- I've got the fire going as you can see.
Welcome to my home.
How can INFJ's develop confidence?
That's the subject of the video, and it's funny
because people might be like Frank,
doesn't everyone just develop confidence in the same way?
Yeah, sort of, yeah, but the way that you perceive
and judge the world, which is what our personality system
talks about, the Myers-Briggs and all that,
it's a little different for everyone.
Everyone else, everyone gets to the same thing
through different roads.
That's really what all of this personality
typology is all about.
It's like yeah, everyone's basically the same,
but everyone is seeing things slightly differently
so we've got to acknowledge that.
First of all, what is confidence?
If we want to boil it down to my NI simplest thing possible,
confidence would be trusting that things are gonna go well
if I do something.
My fireplace thing just ended.
So if you are confident, you don't have a bunch
of anxiety that things are going to turn out negatively
when you do something, and you might even think
that it's gonna be positive.
What a thought, and then if you want to boil it down,
the way you build confidence is just to do stuff and succeed
and to show yourself I can do it.
That's really how you build confidence,
but there's a bit more specific stuff
that I'm gonna get into.
If you'd like a longer video, if you don't want to,
you can just stop there.
I told you how to do it.
Just do stuff and succeed, then you'll be confident.
How did you not figure that out before now?
But for an INFJ, the road to confidence has its own path
that might be a little different from others.
Now, I myself have gained and lost confidence
over the years several times.
That's the thing about confidence
is that it's not just a straight line.
It's not like you raise your confidence
and then it can just plateau there and then, you know,
years later you can come along, and no.
Confidence goes up and down.
You can be at the height, you can be at the low point,
and it really just has to do with external circumstances,
and that's the thing that I think is difficult for INFJ's
is that they are very in tune to external circumstances,
and especially when it comes to other people
and are very much aware of how everyone else is valuing them
because we have extroverted feeling which is trying
to come up with an objective valuation.
An objective valuation, that sounds weird when I say it,
but I'm saying it correctly,
of everything which would include ourselves.
Do you see what the problem is?
Because confidence is something that is, you know,
basically internal.
Self-confidence, how I feel about myself,
but when you are so attuned to others then your confidence
is basically on a seesaw depending on your perception
of what other people think of you, how you're doing,
so on and so forth.
When I was much younger, when I was younger,
so much younger than today, in graduate school,
I was very confident, probably even more confident
than I am now because, I don't know, when you're
in a closed system like school, especially
in graduate school where you're just focused in on one thing
all the time, I felt like I was killing it, man.
I'm doing great at this, I'm getting straight A's, man,
everyone loves me, I'm so popular, yeah,
and I had never felt that before so it was like amazing.
It's funny because, I don't know, you see my now on YouTube
and you might think, Frank's always been popular.
It's like no, I was like, I was pretty much an outcast
until I was like 22 or 3, and then I only experienced it
for like a year and a half of being somewhat liked
and respected, and then it went, then after graduate school
once I wasn't surrounded by people telling me
what a great job I was doing, it was just like back down
into the cellar for years and years and years,
and I didn't have much confidence, you know?
And if you look back at my videos when I first started
my channel, don't watch them, please don't watch them.
(laughing)
You can tell, I can tell, that my confidence was pretty low,
and even just like the things I say in those videos,
I basically say I have no self-confidence,
and I'm much more confident now because I've gotten a lot
of good feedback.
I've gone out and I've done something over and over again
and succeeded, and so now I'm like I don't have anxiety
so much about that anymore, but do you see the problem
is that it's all dependent on feedback from others, right?
It's not, it's not like a self-affirming thing.
I'm not like yeah, I did it, great, I'm good,
and because I say I'm good, that means I'm good.
I'm good at this, I succeeded.
It's like I'm not judging my success based
on my own metrics.
I'm basing my success, which as you may remember earlier,
part of confidence, building confidence, is doing something
and succeeding, but how do I determine when I succeeded?
Oh, when everyone else said I succeeded.
Do you see?
Do you see the problem?
So when you are an INFJ who is always looking around
at other people to see what are they feeling,
what do they think success is?
When you look around and you see people don't think
you're successful, you're not gonna think you're successful
and your confidence is gonna go away.
That's what it is, whereas if you were more internally doing
that success meter, then it wouldn't be so arbitrary,
you know?
Or it wouldn't be so volatile,
and so that's what you really need to do is to begin
to work on that inner ability to judge for yourself,
am I successful right now?
Am I doing good?
I don't care about what other people are doing
and I don't care what other people are thinking about this,
what they feel about me, I just want
to know what do I think.
That's like a good step to take so that you can start
judging success on your own terms, and then also,
and that's thinking, by the way.
Developing your introverted thinking, but then also looking
at the plain facts of the matter because that's something
that I think we don't always look at.
Because we have inferior extroverted sensing,
just looking at the facts is difficult for us,
and that can help you sometimes determine
like am I actually being successful?
Should I be more confident than I am because maybe
if you're looking too much at the things that are abstract,
you're not seeing like just plain things of yeah,
I did good things, I accomplished things.
Things were not there, now they're there.
I'm being so like general and abstract when I'm trying to,
trying to talk about the sensory, but that's another thing
to be working on is being able to determine
in the real world when something is successful or not.
Not just determining it from a logical standpoint,
but actually taking in the facts of yeah, I did something.
It was good, and it's okay to be good.
Like can we just say it?
Like I feel like it's not okay to be good.
Like I've always gotta be struggling, it's not good enough.
Yeah, you can, it's, you can be good enough.
I give you permission to be good enough.
That alone can help you build your confidence right there.
Just give yourself permission
to be good enough for yourself.
Don't care about what other people think.
Don't care if other people don't think you're good enough.
Who needs them, man?
Okay, I need them, I need them, ah, but you actually need
to go out and do it.
You can't just think your way into confidence.
Go out there, do stuff, look at the results,
judge for yourself whether you were successful or not.
Don't care what other people think,
and that's how you can develop confidence as an INFJ, bam.
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stay cool and attractive.