What is Te Like? My Experience
OK, so I need to preface this by saying that my understanding of Te is largely informed by my own experience as an INTJ (Ni Te Fi Se), so be aware that it may be a depiction based largely on what may in fact more accurately be regarded as Ni-Te, and of course I use Ti a lot, too, so take everything I say with that context in mind.
However, I want to emphasise a few things, specifically tailored for an audience of mostly INFJs:
i) Te as the
social thinking function
ii) When do INFJs use Te?
iii) Examples of Te in action
iv) How can I describe what Te
feels like?
Te as the social thinking function
While Te is often accurately described as ‘objective’ logic or ‘strategic’ thinking, what I think many non-Te users fail to grasp with these descriptions is that it is a very
prosocial function. Te is focused on
what works for everyone, and while this may manifest as an obsession with
objective truth which might rub some people up the wrong way if it is pursued too vigorously, fundamentally Te just wants to explain things and design things in ways that work for everyone. It’s like the Fe of functionality.
Te makes sure that things work for people by designing logical constructs that make sense in the outside or objective world, with reference to a specific audience of end-users. For example, if you’ve ever read a piece of writing that made a very complicated idea very easy to follow, because its argument was arranged in proper sequential order, or it was well-formatted with chapter and section headings, that’s Te. The idea of rational argument in general is very Te. Te has the quality of being able to make something very complicated seem very simple, because it is the social thinking function.
When do INFJs use Te?
I wanted to focus on Te as the
social thinking function because I think this is a particularly revealing lens through which INFJs can recognise their own use of it. For INFJs, I think you aren’t likely to be aware of your Te use because it operates
through Fe. You subordinate your Te to Fe concerns.
This is to say that, anytime you
designed something functional in order to make others feel comfortable, or otherwise affect how they felt, you were using Te (Fe-Te). I’ll give you an example: when
@Puzzlenuzzle (INFJ Tidyelf) tidies up, she thinks about how the resulting space will make people feel (Fe), and arranges things in order to make their lives easier (Te); she will give people the space and freedom to move, and might build things that they can
use in order to achieve this Fe aim. This is Te subordinated to Fe.
A Te user like me or
@Pin just operates this way by default – we will just automatically do things to make them
work for others for its own sake, for the joy of designing the system, even though we’ll be aware of the Fe effects (Te-Fe).
Examples of Te in action
When I first started teaching secondary school and college/sixth-form history in the UK (11-18 year olds was my age range), I began in a department that was very unorganised and run by a charismatic but disorganised ExFP head of department. The curriculum was ad-hoc, ‘planned’ week to week or even day to day just to keep things afloat, and the department was plagued by a lack of high-quality resources and organisation.
Somehow, I gradually ‘took over’ the whole organisation and planning of the department because I couldn’t tolerate how disorganised everything was and I obviously just had an inner confidence that I knew best.
I reorganised ‘Staff Common’ to make sense (this was the common drive on which all of our teaching resources were stored – PowerPoints, &c.) with a logical file structure. I re-planned the entire curriculum from foundational teaching aims and government policy. I created a new departmental PowerPoint template (these were the main way we delivered lesson plans) which was both attractive and functional, and ordered all the lessons by numbered sequences. I organised all the staff timetables and instituted new, common policies for behaviour and homework, &c. All of this I organised in a single, centralised ‘Departmental Handbook’ so that anyone could know everything about how the department ‘worked’ from this single document (including a successor as head of department, for example).
Despite being the most junior teacher in the department, the leadership role gradually evolved to me by common consent and the other teachers preferred that I was in control. Predictably, when the head of department went off on sick leave with stress (and because his incompetence had been discovered), I became acting head of department and the place just worked like it never had before. Even a year after leaving that job for a PhD, I know that the staff are still using my systems and resources because I laid a solid foundation of functional machinery. I think this story captures the
prosocial nature of Te in use.
I think this is just pure Te probably coupled with Si, but I left teaching because my intellectual needs were not being met. I needed to pursue my Ni theories and this was just not possible in teaching. Yeah I got to do a lot of Te, but I lived in Ni so I was denying myself on a daily basis – living in Te is just not as satisfying long-term for an INTJ in the same way as it might be for an ENTJ, for example.
How can I describe what Te feels like?
Being an INTJ is very similar to being an INFJ, simply with Te-Fi instead of Fe-Ti, so I’d like you to imagine what your Ni feels like.
My experience is the same, except I have a stronger desire to put these Ni visions or theories into a structured order and to bring clarity and precision to the concepts I create.
Ni-Te feels like you have this at first vague notion of an idea which is uncoalesced. This idea or ‘vision’ is dominating and the state of ‘wondering’ about it and around it is the mode you operate in constantly. You can visualise the almost ‘spatial’ relationship between different but related ideas on a visual field, and the process of concretising the vision is to bring these ideas into firmer focus or stronger relationship with each other and with the ways in which they each form part of the core idea. The vision gradually seems to form a net or web of concepts as it materialises from the Ni space. However, the difference with Ni-Ti is that for Ni-Te it isn’t
enough that the vision makes internal sense – you constantly check and compare the idea against what is objectively ‘true’, and subject your own idea to the constant pressure of imagined attacks and critiques (either envisioned from others, or simply by the weight of reality bearing upon it). It needs to be
real.
I think Ni-Te seeks structure, clarity and precision much more than Ni-Ti, which seems to prefer a more rounded sense of completeness. If I could put it like this, I think you might be able to perceive the difference:
Ni-Ti:
Analogue Holistic Theories
Ni-Te:
Digital Holistic Theories