While I was recently cramming for my FCC amateur radio exams, I had a sort of diet revelation that was worth learning but mega-frustrating.

In a very high-stress situation, it was nearly impossible to stick to my diet plan. I had started a cut, but I had so much going on, including the exam studies, that I was pushing myself way too hard psychologically for the cut to work. I had two businesses to run, a volunteer leadership role on the side involving traveling & public speaking, family obligations, and then along with all that, this new, exciting hobby which requires studying for exams.

I wrestled with the problem, which I first figured was just a diet thing. Was I losing my touch? I lost 100 lbs. before…but had I now reached that point where my luck had run out, and I’d just gain it all back?

(People periodically ask me: “Aren’t you afraid you’ll just gain it all back?” And I’ll just say that you should never ask big weight-losers this question, because they will insta-unfriend you if you’re lucky, and smile at you and make plans for your demise if you’re not. You have now identified yourself as the face of the annoying voice in their head that has posed this question literally hundreds of times.)

So I tried all kinds of alterations to my diet, really fixed up my macros, got more sleep, less exercise, then later I tried more exercise, injected more fun into my day, avoided the kitchen at mealtime, tried more frequent eating schedules, heavy doses of stress-journaling, meditation, dream analysis, and asking friends for help. Intermittent fasting, just skipping breakfast, even skipping dinner and going straight for dessert, in case there was some dessert-calories limit I’d naturally reach (there is not). I tried more bodybuilder recipes off of Youtube, but you know—you can eat too much of those, of course, and that’s essentially what I did.

In the end, stress-eating (more like stress-gobbling) is just what I do under extreme stress, and it was alternately hilarious and terrifying to watch how much I was overshooting my caloric intake goals. I would swear up and down in the morning that I would not cheat, but come lunchtime it seemed that no amount of calories would fill me up. 1600 calorie goal? Still hungry, maybe I have some disease! Try 1800. Nope! And then 1000 calories after that, you simply can’t eat more.

Stress hunger is seriously hard to distinguish from actual hunger.

My “diet” ended with me gaining 5 lbs. by the time my exams were done. Ugggh.

If you’re a big person like I used to be, 5 lbs. might seem like nothing. But keep in mind I was fighting this dragon tooth and nail. Those weight loss tools I listed above—they work! But this time I had too much stress on my plate.

Regarding the stress, beyond the stress journaling I tried developing new frameworks for approaching high-productivity living, I tested my executive functions, I swallowed frogs (metaphorically), I attacked the stress head on, and I used special tricks of the intuition to attack them asymmetrically. But nope.

So in addition to the weight gain, I also have a journaled collection of depressive episodes that I worked through during the same period. I was exhausted and I literally put myself to bed multiple times on some days.

(Of course, it wasn’t a total loss…err, gain. I’m now an extra-happy Extra Class radio operator. Burp!)

After all of that, though, I figure I came out a bit ahead of the game. I had been running an analysis right along with all the troubles. No matter how I felt—depressed, stressed, whatever, I was right there with the problem, keeping pace and taking notes.

Once the exams were done, I had an incredibly valuable bit of information: Fast-paced self-improvement on top of other life duties is going to come at a cost, and for me that cost is probably going to start with weight gain and depression.

I could have spaced the radio exams over the course of 30 years and no one would have said a thing, but it would have bugged me. So I went through with the exam studies even after I figured this out. That’s a bit inflexible—I have now been warned. I know multiple people who have dropped out of university studies completely due to depression and anxiety, and their situations almost immediately improved. And this hobby is nothing compared to university studies.

Now that the exam studies are done, my weight is going down again. Of course, it feels like it’s so easy to stick to a diet now, as long as I work the plan I’ve known all along. All my tools work again: The analysis, logging, the macros, hydration, everything. I torched about 500 calories on exercise today and I’m still on track to meet my no-exercise caloric intake goal. Where was this superpower when I needed it?

So: I’ve done a lot of stuff this year, and I’m super proud of everything I’ve accomplished. This has been one of the highest-achieving years of my life. But that middle ground between “high achiever” and “low achiever” is not the most comfortable to me, and I can benefit by exploring that fact a bit. This aligns with what I know of other INTJs I’ve coached.

This may be really good timing, though. Last year was the first year I personally correlated extreme New Year’s resolution-setting with depressive episodes, and I’m excited to absolutely dominate next year’s resolutions by more carefully tweaking the engagement level and required time allotments.

I’m curious: What was the most difficult goal you ever achieved? What did you have to give up to reach it? Did you have any out-of-control habits that went back to “normal” after you achieved the goal?

My email’s in the sidebar. On Twitter, I’m @systematikk. (And on the ham bands, I’m KM6NHH, doing some AMSAT hobbying lately.)

Filed in: Fitness /31/ | Goals /52/ | Si /19/ | Memorization /5/ | Depression /13/ | Anxiety /32/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/

Still thinking about yesterday’s blog post, here’s a question I ask myself a lot, in different ways:

“Can I defend this?”

For example, let’s say I’m studying some new topic. I quickly become aware of the strengths and weaknesses, benefits and common criticisms of that topic.

The inner critic now has a voice. Now I tend to feel accountable—for whatever reason—to this inner critic.

I recall many times when I’ve imagined myself on the witness stand. Grilled by myself, essentially, for some decision I made or didn’t make. Or some belief system, or an interest into which I pour my spare time. “What good does this interest in X do for you?”

“Well,” I start. “I’m glad you asked, strangely familiar inner prosecutor guy.”

Now if I don’t pass the examination by the prosecution, maybe I keep running into the same issue that I can’t argue successfully—sometimes at that point I become disgusted (not always that I am disgusted—feelings may elude detection) and start to dissociate from the interest. At that point I’m ready to grump out of there. The risk is that I do so with little justification other than “I lost an argument about it in the People’s Court of my brain”.

Part of the natural answer to this for someone with INTJ-like psychology, perhaps, is learning to listen to the “I just wanna / I just don’t wanna” point of view so often associated with Jung’s introverted feeling function.

I mean, if I “just wanna” study some topic that feels vulnerable to intense debate, it’s usually OK simply because I just wanna—that’s enough justification. Making judgment based on a feeling may be pretty foreign to INTJs on its face, but we really do it all the time in little ways.

On top of that, maybe there’s some intuition at play. Something tells me this interest is good for me. Great, but the inner critic would tend to be uncomfortable with that because it’s terribly subjective.

So can I defend it? Maybe. Do I need to defend it? Usually I think the answer is no. But such questioning plays to my strengths; I do it anyway and reap some brain chemical reward for acting like a rational / theorist. Hmm.

Filed in: Interests /112/

Now that I’m a Middle-Aged Guy, I am starting to loop back around to hobbies I had as a kid. With each old interest I re-encounter, I start to think, “why did I quit doing this?”

And like 99% of the time, my answer is, “I totally grumped out of that one.” Man, I grumped out of a lot of stuff.

Do you ever grump out of your interests?

I think it works like this:

• Get really interested in a thing
• Find a point of leverage
• Pursue it very deeply
• Like a little tunnel-digger, end up with a narrow point of view on the interest (I realize this now but I didn’t before)
• If future me is lucky, put it down gently and do something else.
• If future me is unlucky, rage-quit the interest and burn every bridge I built.

This applies to social groups, more traditional hobbies, books I liked, whatever.

The way the point-of-view-narrowing works is:

• I’m having a good time and really digging deep into the topic
• Wow, I’m learning amazing stuff!
• Suddenly I’m in the dark underbelly! Here be dragons: Controversies, unanswered (or unanswerable) questions, people behaving like idiots, clashes with my value system, recognized stereotypes, or whatever.
• Gradually a hunch builds up within me: There are PROBLEMS with this. Something is WRONG.
• I question myself: Can I really defend this?
• I objectify the wrongness rather than subjectify it. It’s not me—nothing’s wrong with my approach—it’s the interest! It’s jacked up! (This could have been a great opportunity for some introspection, some writing, analysis, asking others what they think, etc. But no!)
• At this point I can’t stand that there are problems with it. Maybe it’s all a waste of time!
• Boom, I’m done.

If you’re familiar with any, say, Youtube INTJs who had a large audience and who quit posting INTJ videos and in fact deleted their past INTJ videos and made a video essentially explaining why Jungian type is evil, that person’s behavior also influenced the creation of this blog post. I may have lost a little bit of respect for him because I saw in his acts these old behaviors which seem a bit careless to me lately. Grumping out of things may be natural to many of us, but it really, really needs to be scrutinized.

So I’m trying to put things down more gently now, when I need to put them down for a while. It can be really embarrassing to come back to some old hobby and run into the same old people and give that cringing smile and wonder what they are thinking about your departure! And as I rebuild a model of the interest in question, and work with that mental model, I am trying to hold it lightly so that I can maximize its use while not mistaking it for, say, perfection.

Filed in: Openness /49/ | Interests /112/

Let’s switch this around a bit. I want to hear from you. I always enjoy your emails.

What music have you been listening to (the more obsessively, the better)?

What Youtubes are you liking these days? Any topic. Military history, systems thinking, your favorite Cooking with Dog, anything’s cool.

My email’s in the sidebar. On Twitter, I’m @systematikk.

And on…is there some other platform I should be listening on?

Anyway, let’s do this.

Filed in:

Frustrated with organizational politics recently, I started thinking of an INTJ-optimized way to really create the change that needs to happen.

People who are new to personality type sometimes fall into the trap of thinking, “a real leader? Well that would be the XXXX personality type, or maybe YYYY. They are always in leadership roles.”

In fact, any type can make an effective leader. That’s been established over and over. And type, in order to help us make higher-leverage decisions more quickly, necessarily discards leadership-relevant questions like personal development level and self-awareness.

So INTJs are just fine at leadership and can be great leaders. Even better, we can persuade, usher, and re-route.

Working theory

My working theory is that INTJs hoping to influence an organization can typically get the best result by engineering social change from without, through the leveraged application of the arts and sciences.

I would say “through the leveraged application of technology” but I’m not sure the word “technology” would be taken in the broader sense, which is my intention. For example, you could invent some technology, sure. But being INTJ-smart about it, maybe you just print up better full-color posters than the next guy, and that accomplishes the first directive (below).

None of this is dependent on or ignores any particular position. You’re the president and owner? Everybody does what you tell them to? OK, fine, but you should probably still consider working from without in order to be most effective.

The first directive in this work is to facilitate the flow of information to and from a particular object. You decide what constitutes the object. Maybe you want the organization to agree with you that a far-off goal is something you need to work for. Maybe you want the atmosphere at work to be more relaxed.

For this to happen we need to engage the social organism as an object with psychological receptors for: Harmony, values, recall, impact, deep analysis, systematization, ideas, and vision. In order to do that we have to go meta and view the organism or organization from without. (This applies from dyads on up.)

We must then be willing to stay meta and see ourselves as an overarching portal-opener rather than limiting our role to ground-level, closely-knit parts of the organism. In this latter case I think we set ourselves up to fail or be manipulated through social leverage.

So we create a path, create a portal, open the portal, and stand aside as the organism flows along the new path with excitement.

When we find ourselves working within, we are well advised to work our way to the without, so that we can begin to act like the non-team-players we are, and all this for the benefit of the organization or the values of the organization. We can share our gifts from this position and this is a win-win situation.

This allows us to bring the following skills to bear:

• Adherence to a set of values. INTJs are not a bunch of Darth Vaders; we strongly identify with value systems and this is a key concern. We need to employ this energy positively before we become pessimistic.
• We necessarily involve our intuition for how things can / should be in the future.
• We design for maximum impact.
• We systematize and ensure that things just work the way they need to.

In order to pull this off, we need to keep in mind certain principles like:

• Ask forgiveness more than ask permission, esp. social / group permission
• Weigh the “forgiveness” factor ahead of time and ask if you’ll really need forgiveness. If really needed, perhaps we should get more meta and look at meta-meta-processes.
• Measure results and continually refine our processes based on those results
• Understand psychological components like cognitive processes, so we can downplay our work when necessary, share credit when necessary, play it all up when necessary, and run deeper analysis when necessary.

Well, this has become pretty didactic. And it’s just a draft, really. Maybe it’s even obvious! You knew all this. But I think it’s one potentially helpful path for those who find themselves constantly tangling with the socially-adherent-and-socially-gifted in a well-meant effort to make positive change happen. Get in touch if you have add-ons or thoughts.

Filed in: Thinking /70/ | Energy /121/ | Productivity /120/ | Goals /52/ | Relationships /78/ | Ti /30/ | Control /112/ | Technology /41/

Almost 10 years ago, I began working on what I now see as a journal-keeping framework. The more I wrote what amounted to terribly boring information in my journal, the more irritated I became, and the more I realized that I was thinking of journaling simply as a plain chronology, and I absolutely hate keeping plain chronologies (I don’t mind logging things, but adding the details becomes tedious).

While I thought a journal was important, I wasn’t quite sure how to make it interesting enough to turn it into a habit. The more I tried to keep a chronology, the less likely I was to write.

I thought forward to what my children might want to know about me, by thinking about what I wanted to know based on my past journal entries. As I paged through a few of them (I can’t do this for long—reviewing old works is not something for which I have a lot of patience), I realized they lacked feeling. What was on my mind? What was bugging me? What made me feel upbeat? I had not written any of it down—it was simply a bunch of sketches of things and people, accompanied by notes about where I went and what I did there.

I gave a nickname to this new idea of including more feeling: “Sadnesses and Gladnesses.” This was my first, if one-dimensional, journaling framework. I took this framework with me on a vacation and kept a legitimate travel journal, something that’s still neat to read. While I don’t remember the details of the flight from the US to London, I do remember, still, that I was excited to learn about the newest version of the Linux distribution I was using at the time. The fact that such things stay with me seems to indicate that I was indeed keeping a journal that was more me, no matter how geeky.

Some years after that experience, I read Jordan Mechner’s Karateka and Prince of Persia journals in e-book form and was captivated. He seemed to be focused on his goals, reflecting on how they were or weren’t going, and included little incidentals about his feelings about people, places, software, and so on. Just reading his journals, I knew an adjusted approach to track my goals and progress would be helpful to me, too.

At the same time, my interest in personality type was rapidly increasing. I learned about extraverted thinking, and the way getting one’s thoughts out and onto paper, or into others’ ears, or into a spreadsheet, can be very helpful.

As a result, I started a “Life Improvement Journal”. This journal is my longest and most earnest paper journal to date (though my most current digital journals contain many times the word count) and contains many mini-experiments in journaling. My point in keeping this journal was to experiment with it until it became a legitimately useful tool that would help me improve my life.

In one journaling experiment, I simply asked myself, “is my life improving?” If it wasn’t—and this seemed a very important ingredient—I researched and thought about ways to improve on my improvement process until I came up with something I could try the next day.

In another journaling experiment, pondering the fact that I didn’t know his exact appearance, I sketched the face of Jesus Christ every day. Each face looks different. One of them makes me laugh; it looks as if Jesus Christ might have been imitating one of the Muppets in order to keep a child entertained. However the more I looked at it, the more I had to admit such a thing was possible and, arguably, probable given some ancient Muppet equivalent. How would allowing for this affect my subjective concept of Christ?

These ideas kept my interest and I kept writing and occasionally sketching. This new journal was an exploration of what journaling could do for me, and it helped me identify key factors in motivation while also exploring new ideas.

About two years ago, in a moment of very motivated anticipation, I had my first big cackle in a long time. It was certainly the first cackle in my life that had actually shocked me and made me stop and think. I love the word “cackle,” because no matter how ridiculous a cackle you make, the point of the cackle only becomes more and more clear—you are excited and you feel very good in your current position, probably with some insight into how things are going to turn out for you.

That first big cackle was interesting to me, and I wrote about it. It felt amazing, and quite the opposite of the depression and exhaustion with which I had become so familiar in past years.

I hypothesized that cackles were a very positive sign for increased motivation, energy, and optimism.

What, then, could I do to cackle more?

I backed up a step and realized that my level of excitement is a big hint at an upcoming cackle moment. Since then—to make a long blog post shorter than it would otherwise be—I’ve become a collector of things to be excited about.

Each day, as I write out my daily plan, I try to guess at and plan for some things that excite me. Yesterday, for example, I was excited to write a program on my Casio FX-750GII calculator. How long has it been since I did such a thing? Almost 20 years?

I made the time in my schedule, wrote out some program ideas and immediately wrote an idiot-level program just to quickly learn my way through by trial and error. It felt great!

Today, my excitement was piqued by the idea of testing a modified daily routine for my business (as unexciting as I’m sure it will be perceived, this routine has a spiritual dimension that I am anticipating with excitement), and also spending some time in each of the three library books I had checked out: Learned Optimism, Change Anything, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. I may post my study notes here, too, because that was fun in the past.

Tomorrow, perhaps excitement will mean a DIY video on Youtube, or a favorite new song, discovered.

As I stalk my next cackle—and these are not as easy to come by as “normal excited moments”, by any means—I feel the way a big game hunter must feel when they have caught a glimpse of the animal they were just meant to encounter. After years of fighting depression and anxiety, this new hunt feels very satisfying. And as a side effect, every day now contains at least a little bit of excitement—before now, the question of any excitement at all appearing on the daily schedule was up in the air.

Filed in: Thinking /70/ | Interests /112/ | Therapeutic Practice /147/ | Te /36/ | Goals /52/

Meeting with people for coaching sessions recently, some random generalizations:

Some people need, first and foremost, the ability to talk out their situation. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s just how things are. So with those people I’m testing a coaching model which gives them more of the floor while remaining very directive and results-oriented. Today an ENTP told me he really enjoyed our session, and I was very happy with the outcome myself. He has new and effective methods with which to work, and he’s happier. So the model has grown a bit. For a while there I wasn’t sure I could effectively coach an ENTP, but the answers to problems came quickly this week as I questioned my previous processes and outcomes.

Some people really don’t like to hear themselves talk. (Example: ISFP; some, not all) They sign up for coaching because they know they should, and they were cajoled by someone. Once in the door, they talk more about how they should do this or that, and less about themselves and their motivations. I have a lot of work to do with people like this, but they’re rare in my practice.

Some people really just need an empathetic listener. (Example: ENFP; some, not all) I’m a good listener, so I can cover that base. Eventually they need to make commitments, but they really want to be the one to arrive at those. They want to make my commitments, not my coach’s commitments. That’s fine with me but I also try to gently point out areas for little adjustments here and there.

Generalizing about type is a good way to make trouble for yourself. People develop, they change, they are changed, and so on. As a coach, I build a personal model for the individual first, not the personality type. If I did the latter, I’d be screwed. If I just Googled somebody’s personality type every time I got a test result (wow that would be unethical), my clients would be onto that in a second. Why? Because they are already Googling things themselves! I love that fact. Google is a great first step. Research is a great first step. But the ENTP above wouldn’t have changed his methods that fast through research.

So far I really like this business, and in consultation with many other wise people I’m learning more and more what it means to contribute to the lives of others.

Not exactly an NT pursuit…or is it?

Filed in: ENFP /4/ | ISFP /2/ | ENTP /9/ | Coaching /27/ | Careers /40/

Back when my life was about to take a huge turn for the better, I started a “life improvement journal.” Every day I wrote about what sucked, why it sucked, and wrote a little about what I might do about it. I was inspired by Jordan Mechner and his Karateka & Prince of Persia journals, which can be found in print or in e-book form and are recommended.

Maybe it was that particular journal that did it, I’m not sure. But two years later, having lost over 35% of my body weight, and having become a healthier, happier, and more responsible human being, I was addicted to journaling. I still can’t get enough of it. (I don’t keep a chronology, which I find really boring—there are more enjoyable ways to journal)

A while back, someone asked me: “When you write in your journal, do you keep your writings around, or discard them?”

The question really resonated with me. I have thousands of journal text files and well over 50 notebooks in which I’ve done a lot of journaling. Sometimes I think, “should I just delete all of that; throw the notebooks away? Those problems are now solved.”

For an INTJ, one of the key problem solving modes is “extraversion of thought.” Basically, we just need to blab somewhere, or to someone. Get our thoughts out. Otherwise we tend to hang out with our intuitions too much and we become these grumpy fortune-tellers who “just know how things are going to go.”

So a lot of my most impactful journal entries simply read like this: “I have this problem, what am I going to do, it sucks, oh wait here’s an idea, what if I tried X? OK yeah I should try X. BTW I have an appointment at 3 today. Also so-and-so’s phone number is…”

On the surface, that’s some fairly shallow journaling, or at least that’s how it can appear when I read it now. But there’s a very important step in there. Between “what am I going to do, it sucks,” and “oh wait here’s an idea” my brain kicked in and helped me solve the problem. It’s shocking how little thinking I actually do sometimes, in comparison to say, intuiting or sensing. And a little thinking is often all we need in order to find momentum again.

Journaling is mainly, for me, a way to think in this extraverted way. And most thoughts are not worth keeping around.

However, as I’ve explored the cognitive functions, spending quite a bit of time with Ti, I have this extra thing going on in my journal entries: I’ll start to build a framework. There is a meta-process going on around the journaling, and that process asks:

• Do I have any frameworks or sets of rules with which to attack this problem?
• If so, can I use them right now?
• If not, will this problem happen again?
• If this problem might happen again, can I write down what helped me solve it this time and reuse it later?

So I periodically review my old journal entries, looking for little points of leverage. How did I solve the problem? What did I think would help? Did I try it, and did it work?

I try to extract these points of leverage into their own text files. But I may never complete that gargantuan task, so I keep the journal entries around for now.

Also, perhaps due to its sensate nature (Dario Nardi associates it with our 8th and weakest function, introverted sensing), the journaling-as-collecting-things-from-the-past activity will always be a little bit awkward. INTJs aren’t the best at keeping collections of things. We sometimes swing violently from “I have the BEST POSSIBLE collection of things” to “I just gave them all away to my friends.” From a ridiculously materialistic bent to zen minimalism. Such a black or white tendency doesn’t say much for our maturity on the topic of keeping and storing things, or knowing how to attach importance to things.

Learning to maintain a healthy collection of things, then, can be good. And this is my life’s writing. So while it’s not exactly an amazing work of literature, I’m probably keeping it around.

Filed in: Sensation /40/ | Si /19/ | Thinking /70/ | Te /36/

Here are some frameworks I’ve posted recently, for those who love tips, and self-improvement, and…oh hey, that’s us!

• Procrastination Breaker
• Fitness Framework
• How to Make Learning Fun

Since starting to use Ti more heavily, I have created about 300 of these cognitive frameworks, as counted by:

find ./Frameworks -type f | wc -l

…and they are mostly really messy, not at all polished like those I linked above.

The goal here is to generate my own original, subjective frameworks. Framework depending, I may include more objective data, but I’m already a very objective person overall so the subjective work just adds a dimension of fun. Well, fun and efficiency, since I can just try stuff on my own rather than waiting for the next study to be published.

One interesting trend I’ve noticed is that many of my original frameworks are now merging with each other and becoming more refined. For example, I learned that I can apply to my recovery from most illnesses (even colds, or the flu) the same tools I was using to treat periodic bouts of depression.

The framework I most frequently update right now is my new “monthly framework”, which kind of tells me what to expect & prepare for as each month of the year goes by. In the last year I noticed that many seasonal transitions and activities kind of take me by surprise, so I hope this will help me prepare my mind for e.g. depressing holiday scenarios next time around.

The frameworks I most look forward to updating and re-reading are those focused on making learning fun (above) and interests like earning certifications, interacting with professional societies, and world-building.

Remember also that my intent here is to realign with the traditional INTJ gifts, after stretching myself toward other-types’-gifts for years and years. So if this all seems terribly nerdy or OCD and you find yourself repressing aspects of it, that may be why. I’ll leave exploration of that possibility as a subjective exercise for those who may be so affected, and just say that this has been really helpful for me.

Coaching Update
In other news, my new coaching business is picking up faster than I expected. Referrals are coming in fast, and I was flattered when a doctor asked if he could refer some patients (!) my way in order to aid their recovery toward a healthier mental posture for dealing with the day-to-day.

In another interesting experience, a friend asked for some of my time and said, “my relative would never come to you because she’s concerned that you know her and would judge her, but she needs help with the sort of thing you’re good at. Her life is incredibly hard right now. So I was thinking you could tell me what you would do for her and I’ll do those things with her.” That one still makes me smile. I was glad we spoke though, because she was complaining about the way her own therapeutic solutions were rebuffed by her friend. In general I find it’s not a great idea to try to convince a very anxious person to solve their problems your way. :-)

In response to these inquiries, I find myself googling reasons why I’m not a therapist, and coming up with a very, very subjective set of possible answers. This must annoy actual therapists to no end. And I don’t really want to be a therapist at the moment, so I’m actively looking for ways in which I will need to set boundaries. Still, looking at the Jungian cognitive model(s), one uncomfortable yet very powerful truth is, if you share psychological traits with someone, yet are not a professional yourself, you still may do more therapeutic good in your interactions with that person than a licensed therapist with different or opposing traits could. Yikes.

Filed in: Ti /30/ | Coaching /27/ | Thinking /70/

OK, this is some more Ti fun with some definite extraversion thrown in. So be warned, your built in, INTJ “is that really a good idea?” perceiver alarms might go off.

Me, I’m just over here trying stuff.

But here are some things I have altered lately:

• The way I name things
• The accessories I wear
• My handwriting
• My voice
• My worlds

The way I name things
When I have fun new ideas for things, I now get way more into them and give them project names. My new weight loss plan for the summer? “Astronaut Camp.” The name was originally 90% fun and 10% a reminder to keep a formal chart of how I’m doing. I’m two weeks into it, and now I find myself looking further into the astronaut archetype for guidance. For example, I might ask myself, “how would a healthy astronaut deal with this situation at work?” And of course I’m suddenly interested in watching more Star Trek. This is funny. And good. My past self was far too emotional and simply not astronaut enough.

Also this kind of subjective naming process gets me into Dymaxion territory, which is perfect. I hope to be inventing some Dymaxion-like names soon, because A) that is a seriously cool name and B) Buckminster Fuller is a very INTJ-attractive historical figure.

The accessories I wear
I find myself looking for ways to remind myself to be more of a chart-and-spreadsheet guy, I think because I get so much benefit from that. So as a sort of reminder of that, I bought a new calculator watch (non-affiliate link). I still have my old calculator watch (I have a small watch collection), but this one is better. And it’s got a data bank built in, which is officially meant for phone numbers, but I put it into use for tracking my calories and hydration levels. I mean, if you get 8 full alphanumeric characters and a ton of digits, and you know how to write shorthand, there is no limit. I’m looking forward to using this watch more, and it definitely works as a reminder to be more head-focused and maybe a bit less heart-focused for now.

Anybody else using the data bank watch this way? Let me know, email’s in the sidebar. Or just let me know what watch you like for nerd purposes, and why.

My handwriting
It sucks to have to tell you this, but I am almost done with my handwriting analyst certification. Why does it suck to have to tell you this? Well, to many INTJs, this is pseudoscience at best. But let me just say that if you feel that way, I used to too, and after actually going through the experience, I think that pseudo-scientific perception (remember, INTJ perception is a very subjective cognitive function) deserves some extraversion. Handwriting analysis definitely seems to be intractable to science, but I don’t really care about that, at least not any more than I care about personality typology being intractable to science. (I do have my own qualitative framework for experiencing and then gauging this stuff, and I think you should too.)

Anyway one of the “reminder” things you can do via handwriting (similar to my calculator watch) is to change aspects of your handwriting to more closely align with the person you want to become.

Now, as a graphic designer: This makes total sense. Graphology doesn’t even figure into that assessment.

So I have started modifying my handwriting to be a bit more aggressive and angular, large, and I’m modifying that darn capital M which has always bugged me. Turns out it was a very low-confidence M. So we’ll see how this goes.

Maybe this is mad science, which has always been more fair to the subjective world, methinks.

Oh and I’m kind of thinking I might go full graphologist. Not sure yet. I joined AHAF and if it seems interesting to you, I have to say it’s a very well-run organization with gobs of resources and interesting meet-ups.

To balance that out, I also joined NSS and am SO pumped to get involved with “space stuff”.

(Can you see how all of this interest-chasing is helping me conquer depression? Seriously, it works. At the end of even the worst day I always have my interests to catch up on.)

My Voice
I once received a life-changing compliment on a conference call with a group in Ireland. The US rep who was working there chuckled a bit and said, “everybody here thinks your voice is very soothing and pleasant.” You never forget stuff like that.

Just recently, I had noticed that my voice pitch shot through the roof under stress. So, if I’m changing my handwriting…why not aim for a low voice as a way of possibly controlling my mental game on phone calls?

I’m trying it.

BTW this stuff is not going to change overnight, so please don’t misunderstand me as a guy who’s about to leap off a tall building wearing a self-improvement cape. I’m mainly excited about the ideas at this point, really, but I expect to give them some time and see how they go.

And finally…

My Worlds
In my introvert retraining process, in which I intentionally realigned myself with the healthy INTJ model, I kept reading that introverts have a “rich inner world.” This bugged me, because what was that supposed to mean? I had no idea. I feel like my inner world was mostly just other peoples’ ideas floating around.

But now I think I’m starting to get it. But only after I started world-building. And then exploring those worlds.

Well, you can only do that in your head.

And to make a long story short, one of those worlds has a rather advanced medical science institute with amazing staff. And whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed, a bit depressed, or whatever, I intentionally make a little visit to that place and get some ideas on how I should be recuperating. And every time, it makes me feel better, faster.

Now just in the last couple of weeks, my subconscious has kind of latched onto this place. I know this because it suddenly brought the institute building to the forefront of my mind one afternoon, and I thought, “why would that place come to mind? Am I feeling kind of down and out?” And I was! My subconscious told me what needed to happen via mental imagery before I consciously figured out how I was feeling. Pretending I was in a medical bed, I watched some interesting Youtube videos and took a nap in a hammock, which are, confidentially, steps 1 & 2 of my personal anti-depression framework.

That was a pretty neat experience. I’ll keep developing the rich inner world, and I highly recommend world-building as at least one aspect of it. (I have at least a descriptive text file and maybe a digitally-drawn map of each of these worlds on file.)

I should also mention that the subjective inner world-building really spurs some more objective research as well. I find myself establishing space stations, asking myself what science is carried out within, and then learning new things about e.g. exobiology.

Some Final Words
Why do I feel the need to change myself? There is a bit of a cultural stigma about that, I think. Why not just be OK with who I am, and accept myself?

I think broad wording like “change myself” can cause trouble. Because I think there’s a sort of culturally-obvious, intuitive answer, which is “I must therefore be hating who I am right now,” but is really not as accurate as it needs to be. In fact what I’m doing is aligning myself more closely with my natural gifts, instead of trying to be more “normal” or spending lots of energy to fit some less-comfortable cultural norm.

So maybe my best answer for now is, “I already tried changing myself, I found a healthy direction in which to change, it worked wonders, and now I want to do more of it.”

Filed in: Openness /49/ | Ti /30/ | Interests /112/