Sandwich Making: INFJ Style

Are you familiar with the Myers Brigg Personality test? If you're not, take the quiz here http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp first or the rest of this blog will make little sense.

I first discovered MB at the beginning of my sophomore year in college as I struggled to answer the infamous "who am I" question. A lot of my friends had a love-hate relationship with Myers Briggs because they received different results every time they took the test. Not so for me. I always have been, and very likely always will be an Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging person.

So what exactly is an INFJ? Great question. My dominant function is introverted intuition, meaning I spend a large part of my day inside my head. Since I orient myself internally, I am often oblivious to the external world.  I tend to make decisions emotionally, and weigh how my actions will affect others before moving forward. In the last part of my personality, my judging side, the universe decided to throw me a curve-ball. Introversion, intuition, and feeling tend to be very time-consuming states of being. Yet because I'm a J I loathe being late for anything. I'm still trying to figure out if being a time-conscious creative individual is a blessing or a curse.

The above description may have made little sense to you if you are a sensing person so I'll insert an example: sandwich making, INFJ style. With sandwiches I like variety, but I like to draw that variety from three or four options. There's also an emotional component to sandwich-making. Ham-and cheese on wheat means I am at peace with my internal world. Peanut butter and jelly on white means I'm stressed out and need someone to listen to me vent. Putting together a sandwich can tire me because I must remember where in the Kitchen we store the different parts of a sandwich as well as where to return them when I'm done.

Once I've composed said sandwich I need to take it and leave the kitchen as fast as possible in order to re-charge. I often leave behind crumbs, and/or jelly smeared knives. I'm not being lazy. I do not do this to test the patience of the next person who wants to make a sandwich. For me, as long as the bread and peanut butter are back in the cubbard I've acted in kindness towards my neater room mates. Having lived with neat room mates I know that crumbs are their version of nails on a chalkboard. Please be patient with me. I'm learning.

INFJ's often get confused with extroverts because we love people. And we do love people. There's nothing like a meaningful one-on-one conversation to give me warm and fuzzy feelings.We tend to be great listeners so we're never lacking for people to talk to.  But anything more than one or two people forces me to expend more energy than I receive. Group settings exhaust me because I bring to them the intensity that I bring to one-on one conversations. But since we love people so much we tend to deny our introverted tendencies in group settings, drain ourselves of all energy, then have to spend a week in our pajamas oscillating between sleeping and reading Victorian literature.

For everyone reading this blog because they're looking for better ways to communicate with an INFJ I'd say resist the urge to patronize when reminding us of a detail we've overlooked for the hundredth time. We also like to be affirmed in our actions because can see ourselves as weird because we've spent too much time analyzing our actions and not enough time externalizing them. It's also helpful to ask "What are you trying to say?" We won't be offended. We're often just as clueless as you are :)