- Hey what's up everyone, what's cookin'?
I hope you're having a good day thus far.
Now a couple months ago I released a video talking about
signs of an unhealthy INFJ,
the INFJ personality type.
And today we're gonna be talking about
the positive side of that,
ways to work on becoming healthier
if you are an INFJ.
First of all, this is the one that I struggle with the most
so I guess that's why I put it first, I don't know.
But try to be more spontaneous and playful.
I don't just mean playful like, you know, playing around
but like willing to interact more with people
in a spontaneous way.
As people who have introverted intuition
as the dominant function,
it makes us wanna stay within our defined
view of the world,
and that means also we like to plan a lot.
We really like to plan stuff out before we go into it
which can make us very not spontaneous.
I like to say, "I can be spontaneous,
"if I have like two things to choose from,
"if I can plan for the spontaneity."
This can hold you back sometimes,
look it's good to plan,
I mean as a planner myself I like having
a well-defined plan for just about anything.
When going to the grocery story, I want a plan,
you know, I don't want to leave anything up to chance.
So when people, especially like if friends
wanna be spontaneous, wanna do stuff off the cuff,
or maybe not even just friends,
like things come up in life
that force you to be spontaneous,
INFJs can really struggle
because there's no time for a plan,
it's just we gotta go with stuff in the moment.
We've gotta be playful with other people
and go along with the flow in the moment,
it can be very difficult, very challenging.
So this is something that we can work on
is when we get into a situation where we're gonna be faced
with being a bit more spontaneous,
rather than fight it, which is my natural inclination,
I wanna just you know find a way around the spontaneity.
Can I plan my way out of the spontaneity?
Try, occasionally, work your way up,
don't try to go all in at once and spontaneously decide
I want to move to Japan or something.
But you can be like, okay,
I'm going to try to not plan this next thing out,
I'm not gonna try to figure out
all the details in advance.
Start with something low stakes,
like your friends want to go out to dinner,
try to just figure it out as you go along.
Go to a new part of town, maybe,
go somewhere where you're not familiar
where you're gonna kinda be forced
to just go with the flow and be in the present moment.
And after a while this can help you develop
that ability to be spontaneous and not have to be
that killjoy who has to have everything planned out,
who has to know, "Where am I gonna park?
"I gotta check out my SpotHero
"before we go to this place, man."
No just try to go with the flow
and then after a while you can start to level out
that crazy need you have to always plan everything out.
You're just trying to bring it
a little bit more in balance so that at times
you can just go with the flow.
Let's stop briefly and support this channel
with a quick commercial break.
Thank you for sitting through that, you're a gem.
All right, our second tip,
this is gonna be another tough one.
But learn to put yourself first before others
and allow other people to be unhappy
with the decisions you make.
This is a dangerous one because there are
a lot of us who already don't have a problem with that.
This is more for those of us who have this issue
where we're always trying to keep other people happy
and the decisions that we make
are more of a reaction to what's gonna keep
everyone else happy rather than,
what do I actually want?
What do I think is gonna be good for me in this situation?
This is something that also takes practice
because there's gonna be some big decisions
that come up in life where
it's not gonna make everyone happy
to do the thing that is true to you.
To stay true to yourself you're gonna have to make
some people a bit TO'd, and you wanna start working on it
now with the smaller decisions
if you are struggling with this aspect,
you need to start working on this now
rather than waiting til it's this big life-changing decision
because if you're struggling with it then,
it's gonna be way harder to put yourself first.
And like I say, it's a fine line,
because putting yourself first isn't necessarily
being self-centered or selfish
but I can see how some people can take that message
and bring it into that negative direction.
I think generally we're pretty empathetic people,
we're sensitive, we know what's best for others, right?
But we need to bring in the balance of
not just sacrificing ourselves for that.
We need to learn how to draw boundaries and realize,
"I need to make decisions that work for me first,
"before I think about is everyone else
"gonna be okay with this?"
You know what I mean, which is not necessarily
our first inclination.
And you can get stuck in this rut of,
well I've been sacrificing what I wanna do
to keep everyone else happy, or,
you get mad at other people because you have
the decision you wanna make and you're trying to get
everyone else on board with it first
before you feel like you can do it.
And then you get mad when the other people
don't get on board.
So you've gotta develop that ability
to just put your foot down and say,
"This is what I'm doing 'cause it works for me,
"this is what I want to do."
And it's tough,
realizing that you don't really owe people,
you don't owe it to people that they're happy
with your decisions.
Onto number three.
This is a good one: Be more present.
Being intuitive means that we live in our imaginations
more than we live in the physical world.
And what goes along with that naturally
is to constantly project into the future.
Like I said we're always trying to plan ahead.
Even when we're not really aware of it
we're always trying to figure out
what's coming around the corner.
That's what intuition is good at,
that's what the intuition, that's what its strength is,
figuring out what's coming around the corner, man?
And that's the gear that you can be stuck in
if you're not careful, especially because INFJs
are really out of balance when it comes to
intuition and sensing.
Extraverted sensing is really all about being present,
being there in the moment.
And this goes hand-in-hand with the first point
of being more spontaneous but you need to practice
those moments of getting out of your head
and just being present in the real world,
in your body.
Being in the moment rather than being in a few seconds,
a few minutes, a few hours, a few years into the future.
Catch yourself, realize, "Oh man, I'm not even in the year
"2000-whatever it is right now,
"I'm way ahead of it," and it's good from time to time,
of course everyone needs to use their intuition
to project out into the future a bit.
It would be a terrible thing if you couldn't do it.
But when you're sacrificing
being in the present moment for that,
you're no longer living in reality,
you're living in a projection of the future.
All right, the next one,
number four it might surprise you a bit.
It's not advice I hear given out very often to INFJs,
but INFJs are naturally teachers.
We like to just tell people what our view of the world is
in a way so we can help them out, be a bit better.
If you watch yourself, you're gonna find yourself
making little life lessons out of the most mundane stuff
all the time.
Even if it's just a quick thing you'll be like,
"Yeah man, that's how the world is."
Because we want to help others
and because we feel like we've figured out
a lot of the patterns with our intuition
and we're like, "I've seen this happen before,
"let me tell others about it, let me get it out there
"so that I can make them aware of what I have discovered."
I mean that's a good thing, it's not a bad thing,
but the flip side of it is that we can forget
to take in information, forget that we don't know everything
and we need to learn from others.
So that's the next point is,
remind yourself that others have something to teach you.
Everyone, not just the people that we look up to,
not just our mentors but everyone around us
has something they've figured out about life
that we maybe haven't figured out.
All right maybe not the little children,
but maybe even them, maybe they see something
in a different way that can open something up in our minds.
So rather than getting stuck in that gear,
that one way of, "I need to tell you how I see things,"
you know and it's from a good place,
it's from trying to help people,
"I need to tell you how things are,"
allow yourself to reverse it from time to time and be like,
"Oh I can learn something from you even though
"you're not necessarily a teacher,"
you know just everyday people.
And it's not so much that they have a ton of wisdom
or whatever but what it is is that they have
a different perspective on life,
they're seeing things from a different way,
which can also help us break out of
that kind of narrow introverted intuition,
it is a narrow thing.
It's not looking out to gather in
a bunch of different perspectives so
when we open ourselves up to realize
that other people can teach us stuff
about the world, about ourselves maybe,
just from showing a different perspective,
just from us taking in something
that is different from how we see things,
that can really open up our world.
So remind yourself,
it's not just me blasting out to the rest of the world
what I know, right?
I need to also take in from others,
learn lessons from others and be open to that,
be open to hearing their perspective
and what they have learned through life.
On to tip number five.
I put up a one but I should be putting up a five right now.
This is so general,
I wondered if I should even put it in here
but take care of your body.
Take care of this vehicle that we're driving around
this world.
Of course everyone should be taking care of their body
but it's not the most obvious thing to INFJs because
it's all having to do
with that inferior extraverted sensing,
we don't respect the physical world so much,
what we respect is our imagination.
Even if we may think,
and it's a weird thing because
because that is our inferior function
we may think we really respect it
because it's something we're not terribly good at.
We're like, "Oh yeah man, the physical world,
"being in the now, I love that stuff."
But really on a very base level, we don't respect it
because it's not the first thing
that we are putting our attention towards.
That has to do with taking care of our physical body
because to us, you know, it's part of the physical world
and it's easy to forget about it,
it's easy to just be like what's most important
is my imagination, my intuition,
and the body is a distant second.
But don't let yourself,
don't let yourself go is what I'm trying to say.
Make sure that you get into your body,
take care of your body, don't neglect it,
realize that the body is necessary to support
this big ol' amazing intuition you got going on.
It'll work much better if you take care of your body.
Now onto our last point, number six.
This is gonna be hard-hitting so brace yourself.
Let other people see the real you.
This is difficult for two reasons, it seems to me.
First of all, a lot of us INFJs don't know
who the real us is, or if we do,
it's hard to put our finger on it
because it kind of changes situationally.
It can be difficult to be even aware
of what our identity is, you know what I mean?
And then beyond that,
we like to, because of our extraverted feeling,
we like to kinda move around
with others to fit in.
We like to be able to keep everyone else feeling good,
and part of that is sort of shape-shifting a bit,
moving our identity around to fit in with whoever,
whomever, to be correct, whomever we're with.
And I go out of my way to be correct
and then I end the sentence with a preposition, oh well.
It takes a lot for an INFJ,
this goes back to putting yourself first in decisions,
but it takes a lot for us to
to get to that point where we can be really solid
in who we are as people and then to allow other people
to see that consistently and authentically
throughout many different scenarios, you know,
with other different groups of people
where we normally would try to blend in a bit more
because we're good at that and we like to do that,
we like to fit in and just go with the flow
of what's going on.
I don't mean spontaneity-wise,
going back to our first point,
I mean more like go with the flow of
what's the vibe of the room,
we like to fit into that.
We don't want to stand out so much and,
make ripples, make waves, we don't wanna rock the boat.
So this is something you've gotta kind of get over
and a lot of these previous tips can help you
develop that ability to be comfortable
with who you are and be able to walk into a room
and perhaps rock the boat a bit because
you know who you are and you're not trying
to put on a show for others.
INFJs, believe it or not, can get the reputation
for being fake and phony
because we are able to
do that game of kind of presenting ourselves
in different ways depending on the situation.
We're not the kind of people whose first inclination
is gonna be like, "No, uh uh, this is who I am,
"you all can adjust to that."
No we wanna adjust to the room.
It's gonna be hard to fight that
because a lot of times you're not gonna think
you're being fake,
you're gonna be like, "No this is just what I do.
"I play the game."
We realize as INFJanes...
As INFJanes?
As INFJs and as IN-Frank-Janes,
social interactions are a big game, we get it,
we understand the game and we don't mind playing it
because we just feel like that's what you're supposed to do,
you're supposed to play the game.
And if part of the game is me, you know,
doing a little shucking and jiving,
doing a little juke, a little power move, a little spin,
to fit in, to like obfuscate my true identity a bit,
just to keep the happy vibe going,
just to keep others happy?
We'll do it because that's the game.
So you have to develop this ability to,
you're never gonna not be aware of the game,
you can't drop the knowledge of the game,
but what you can do is realize I can play the game
and still put forth my real self.
I don't need to totally wear the cloak
of personality invisibility just to get myself
through these things.
I can actually be me, put out there who I am,
and maybe some people won't like it,
maybe some people won't be happy with it, oh well,
but that's what you've gotta be able to develop
in order to be like a fully rounded person,
in order to be a healthier INFJ.
Because if you do this for decades,
if you play the game for decades of fitting in
and not being your real self and not actually,
you're gonna start to not actually know yourself.
"What do I think is true, who do I think I am?
"I don't know I'm just looking at everyone else
"to define that for me."
And it changes based on the situation.
And people are gonna resist that,
people don't like it especially if you're really good
at playing the game, people don't like it
when suddenly they see a part of you
that you know has always sort of been there,
that they haven't seen because you're good at hiding it.
But start revealing those parts of yourself to others,
let them see the real you.
And it's possible maybe you'll lose some friends
along the way, but were they really friends,
were they really friends with you?
But I think you'll also be surprised
to know that a lot of people will accept you
for who you really are.
But of course part of the first step of that
is really figuring out who you are.
How do you do that you might wonder?
That's a tough one.
But it is something that I think with
a lot of these other steps,
being more spontaneous, being more present in the moment,
taking care of your body,
making decisions that are maybe unpopular
but that you know are right for you,
those can sort of start to define for yourself
what kind of person you really are.
And you're gonna start to feel comfortable with that
and allow yourself to show that to other people.
So those are my six tips to being a healthier INFJ.
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