ever wished that your complex personality came with an owner’s manual? I can’t give you a comprehensive guide to understanding everything about yourself because only you can reach the depths of who you are, but I can help you understand the INFJ personality type better. As the founder of Truity, a company that helps people and organizations use personality assessments to develop their full potential, I often get questions from INFJs who want to learn more about themselves. Here are the five questions I’m asked the most frequently:
1. Do INFJs really only make up 1 percent of the population?
Let us call it “the Stat”: the notion that INFJs are the rarest personality type, making up a dismal 1 percent of the population. The Stat originated with Isabel Briggs Myers herself, based on the population of the school district where she conducted her studies in 1957. INFJ was the rarest type in one particular school. Of course, that doesn’t mean by extension the Stat is universally true everywhere.
In fact, beyond the rumor mill of the Internet, the evidence for the Stat is limited. Although some surveys have duplicated the finding, other authors have reached an entirely different conclusion about the rarest personality type. Thorne and Gough’s Portraits of Type: An MBTI Research Compendium, for example, claims that INFP/ISFP has the smallest representation across the U.S. population. The Distribution of MBTI Types in the United States by Allen Hammer and Wayne Mitchell, published in the Journal of Psychological Type, Vol. 37, 1996 found that ENFJ marginally had the smallest representation (2.45 percent of the population compared to INFJ’s 2.55 percent).
So, not every study shows INFJ as the rarest type. And because all these studies were conducted on small (and sometimes biased) samples, we really can’t be sure precisely how prevalent any type is, including INFJ.
Despite this, people are in love with the idea that INFJs are as rare as the two-horned unicorn. But this can be downright dangerous. Why? Because your rarefied status is often the only thing people remember about the INFJ type, undermining your considerable strengths and qualities. And because it knocks the bottom out of the entire personality type framework.
Personality typing is founded on the principle that no one type is better than any other. Yet many test-takers equate “rare” with “special.” They deliberately fudge their answers to earn this stamp of superiority, regardless of whether the label fits. This usurps the process of matching the person to the model and can get in the way of people recognizing their true natures.
If the INFJ label doesn’t feel like it fits, it may be time to retake the test. If, on the other hand, you experience “rarity” not as a statistic but as a sense of feeling out of step with the world, you likely are a true INFJ.
2. Why do I feel like a stranger in a strange land?
NFJs—whether extrovert or introvert—find it difficult to engage with the world. Some INFJs report feeling so detached from reality that their actions seem awkward and unnatural, like an out-of-body experience. The fact is, you feel different from the rest of the pack. This difference can make you feel incredibly isolated, even when you are surrounded by family, friends, or a roomful of INFJs who, theoretically, share the same personality traits as you do.
The problem is not, as many suggest, that INFJs are “rare” in the sense of them making up a small minority of the population. It has more to do with your complex inner world; the power exerted by your vivid imagination. Like other intuitive introverts, you can become so absorbed in your own thoughts that you are oblivious to the physical world. You feel that nobody is like you because they aren’t like you—at least in the sense that they cannot possibly speak the language of your fantasies.
How do you connect with the world? Most of us do this by reaching out to people and sharing our passions and our hungers. Sharing, however, is an extroverted function. It is not what you do best. Deeply private by nature, you may find opening up to others so challenging that you often avoid the issue and retreat to the safety of your own imagination.
Unless the conversation is about a cause you care for deeply.
When you sense an affinity with someone based on shared values and ideals, you become a warm, sensitive, and sought-after friend. But the connection has to be there. You are often guilty of throwing out perfectly healthy relationships because they fall short of your friendship gold standard: ultimate compatibility.
Until you learn to meet people halfway, finding a genuine soul mate will be tough. You will feel disconnected and lonely. This is the cross you have to bear. But when those kindred spirits do come along, you will be able to form an indelible link with them built on trust and mutual understanding. Those relationships last a lifetime.
Enter a Breathtaking Inner World
The first coloring book with an introvert theme is here. Follow an introvert and her cat as they journey through quiet, forgotten places, battle “people” overload, and seek true connection. From the creator of Introvert, Dear. Learn more.
3. What is the perfect job for an INFJ?
Your ideal career is one that expresses the four dominant aspects of your personality. Hence it would deliver:

• Substantial intellectual work (an I preference)
• Creativity and the ability to explore wider problems (an N preference)
• Making a difference in the lives of other people (an F preference)
• A well-defined and structured work style (a J preference).

Careers that tick these boxes include psychology, counseling, social care, librarian/archivist, teaching, the arts and design. Studies—and a fair whack of anecdotal evidence—show that these are the careers chosen most often by INFJs.
Are you about to stop reading? You probably feel let down by this advice. Because it doesn’t resonate with you. Because it is old news.
Here’s the thing. As an INFJ, you can’t seem to shake off the sensation of uniqueness, of feeling different from the rest of the world. Reducing you to a list of “ideal” jobs feels too superficial and too generalized to be of any value. You rail against the idea of being pigeonholed to the point where no answer to this question may not ever be satisfactory. You want to crawl out of neat little boxes, not into them. You refuse to limit your potential.
So what’s the answer?
For many INFJs, it lies not in the type of job but also in the way you are permitted to perform it. Work styles that give you absolute freedom to pave our own path and deliver meaning, in the sense of fulfilling your deepest values or needs, are especially rewarding.
Entrepreneurship/freelance work fits the bill because it is service (people) oriented, yet you can create the value system, make the rules and call the shots. Other INFJs have found great success in management positions across all industries, as this allows them to solve complex problems in a logical but very kind and empathetic way. Being sensitive to the ways in which negativity can hurt people makes you really effective at dishing out constructive criticism—just the ticket for effective management.
Top Jobs for INFJs, Work Style, and INFJs as Leaders can give you more insights. Or check out Four Hot Careers for INFJs.
4. How do I handle being so empathetic all the time? It’s quite exhausting.
Personality theorists describe you as a Counselor, an Advocate or a Humanitarian, the champion of the oppressed and the downtrodden. You recognize and carry the emotional baggage of others. When you feel, you feel so deeply that other people’s problems might as well be your own. Sometimes you can’t even watch a horror film or news program without reacting negatively to the terrible things you have seen.
These things happen because you are deeply empathetic. An empath is a person who feels exactly what other people feel, even if they have no direct experience of the situation. INFJs often are so finely tuned to other people’s energy waves that they find themselves being unconsciously influenced by unwanted desires, moods, and wishes. And it can be exhausting.
While empathy has its benefits, for your own sanity you need to learn how to detach from other people’s problems before you become completely overwhelmed. There are various ways you can do this:

• Set and defend your boundaries. Saying “no” is hard for an INFJ, because you feel guilty about hurting people’s feelings. But sometimes, the only winning move is not to play the game. Set time limits for the amount of social interaction you can deal with, and back off completely when it gets to be too much.
• Take some alone time. As an introvert, you need extended time alone to refresh and recalibrate.
• Return the emotional baggage. Reflecting feelings back to the originator can help minimize the burden you are carrying. Practice saying, “I can tell you’re feeling xyz right now. What do you think you could do to help yourself feel better?”
• Shield. A recent study published in Neuroimage suggests that people can’t perform empathetic and logical thinking at the same time; they mutually inhibit one another. The shielding technique requires you to turn down your empathetic F side and turn up your decisive J side. Focus on helping the people around you take productive action. This will press you into logical thinking and help block out the overwhelming effects of your empathizing.

You can still offer compassion, but the above techniques should help you manage the emotional overload when people take too much. You won’t look back.
5. What are the best ways for an INFJ to be a leader while at the same time staying true to the core of their personality?
Reading this, you might be shocked that anyone could imagine the quiet, thoughtful INFJ as much of a leader. You are so used to being the black sheep, the outsider walking to the beat of your own drum, that you may not have considered your leadership potential let alone started honing those skills. Yet INFJs were born for leadership. Mahatma Gandi didn’t do so bad when he led an entire nation to independence in British-ruled India.
As with any role or profession, the key to success is staying true to yourself. You will not demonstrate the same behaviors as a conventional leader, such as the ENTJ, but you do possess the qualities you need to lead effectively. Here’s how you can excel:
Lead by example. Because you genuinely care about people and whether or not they are happy, you will never ask anyone to do something you would not do yourself. People will work hard for you because they trust and respect your ethics and judgment.
Focus on the human side of business. You are empathetic and compassionate and these skills make you a supportive and appreciative leader. You inspire and motivate people. You encourage them to reach their full potential. These rewards are known to boost an individual’s creativity and productivity, such that the team you lead is likely to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Collaborate. INFJs are not the type of boss to shout commands from the corner office. You involve the team in decision-making and encourage people to look for solutions together. When things go wrong, you do not waste time looking for someone to blame. Instead you focus your energy on improving the process, to avoid making the same mistake again and to minimize conflict.
On the downside, you can experience enormous distress when organizational processes get in the way of human needs. Invariably, this will happen and you will need to develop coping techniques. Also, you have a habit of feeling overwhelmed—paralyzed even—when you cannot resolve all the problems you see.
Remember, “Mile by mile it’s a trial; yard by yard it’s hard; but inch by inch it’s a cinch.” This is a good mantra for the INFJ leader, and one that will stand you in good stead as you strive to evolve as a leader and as a human being.
Want to know more? Check out Four Ways Introverted Leaders Can Make The Most of Their Strengths.
For more information on making the most of your INFJ strengths, check out Truity’s ebook, The True INFJ.

 

Neuroimage. 2013 Feb 1;66:385-401. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061. Epub 2012 Oct 27.
fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains.
Jack AI1, Dawson AJ2, Begany KL2, Leckie RL2, Barry KP2, Ciccia AH3, Snyder AZ4.
Author information

Abstract
Two lines of evidence indicate that there exists a reciprocal inhibitory relationship between opposed brain networks. First, most attention-demanding cognitive tasks activate a stereotypical set of brain areas, known as the task-positive network and simultaneously deactivate a different set of brain regions, commonly referred to as the task negative or default mode network. Second, functional connectivity analyses show that these same opposed networks are anti-correlated in the resting state. We hypothesize that these reciprocally inhibitory effects reflect two incompatible cognitive modes, each of which may be directed towards understanding the external world. Thus, engaging one mode activates one set of regions and suppresses activity in the other. We test this hypothesis by identifying two types of problem-solving task which, on the basis of prior work, have been consistently associated with the task positive and task negative regions: tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects. Social and mechanical reasoning tasks were presented to neurologically normal participants during fMRI. Each task type was presented using both text and video clips. Regardless of presentation modality, we observed clear evidence of reciprocal suppression: social tasks deactivated regions associated with mechanical reasoning and mechanical tasks deactivated regions associated with social reasoning. These findings are not explained by self-referential processes, task engagement, mental simulation, mental time travel or external vs. internal attention, all factors previously hypothesized to explain default mode network activity. Analyses of resting state data revealed a close match between the regions our tasks identified as reciprocally inhibitory and regions of maximal anti-correlation in the resting state. These results indicate the reciprocal inhibition is not attributable to constraints inherent in the tasks, but is neural in origin. Hence, there is a physiological constraint on our ability to simultaneously engage two distinct cognitive modes. Further work is needed to more precisely characterize these opposing cognitive domains.

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

KEYWORDS:
Anti-correlated networks; Default network; Dual-process theory; Task negative; Task-positive; fMRI

 

4 WAYS INTROVERTED LEADERS CAN MAKE THE MOST OF THEIR STRENGTHS


BY MOLLY OWENS | JUL 29, 2015
When asked to describe a great leader, which type of person springs to mind? The all-guns-blazing, exuberant networker? Or how about the dominant visionary who flips tradition on its head? Certainly not the understated loner who listens more than they speak, right?

Today, a growing tide of research is turning such outmoded assumptions on their head. Far from being lousy leaders, introverts may have just the right combination to lead organizations in our no-holds-barred, extroverted business culture. They just lead with quiet confidence rather than arrogance. If your style is more of a sensitive intellectual rather than a sleazy salesman, you can still be a sharp and classy leader. You just have to make the most of your strengths.

PREPARATION, PREPARATION, PREPARATION
Preparation, analysis and strategy are key chapters in the introvert’s playbook. Whether you are giving a presentation, networking with colleagues or addressing a team, you don’t wing it. You spend time thinking through your goals and preparing for questions. These are not weaknesses; they are skills that will give you an edge in social situations.

In fact, thorough preparation allows even the most extreme introvert to behave more like an ambivert—someone whose personality sits in the middle of the introversion-extroversion spectrum. That’s because preparation lets you know when to speak and when to listen, when to reflect and when to probe, when to push forward and when to hold back. The result is a calibrated approach—a combination of the extrovert’s assertiveness with the introvert’s quiet confidence for the best of both worlds.

BUILD DEEP AND RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIPS
When introverts are in the zone, they’re in zone. Your disdain for large-group socializing means you don’t engage in meaningless pursuits like superficial chit chat or blowing your own trumpet. Instead, you give individuals your full attention.

This is an excellent skill. Engaging in meaningful, one-on-one conversation enables you to build clear communication channels based on friendship, credibility and trust. Not only does this allow you to get your vision across in deeper, more personal ways, it also makes your team more willing to offer up ideas for improving the business. People who work under an introverted leader know that their opinions will be heard, and this makes them more proactive. In the same situation, an extroverted leader may feel threatened, which makes them less effective at leading vocal teams.

HARNESS THE POWER OF SILENCE
The power of silence can serve as a real strength for the introverted leader. Extroverts are so uncomfortable with silence that they will say anything to fill the gap—and it only takes one foot-in-mouth comment to tarnish their reputation.

By contrast, as an introvert you are good at holding your tongue. You access wisdom when your mind (and your mouth) is quiet, and this allows you to choose your words carefully and correctly. By taking the time to consider the facts and issues before speaking, your responses will convey a sense of reflective wisdom that shows up very powerfully to your peers and your superiors.

USE TECHNOLOGY TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
One classic introvert weakness is the undersell. You don’t feel comfortable showing off. You believe there is something noble about hiding your light under a bushel and you prefer to let your results speak for themselves. Unfortunately, self-promotion is a necessary evil if you want to get your ideas across.

As a classic introvert, you have a way with words—you’re just not very comfortable with thinking out loud. Luckily, there’s a platform for getting your vision across in a calm and measured way—the Internet. Personal websites, blogs, newsletters, social media, podcasts and videos are essential tools that allow you to market yourself, boost your personal brand, increase your sphere of influence and articulate your messages in a way that feels authentic to you.

The key takeaway is this: Introverts can stretch and grow as leaders without changing the essence of who they are. You may not have the bold, extroverted exuberance that initially captures people’s hearts and minds, but your calm and measured nature has no less power to lead teams and influence people.

• Molly Owens's blog

 

Sperry, Jenkins: Left Brain, Right Brain
A noted scientist and a wounded veteran: roots of the left/right brain story

[First of three monthly parts]

The left brain/right brain story has permeated our culture. It is common to hear someone comment that they are a “left-brain” or a “right brain” person, and it is just as common to hear about left- or right-brain thinking. The left brain/right brain story apparently began on a day in February 1962, when a 48-year-old man with intractable epilepsy was brought into an operating room at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles. This was the moment that Roger Sperry, a world-renowned neuroscientist, had long awaited.

For years, Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology had surgically separated the left and right sides (also called hemispheres because each is, roughly, half a sphere) of the brains of cats and monkeys, and then tested the animals in experiments that measured cognitive function. He and his team had developed a novel way to plumb the mysteries of the living mammalian brain—and their conclusions from this so-called split-brain research with animals had taken the neuroscientific world by storm.

“They perceive, learn, and remember much as normal animals do,” Sperry wrote, in a paper that attracted significant attention inside academia but went virtually unnoticed in the larger world. “However, if one studies such a ‘split-brain’ monkey more carefully...one finds that each of the divided hemispheres now has its independent mental sphere or cognitive system....In these respects, it is as if the animals had two separate brains.”1

On that winter day in 1962, Sperry was setting the stage for his first test on a human, William Jenkins.

Mr. Jenkins was a military veteran who had suffered grand mal seizures (“brain spasms” that produce massive convulsions)—sometimes as many as 10 a day—since surviving a bomb explosion near the end of World War II. He had learned of a radical operation, a version of which had been performed by other doctors two decades before at a Rochester, New York, hospital, that had relieved the symptoms of extreme epilepsy. He was eager for the California surgeons to try it on him. Unlike patients who underwent earlier versions of this operation, Mr. Jenkins made a deal with his doctors: Whether or not the surgery reduced his suffering, he agreed to work with Sperry, who would administer postoperative behavioral tests similar in principle to those given to the scientist’s experimental animals. Assuming that Mr. Jenkins’s higher cognitive functioning survived the surgery, his ability to respond on command and communicate with speech might give Sperry a quantum boost in his research.

“Even if it doesn’t help my seizures,” Mr. Jenkins said before meeting the scalpel, “if you learn something, it will be more worthwhile than anything I’ve been able to do for years.”

The surgeons shaved Mr. Jenkins’s head, sterilized and peeled back his scalp, opened two holes into his skull, and began the meticulous work of cutting the corpus callosum, the largest structure that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brains of humans; this structure consists of some 250 million nerve fibers, an impressive piece of brain anatomy. The operation went according to plan and Mr. Jenkins recovered without incident; his convulsions were indeed gone, and, like Sperry’s monkeys and cats, on casual observation he seemed cognitively normal.

But Sperry’s testing revealed that such causal observations were misleading. Mr. Jenkins’ cognition was indeed changed, and the hemispheres were indeed revealed to have some distinct capabilities.

What are those capabilities, and how do they align with the popular left brain/right brain narrative?

 

Future Thinking and False Memories
Looking at the road up ahead can change the scene in the rear view mirror.


Source: "Portrait of Alexander Hamilton" by John Trumbull / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
In the song “My Shot” from the Broadway musical Hamilton, Lin Manuel Miranda’s title character sings, “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.” The feeling that his death is already in his past allows Hamilton to dispense with the idea of dying and throw himself into the affairs of his young nation, unafraid of death but fully aware of the brevity of life. According to the logic of the song, Hamilton’s greatness is built, in part at least, upon the foundation of a false memory, and new research suggests a possible reason for the success of his mental strategy.

Psychologists have long been aware of the creative license our brains exert when encoding the factual details of our life experiences into autobiographical memories, and our everyday lives offer no shortage of concrete examples to illustrate the phenomenon. We’ve all felt the embarrassment of sharing a story about something interesting that happened to us, only to have the details of our story called into question by someone who experienced the same interesting event (“That car that sideswiped us was white, not red, and I’ve got the insurance photos to prove it”). And those occasions on which we are actually called out about our erroneous memories are undoubtedly a mere fraction of the factually inaccurate memories with which we are never confronted.

Rather than indicate any fundamental weakness or defect in our memories, however, the frequent disparity between the facts as they happened and the way we remember them is actually a reflection of the constructive nature of autobiographical memory. Whenever we recall some event from our past, we don’t simply call up a file and replay a recording of it, like we would a YouTube video, but rather construct it anew from memory traces stored in various locations throughout our brains. And each time we rebuild it, we do so in a slightly different way. As psychologist Elizabeth Loftus observes, “In essence, all memory is false to some degree. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process, whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography.” Deviations from factual reality—false memories—are not a deviation from the norm, but rather an intrinsic and inevitable result of our constructive memory.

For many years, memory research focused on the more unfortunate aspects of false memories, such as widely publicized cases of people being wrongfully convicted on the basis of testimony that, even though witnesses genuinely believed what they were saying, turned out to be false. More recent research, however, has found a silver lining to the false memory cloud. Using a technique called the Deese/Roediger—McDermott procedure, in which people are presented with a list of semantically associated words (e.g. bed, wake, rest, and dream) and then later asked to recall the words—psychologists have been able to reliably induce false memories in the laboratory. On the later recall/recognition test, subjects frequently report having seen a related word, a “critical lure,” that was not actually on the list (e.g. falsely remembering the word sleep after seeing bed, wake, rest, and dream).

By predictably triggering false memories, researchers have been able to identify psychological traits associated with them, and many of these traits are surprisingly positive. In one study, experts in a given field “were at increased risk of domain-relevant intrusions,” indicating that “the superior organizational processes of experts support the associations that give rise to false memories.” Another study found a “positive correlation between creativity…and susceptibility to false recall,” and still other studies suggest that the generation of false memories can “prime solutions to insight-based problems.” All of this research indicates that false memories, rather than being intrinsically problematic, are actually “adaptive” and “functional.”

Having memories that depart from factual reality, then, is a normal, even desirable function of human memory. And in an ironic twist, it appears that our tendency to misremember a past event is particularly prevalent when we first think about it in terms of the future. Psychologists at the University of Hull, England, conducted a variation of the Deese/Roediger—McDermott procedure that incorporated future thinking into the usual word presentation/recall paradigm, having participants imagine a future camping trip and then rate words on the presented list for their relevance to the trip. In the follow-up recall and recognition tests, participants demonstrated higher levels of both false recall and false recognition than participants who rated the words according to other measures of relevance (e.g. past experiences, or pleasantness). The study supported the emerging view that the associative processes involved in the creation of false memories can produce a number of unexpected cognitive benefits, and that these associative processes can be enhanced by future thinking and planning.

When the Broadway Alexander Hamilton sings “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory” in a song about his ambitions for future achievement, he is affirming the adaptive function of false memories. By imagining his future death, he creates a false memory of death as a past event, and in the process spins a web of associations off of that memory that tags everything he does with a compelling sense of urgency. It is this urgency that propels him headlong toward his destined greatness.

 

Similar to my reasoning to remain in the 'moment', and just do it

 

No, I don't mean sex ... however,

 

It is a cool idea.

 

Westworld was spooooky. Can't wait for SII