... on this video.
Laughing with tears coming out of my eyes emoji.
But you don’t have to...
like if you’ve got a lot of extra time (laughs)
- Your personality type very well might be messing
up your communication with others.
N v S, of course that stands for intuition versus sensing.
Intuition has to be an end,
because introvert already took the eye.
Now what intuition and sensing are talking
about is really abstract versus concrete information.
And Myers-Briggs didn't make this up.
This is something that exists and has existed
in psychology and philosophy for a long time.
Reality is both abstract and concrete.
Both of these types are dealing
with reality in one way or another.
But what do we actually mean by abstract or concrete?
Here we go.
I wrote it in some colors.
So we keep you all engaged.
When we're talking about the concrete,
we're talking about a real world object.
And when we're talking about abstract,
we're talking about an object of the mid.
We're talking about observable versus not observable,
quantifiable versus not quantifiable.
And a lot of times we're talking
about a thing versus the category that the thing is in.
A lot of people still debate
over where the dividing line really is.
And that's not just me talking about like,
oh, well we really can't say no.
That's like the philosophers
and stuff are like, well,
you can't always say exactly
what is concrete and what isn't.
Some examples of abstract versus concrete are goodness
which is abstract, and a good book, which is concrete.
Although the wrinkle is,
if I said good books in general, that would be abstract.
But if I say that book is a good book,
and I'm pointing towards Harry Potter
or whatever, that's concrete, I can pick it up and read it.
Now, back in the day when I was,
I believe that my class
in high school was the last one to have analogies
on the SAT exam, which is a very good demonstration
of taking the concrete and putting it into the abstract
in terms of the connection between the concrete things.
So this is what a question would look
like in the analogy section.
A boat is to water as,
and then you get a few options here.
The intuitive connection
between these two concrete things
is that a boat is a vehicle that goes on the water.
So the answer would be plane to air.
Another example that's a bit more surprising
is if I was just talking about comedy movies
with you and I'm like, "Hey man, I love comedy movies."
You might think that that is concrete,
but that too is abstract
because you can't watch comedy movies as a concept.
That's just like the abstraction,
the categorization of a bunch of specific movies.
If I said "Napoleon Dynamite," then yeah, that is concrete.
I can watch "Napoleon Dynamite."
If I said movies like "Napoleon Dynamite;"
now we're back into the abstract
because that's that's a category or that's an analogy.
I think a lot of times when we talk about personality types,
we think that intuition is a lot more complex
than it really is and a lot more disconnected
from the concrete world than it really is.
But as those examples should have shown you,
intuition, AKA; abstract thought,
is really only a couple
small steps away from concrete thought.
So now that I have belabored the point,
of abstract versus concrete thought,
it should be fairly apparent
to you that everyone does both of those things.
Thinks both of those ways,
processes that information on both sides of it all the time.
It's all about preference, baby.
So intuitive types might know all the facts,
might know all the concrete details
and in fact they know a lot of them.
But then the question is,
what are they gonna rely on when they are trusting?
How do I know what is real?
I'm gonna trust the pattern that I see
amongst the concrete facts rather than the facts themselves.
And that's also what I'm gonna communicate to other people,
because that's the important info that they should get.
Likewise, sensing types very well are doing a lot
of abstract thinking,
but at the end of the day they're like,
okay, yeah
I see the pattern there,
but I don't really
want to say that that's the the important thing.
I don't wanna say that
I'm gonna put my bet on that.
If I have to say what is real, what is not real,
I'd rather stick with what is provable
and observable and the concrete facts right here.
Do you understand what I'm talking about?
You don't.
Okay.
Between the two types,
I think that sensing types are gonna be overall
easier to understand
than intuitive types,
but you guys are still messing
up communication in several important ways.
Despite the clarity that you might bring
to your communication in terms of the facts,
in terms of what,
it can leave people wondering
what is the context of this?
You don't understand the why behind it,
how does it all fit together?
And then they might not be using analogies
to help you understand how these facts fit together
as they relate to something else.
Let me give you some examples player.
Back when I was in school,
my job after classes
was to go to the scene shop at the theater
and help build the sets for upcoming production.
So you're building platforms,
you're building walls for like a fake house,
for whatever play is gonna go on.
And I had this professor who was oftentimes
designing these sets and so he would have the plans there
and he would tell me what to build.
A lot of times what he would do is he would say,
I need you to cut three pieces of two by four at this length
and go, and while that was clear,
in the sensory, the problem was he would never tell me
like how it all fit together.
He never stopped to say like
here's the overview of what we're doing.
So a lot of times I would mess up the scenery,
even though he gave me very exact details,
I wouldn't always know what I was doing overall.
And so I would put things together technically
in the way he told me to do it, but it was wrong
because it wasn't taking into context everything else.
Well, I had another professor in college,
he was teaching about the fall of the Roman Empire
and every day he would give like a long fascinating story
of all the events that happened and the emperors
and what they did and the generals and blah, blah. blah.
Event, event, event, event.
So at the end of each class, I kind of knew a lot
of things that happened, but I was like,
can you zoom out and maybe show me
the pattern generally of what was going on?
A good analogy, a good zooming out
and kind of blurring things a bit
to get that top down view,
can help you understand
what all those details actually mean.
And sensei types fail to do that a lot of times.
Sensei types just, it seems ironic,
but try to clarify what you mean
with those details by giving some analogies,
by giving a bit
of an overview before or after you give all these facts.
It helps contextualize what you're saying.
Intuiting types, these types have much more
vague communication that is typically
a lot less clear than the sensing types.
As we've discussed,
there are some advantages to communicating in the abstract,
but here's how the intuitive types
how you guys mess up your communication.
Now the probollo with a lot
of intuitive types is that they give a lot of generalities,
they give a lot of overviews, but it is so abstract
that you don't really know what they were talking about.
Like it can leave you with a general understanding
of the principles of what they were talking about.
But if you were to then try to say what
the practical application of it was or a practical
like real world example, you'd be a little bit
hard pressed to say what they actually meant.
Here's an example to clear things up.
So let's say a friend is getting married
and she's telling you about what her wedding,
what she wants her wedding to be like, and she's like,
"Oh, I want an an eclectic mix
of different aesthetics and I want bold colors
and I want food that people are gonna remember
and it's unique."
You might have like generally understood what she meant,
but then if you're like,
well what does she actually want at her wedding?
No clue.
Like she said, "Bold colors."
What colors, what are the colors even on?
Is she talking about flowers?
Is she talking about the the groom's tie?
Are we talking about a yellow submarine
themed wedding where it's like,
we're in a,
I don't even know where I'm going with that.
Same with physics.
It's like you can learn all these principles of physics,
but if the teacher never tells you like,
"Oh, you need to know this,
because of this real world application,
it's gonna be difficult to really understand
what they're talking about."
Intuitive types, try to clarify what you mean
by bringing in the practical application
of what you're talking about or giving examples
or illustrations of specifically what you mean.
There's you in the monitor.
Whoa,
whoa,
that's cool.
Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna get even
more specific so you can really know like kind
of the different struggles
that each type has in communication.
First up we're gonna talk about the SJ types.
These types generally prefer introverted sensing.
When SJ types give details,
they're often very specific because those
SJ types are kind of whittling down reality
and the concrete observations they make
to what they think are the most essential concrete facts.
So that's what they're communicating.
The problem is that can be confusing,
because other people might not understand why
those details are significant.
It's like, okay, I get what you're saying, but like why?
Why these details?
And so when other people are listening to you
if you're an SJ type, a lot of times they're just wondering,
what should I be paying attention to?
Like they're giving me all these details
and some of 'em don't really seem to be important,
like they don't seem to fit together.
What should I pay attention to?
What's gonna be relevant, ultimately?
What's gonna fit into that abstract overview?
When SJ types communicate,
I think one of the interesting things they do
is they tend to communicate in stories.
And those stories tend to progress
in a very structured linear way.
Although, a lot of times it comes
with a lot of details that don't matter, it matters to them.
They struggle a bit to understand what details
are gonna matter to other people.
Now when SJ types use analogies
and they do use analogies fairly often
and that can trip people up.
They think, oh,
I hear someone using analogies, they must be intuitive.
No, everyone uses analogies
and everyone uses analogies to clarify things,
but they use them a little more clunkily when you,
when you don't prefer intuition
when you use that intuition, it's really just like a splash
of flavor in there and you're kind of just like, okay,
here's a quick thing.
The SJ types,
their abstract analogies tend to be stories that are a lot
of times true stories and it's like extremely
clear what we're talking about concretely
and extremely clear what the connection
is abstractly in that analogy.
The SP types generally they prefer extroverted sensing.
It's a little different flavor of sensing than the SJ types.
So these types will give concrete details
that they deem to be objectively relevant.
So as the SJ types are
like what are the few details that are relevant
to me that I, that help me make sense of reality?
The SP types, it's the opposite.
It's like, okay, let's just see
what facts do other people need to know?
The problem is that a lot of times these big relevant facts
that the SP types have and communicate
to other people are missing like little details in between,
so that people get like sort of the big events that happen,
but are like, okay, what happened in between?
How did we get from point A to point C?
These types also tend to communicate in information dumps.
So they will just give you a bunch of info
and a lot of times it'll be those big details
and then they're just kinda like followed
by the the smaller details or whatever.
It's kind like, hey, let's sort out reality,
like concrete reality and figure out what it is.
And you're like, dude, this is like so much information.
So it's interesting, the SJ types and the SP types
can both of them can confuse other people
with the details they are giving out.
I think with SJ types though, it seems like very particular,
here's detail A, here's detail B, here's detail pie.
And everyone's like, why did you throw pie in there?
Whereas the SP types are like
here's A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K
L, M, N, O, P, and everyone's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Which, whoa, dude.
When the SP types use analogies,
what I've seen a lot
of times is that they're in relation
to concrete things less so, like a a whole drawn out story.
And I find that they also will use
relatively brief analogies as well.
They might use a lot of 'em, but they'll just
be like very quick like, "Oh yeah, it's like this."
Now let's talk about the intuiting types.
First of all, we'll talk about the NP types.
They have extroverted intuition.
NP types make a lot
of abstract connections and a lot of analogies
and a lot of categorizations,
'cause as we talked about,
categories of things is abstract and intuitive.
So the NP types are like, here's an analogy,
here's a connection, here's all these things.
It's like we're just talking about this one concrete thing
and they're able to throw up
all these abstract connections to it,
which can provide clarity,
but it can also leave you a little bit confused
'cause you're like, wait, you might forget
like what were we talking about to begin with?
And a lot of times,
because these types throw out so many abstract things,
when you look at them side by side,
they can feel like inexact or contradictory
or confusing because they make
so many and they're kind of like just,
those basic connections really quick.
And when these types give concrete examples,
when they go into their sensing side,
it tends to be very specific and detailed.
Now we go to the NJ types.
They prefer introverted intuition.
Now these types,
they are using their abstract thinking to categorize
and to make connections and see patterns in concrete reality
and make them as simple as possible to like boil down
and condense everything into as few categories as possible.
All right, so here's an example that might help clarify
the the NP versus NJ,
when I'm talking about the NP making all these things
and the NJ trying to reduce it.
This is theoretical, but an illustration.
If you ask an NP type like how many music genres there are?
They're gonna like list a thousand different music genres.
They're going to take pleasure in seeing,
oh, what are all the connections
between these songs that make them this,
that are slightly different than this?
And how do they overlap and like, oh man,
there's all these different things.
This particular song could be
in five different genres and like,
oh, there's like 20 different sub-genres
within this subgenre.
They'll find those abstract connections
between the music and try to make as many as possible.
Whereas if you ask an NJ type,
how many music genres are there on the extreme end,
they might say there are only three basic genres.
You can boil everything down into three genres.
Now I know that's kind of ridiculous,
but I'm just trying to exaggerate
in order to demonstrate this level of categorization.
NP, let's categorize as much as possible
and as much detail as possible.
NJ is like, no, let's reduce it.
Let's get rid of as many categories
as possible and combine them.
And so for the NJ types, their communication can be unclear
to others because the way they categorize the world,
the way they look at it abstractly
can seem overly simplistic
in the way that they say that things are like each other.
And it can seem kind of dense and obscure to people.
And I mean dense, just like in like,
how do I understand your connections here?
Not dense, like stupid.
These types tend to communicate in analogies
that are like singular and detailed rather than going off
and doing a bunch of related abstract analogies.
They're just like, okay, no, I'm gonna take all of this
and I'm gonna find the single perfect analogy for you.
And that's it.
And when they give examples,
it tends to be pretty basic and bare bones.
It will be concrete, but it's gonna be like the easiest,
like most obvious concrete example
that you can come up with.
Leave me a comment,
let me know what else you'd like me to cover.
Until next time, stay cool and attractive.
♪ They say a stranger's come to town ♪
♪ They call him ♪