The IEI Productivity and Organization Post

I am an IEI (MBTI: INFj). This is Organization By An IEI, For IEIs (or INFJs). Enjoy, my fellow scatterbrains.

In Socionics, IEIs have Te as their vulnerable function, where Te governs effectiveness; productivity; functionality; knowing facts and concrete, factual information; and handling concrete work processes--so, I struggle with precision, effectiveness, and knowing things exactly. In addition to that, IEIs have Ti as their mobilizing function, where Ti governs conceptual structures and systematization: I get excited and motivated by structures and thinking about systems. I am also strongly motivated to avoid shame, and my upbringing placed heavy shame judgments upon expression of weak Te. And, I am afraid that my world and my environment will turn into chaos if I don't tightly manage and control things, and actively bring processes to their intended conclusions.

So...I'm organized. 

What does being organized mean to me? Well, right now I am between jobs, so being organized means that I:

My closet is neater than your closet.

+ Plan out and track daily activities

+ Keep a very clean, organized, tidy home for my boyfriend Thomas and me

+ Cook regularly

+ Care for 2 beautiful dogs

+ Have no physical or virtual clutter 

+Track and manage my finances and debts

+ Am currently writing a paper on sleep and another on consciousness, which require extensive research

+ Write posts for this blog and organize Socionics meetups in NYC

+ Am in the middle of learning Python, a coding language

+ Am taking two courses on Coursera

+ Am reading constantly

+ See my family weekly

...in short, i'm making the most of my time. Here's how I do it.

Guiding Principles 

I have a certain lifestyle I want to lead. I have projects which when finished will improve my quality of life. I have things I want to accomplish, small wants and big dreams alike. So the first principle I work off of is,

Break the big down into small and implement the pieces. 

Here's one project of mine that follows this principle. The goal is that I want to improve my productivity and become more disciplined. This goal is really important to me and it is at the bedrock of what I am doing, so it gets its own principle:

Decide, do, and follow through. 

So I decided that that project means scheduling projects by giving them 'death dates' (the date the project dies whether or not I finish it) and breaking projects down into actions which I then schedule. It also means that I realized I needed to schedule every day in order to get the most out of my day and not waste time. This is because NOT scheduling actions means you never concretize your plans, which means that all you're tracking is a vague feeling of unease about an approaching deadline. This can be rephrased to

You can only be accountable if you think of your time as valuable, stay aware of its passing, and dedicate it to concrete actions. 

Which is really a very Ni way of thinking about time. And that's just fine for me.
This guiding principle is also very Ni:

Minimalise to allow the essential to thrive. 

That one is so important, it's at the top of the list of my personal commandments. This one is huge. It's about accepting that there are a LOT of things I could be doing, but I am CHOOSING not to because the more stuff I am generally committed to, the less I am actually committed to any one of those things/goals/processes. This principle is about saying NO to things because you want to say YES much louder to what really matters, and to see those YES things through to their ends.
To support these efforts, here's a guiding principle that comes straight out of my suggestive Se:

Just start. 

Because that is really helpful for busting through the initial resistance I ALWAYS feel before I start taking actions.
Last one, and this one has become so ingrained to me that I don't know how I could ever have functioned without it:

Write everything down.

You need to get groceries, write a paper, pet your dog, vacuum, remind your boyfriend of something, get tickets to a play, do dishes. What do all these things have in common? They are all going to be done at another time than the moment you think of them: which means that they will ALL be written down on a list somewhere. Don't try to keep things in your head, IEIs. If your brain is as vague and imagination-heavy and unconcerned with factual knowledge as mine is--see utter Te deficiency above--then you need to do this too. Just write it down, everything in one spot is best, and schedule yourself to review it...then trust yourself to look at it at that point in the future, and either decide to do it, or not do it. But you'll be making that choice consciously--it won't be because something fell off your radar. Trust me--my radar is the fuzziest I've ever known, but nothing that I ever write down falls off of it anymore.

Tools
I use a variety of tools to help me stay productive. Here's what I use:

1. A Passion Planner and a set of highlighters. This is my daily and weekly planner, and it is a great guiding tool for tracking my time, which I do to stay accountable to my time (one of the guiding principles!) by staying aware of how I use it. It also is spectacular for what it was intended for, which is to help you bring your passions into your life: the big-picture goals and desires you want to implement to be happier. In the morning at 10am I review my open projects and to-dos and plan out my day; then, after every major set of actions, I check in and color-code what I did (just like this article). It is much less work than it sounds, and it helps me stay aware of time passing and what I'm using my time for: since starting to use this 4 weeks ago, I have cut down my wasted time by more than half. I also found that I really love the physicality of it, something I haven't gotten enough of or gotten used to not having even after many years of exclusively digital planners and calendars. 
2. A digital calendar. For things that I know are coming ahead of time, I schedule those various events and recurring reminders like birthdays on my Google Calendar, and set up groups for different kinds of events (my groups are: family events, personal events, to-dos and errands, and socializing) and run that calendar through Sunrise calendar. It is a great app for putting together calendars from multiple platforms into one beautiful view and can be managed via pretty much any device. 
3. Wunderlist. This is an absolutely incredible app that helps you stay on top of your lists. You can schedule any item, have multiple lists and items from different lists show up together under the 'Today' list, set reminders and due dates, add notes, sync with Sunrise, and more. I use it for:
   = scheduling weekly recurring to-dos such as 'Take out trash/recycling on Thursday', 'dishes', '10-min cleanup' etc. This helps me not think about recurring events, just follow instructions, which falls under Decide, do, and follow through: I decided I have to water plans weekly, write the note once to remind me every day at a certain time, and then just do it when I get the reminder.
   = scheduling project deadlines, or 'death dates'
   = keeping a big list of to-dos
   = writing down all the groceries you usually get: check them all off but they don't disappear, so you basically have a database of items; so if you are going to the store and need tomatoes, milk, and cheese, just uncheck those so they pop back up on the active list, then check them off once you have found them in the store, and they slide back down until you need them again. This helped my food shopping tremendously...and my diet, too, since I pre-wrote my list of items I can actually eat without guilt :) 
4. Timer. I don't care how fancy you get with this, but you need a timer. I decide on an action or something I want to focus on--like kitchen cleanup--and set a timer to go off after 1 hour. That way I don't have to worry about anything else but what I'm doing, because I've already thought through my plan and once the timer goes off, I know I will stop what I'm doing and continue on with the other actions in my day. It also really helps to concretize how much time you have locally speaking, because that helps make every action you take feel more 'real'. 
5. Phone alarms. I use my iPhone 24/7 and found that having preset alarms for daily things helps tremendously--as long as I do that thing the moment the alarm goes off, or snooze the alarm until I can do that thing as soon as I turn the alarm off. My daily alarms are my 10am, 12noon, 3pm, and 8pm schedule check-ins; at that time, I open my Passion Planner and review how my day is going. 
6. Gmail folders. I automate my email so that various emails are automatically sorted into folders--anything from friends goes into 'People', work-related things go into 'Business', Amazon or eBay goes to 'Money', and all my feed articles, like Lifehacker, go to 'Current reading' (I use IFTTT to send blog and website posts automatically to my email account...I love waking up to a new xkcd comic, or something new from Raptitude). That way, instead of 10-30 unread emails immediately jumping out at me from my poor overworked inbox, they are all sorted for me and I know automatically which unread emails deserve my attention first.

My desk and workspace at home.

Emotional Support

I use the following to support my emotional wellbeing through all this productivity and organization:

• I make sure to upkeep a decluttered visual atmosphere so I can work without being distracted, and to model success for my conceptual projects. This one is recursive: I upkeep this via projects and actions that I schedule on Wunderlist and my Passion Planner, in order to be able to do other projects and actions. 
• Keep a success board: when I finish a project, it's easy to forget about it soon after because I focus on the difficulties at hand presented by a new or unfinished project. Keeping a success board helps you remind yourself of your own productivity, which in turn can really help you stay productive. 
• Track the books I read via Goodreads Reading Challenge -- one of my projects is to read more, and seeing the books I've read this year helps not only along the success board principle, but also reminds me of the literary places I've been, which helps me cope when there are difficulties in the moment. 
• Taking time to think about and understand why being productive is important to me. Being productive ISN'T important to me, actually: making my dreams come true, having no ambiguity, and making sure I don't feel bad feelings are my actual motivators. Thinking about the big picture purpose helps me determine what activities and plans I can say NO to today--that's one of the guiding principles--because I can determine how today's scheduled tasks might not be relevant to my global goals after all. 
• Making sure I specifically plan activities that will rejuvenate me: if I schedule myself to read, and make myself read even if I don't feel like it, after about 5 minutes I am already feeling better about my life and my day than I was 5 minutes ago. Schedule the things that matter to you, the things you need even if you are not too happy about needing them: walks, ice cream, watching TV. The additional upside is that you can then use your handy-dandy timer to make sure you spend only as much time on those things as you choose to, BEFORE you start. 

Tips and Tricks
Schedule break time to make breaks official.
Don't neglect your need for a break and don't overestimate your ability to work hard and attentively without a break to look forward to. That was always my biggest issue: assuming I can totally chew this gigantic bite I just bit off. But as long as I schedule the breaks in advance, it's easier to concentrate because I know I will get a break soon. And when I do take that break, I take it under ideal conditions: I know I don't need to even think about the things I'm not doing, because I'm handling those separately.

Reflect on your day in the morning and at night to bookend the day with awareness.
Not being aware of my time was one of the biggest hinderances to getting things done. Using my 10am and 8pm phone alarm reminders to help me take time to reflect on my day's schedule has been huge in helping me stay aware of how I'm using my time, and therefore use it more productively.

Use highlighters (use tools that make you feel happy to use them). 
I've already mentioned that I chose the Passion Planner for my daily/weekly tracking because I love the way it feels and how using it feels wonderfully real and easier to physically do than the extra steps that digital calendars feel like they put on me. I use highlighters on the Passion Planner because it helps me quickly get a sense of how I'm spending my day, but also because I like the colors and the sense of childish irreverence and fun that I get from them. Use what makes you happy.

My beautiful(ly organized) windowsill display makes me happy to look at it. #Ti+Fe!

Let yourself do recurring, but passive, visual reviews of your projects, activities, and physical environment.
If you're like me, clutter and ambiguity irritate and upset you. Letting yourself just look around will help by giving yourself permission to just be aware of the clutter and ambiguity around you. You can come back to it when you are ready, but staying aware is the most important step to that.

Reunderstand 'stuff'
Everything you own, physical and digital alike, including conceptual projects (and I'm taking about owning a project like 'reorganize kitchen') fall into one of three categories. Each of these categories needs to be strongly differentiated away from the other two. Don't even keep them in the same location.

• [Projects]: the item or news article or what-have-you has actions you need to take on it. E.g., there's 5 books you want to read (next to the 4 books you just own). Put those 5 books in a different place and ask yourself what the next action would be that would get you on the path to reading those books. Or, decide you will not read them and they are JUST things you own. Or, schedule when you will begin to read them. Just don't defer these decisions. 
• [Upkeep]: things that have identical, recurring actions on them. E.g., dirty dishes need to be washed, plants need to be watered, etc. Concretize every single action that all of your upkeep things need, then use a reminder app like Wunderlist to send you weekly or daily reminders, so you don't have to think about whether your plants are getting enough water. David Allen, he of the Getting Things Done program, suggests that whenever there's something you should be doing that you're not doing, part of your brain is thinking about it all the time; it keeps an open tab, and that will ruin your equilibrium and ability to focus properly. Take the pressure off. Write it down and schedule it so you don't ever have to think about recurring actions. 
• [Stuff you own]: just stuff you own; if you only stored it for the rest of its life, that would be good enough. Let everything in this category be firmly in this category and not also in a 'maybe one day' project category. Harsh differentiation really helps with knowing exactly how much work you have, which lets you take control of it and eliminate ambiguity. 

Have a 'home' for everything
Everything you own deserves a home, including you. Including tiny objects and big objects, every piece of clothing, every book, every medication bottle, every cup and pan and even things like cookies in boxes and milk and water bottles--these should all have a dedicated location where they belong. And even things like projects and books you're reading and books you're not reading. Everything should have a 'home', and when it is taken out of its 'home', it should eventually return there. That will take care of 50% of your clutter. (The other 50% you'll throw out. I believe in you.)

Schedule with other people to stay motivated
With Se in our suggestive function, we are often externally motivated by things or people pushing on us to act. Use this to your advantage by making your schedule transparent to people close to you, or enlist others' help in doing things with you (like remote house-cleaning sessions where you and your buddy both check in with each other at the start and the finish!). Check out Gretchen Ruben's 4 Tendencies in regards to how people deal with rules and requirements; her quiz on those 4 Tendencies is here.

Things That Haven't Worked For Me

• Physical monthly calendar. I can't squeeze the things I need to see every day into those tiny boxes. And something that's edited more rarely than 2x a day needs to be digital for me. 
• Planning days in advance: really a terrible, misguided idea on my part, and I tried this for *years*. Don't plan your day in advance, plan your day the day you are living it. Set weekly goals and check in with those goals every morning when you plan your day. Don't set yourself up for breaking your agreements with yourself, and you do that every time you make plans you don't follow through on. 
• Working off to-do lists. Just don't bother trying, it's another thing that people do for years without it working for them. Your to-do list should be short and concrete, and include things like 'schedule grocery shopping for Monday' or 'buy dog food', but even those things should have deadlines attached to them. Don't let yourself grow a to-do list that is divorced from the flow of real time. As soon as a to-do pops up, ask yourself where it fits on your local timeline--is it a today item, tomorrow item, or 3 months from now item? Then schedule it on your calendar or put it into an appropriate list via Wunderlist. 
• Mind-dumps. This is a cool concept that I wish worked for me. Basically you give yourself 5 minutes and you write down literally everything that you can think of that you are tracking in your head, or have to do, or isn't done yet, or isn't scheduled...you get the idea. Then you review the list and those things that you commit to, you put them into the appropriate groups or schedule them or decide on the next actions. This hasn't worked for me because I don't remember to do it, but the reason to do it is because you are overwhelmed by things you are not sure you are getting done or not, and since I've been so good at writing things down (guiding principle!) I don't actually get to the point where I could really benefit from a mind-dump. 
• Trying to motivate myself to stay on track by being upset at myself for not being on track. Just don't do this to yourself. It won't work. Self-flagellation only hurts, it doesn't help. It won't help you get on track. What will help you get on track will be by knowing what the track is, how everything fits into it, and choosing the track to meet the real goals you yourself feel are important. 

That's basically my organizational scheme in a nutshell. I do it because I want to love my life, and I want my life to not suck. And so I can spend guilt-free time with my puppies.

If we could choose our types...

There's something important that I've experienced the longer I identify as an IEI: there's a realization of the layers of ways I relate to IEI function expressions and a simultaneous disgust with the ways the IEI map codifies my restrictions. I struggle with Te and Si in a way that I don't commonly see discussed in the groups--that is, I am constantly staying on top of my productivity and environment--despite my strong discomfort and self-annoyance with it--where consistent successes cost me my energy and vitality. But perhaps I struggle moreso with generating Se, and feel its lack in my life painfully; and although I have a loving relationship to Ti, I periodically break down in self-disgust at my own inability to grasp the big picture of concepts or systems, which vantage point I could use to understand underlying qualities and generate explanations. Finally, I struggle with Fi, precisely because I am always choosing not bring it to the forefront to serve my Fe+Ti values of close connectivity with important people in my life.

But I am tired of understanding these limitations, and I want to move past them.

It occurred to me that I am pretty motivated when I reach for a structured ideal. I am not sure which type to me is the ideal; in a way I feel the strong qualities of an SLE-IEI match would provide for all my needs, but in the absence of willing SLEs and lacking the Se+Ti qualities myself, I think the ideal personality for myself would not be an IEI.

Of all the types in the Socion, if I could choose my own personality, I would choose to be an LII.

"With a combination of dominant  and , the LII is usually a conceptual thinker with clearly delineated views and ideologies. Unless life forces them to earn a living doing physical labor, the LII prefers to apply their analytical thinking skills to non-material aspects of things: planning organizational structures, developing ideas, analyzing data, and reaching conclusions. No matter what they do or where they work, the LII will have a distinct focus on clarifying thought and ways of looking at things." ~ LII profile, WikiSocion.org

With leading Ti, LIIs live with the sense of understanding the world as a systematized entity, and subsuming constant incoming data to a single worldview, where this view is perhaps biased but not exclusionary. If Filatova is to be trusted in suggesting LIIs subsume Ne to Ti  ("The LII does not come up with ideas simply for their own sake, but tries to relate everything back to "the main point". He quickly becomes impatient or disinterested with discussion that is simply meant to generate ideas, instead of realizing them") that kind of preoccupation with centrality and harmony is very appealing to me. This ultimate desire to create something real, despite the process being one of a kind of mental tinkering with concepts, is in a way aligned with my experience of Ni--I am interested in patterns in reality, not just for their own sakes but also for their meaning and application. Similarly I appreciate that "The LII strives to reduce things to their most essential aspects, and mentally recreate the whole from the bottom up." I especially like the worldview of Ti+Ne, where one is constantly expanding ideas but ultimately doing so in order to understand how they fit into a global structure. Most importantly to me, the LII as depicted is a vision of a person who is capable of fully understanding and thinking about various phenomena, boiling things down to their essential functions and experiencing methodological harmony. They are not just interested in Ti+Ne, they are capable in using them effectively. The rest of the IEs seem to fall into harmonious positions within that type in a way where those IEs seem appropriate to me.

As someone who knows how to create a comfortable environment--even if it doesn't come easily--I feel I could be self-sufficient as an LII, in that that aspect, together with the experience of Ti+Ne as 'feeding' myself on analysis and ideas, would allow me to happily and quietly exist without needing external support as much as I do as an IEI. The kinds of things an LII seeks via 5th and 6th functions do not seem to me to be as difficult to find from others as Se+Ti seem to be for me now... I am already interested in just about everything, but I am missing the ability to generate meaningful structures of explanation for cohesion.

We do not choose our types; types exist to explain and codify us as we are. For my self-development I will not keep looking to my type. Instead, I'm going to see if allowing myself to reach for the ways an LII would interact with and express themselves upon their world might be better for me personally. 

Socionics and hopefulness

I was talking with a Socionics friend the other day about something I had read that I thought was very Fi-valuing. It was a post criticizing the idea that science fiction used to be about hope and the advancements brought by a bright future. The post, by the way, was about a girl growing up reading classic scifi and feeling extremely uncomfortable about the way the futures that these writers were imagining all portrayed women as a definitively second-class citizen at best. The post talked about the frustration the reader felt that these forward-thinking writers couldn’t imagine a better society. It ended by mentioning a different post that was “criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder” and the author responded to that with: “No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.”

So that post was very Fi-centric to me, and made me feel uncomfortable. It forced me to think about how I disagreed. I felt that those classic scifi authors couldn’t conceive of such a societal change because they just weren’t interested in societal changes except as a result to technology. To me, classic scifi WAS about hope and thinking about future advancements and the sense of this boundless, endless human potential that was about to be harnessed in the world. Today’s hard scifi doesn’t do that; today’s hard scifi is much more dystopian and destructive and certainly not about hope and future advancement. And to me it is because it reflects this feeling that we have today in our culture of a sense of hopelessness and despair.

When I said this to Jesse, he said that there’s been a sense for him that since the turning of the millennium there’s been an experience of the loss of hope. We’ve had 9/11, the war on terror, the economic crash and recession, and more; and it’s reflected in our ever more dystopian media. He said there’s a kind of raw defensiveness and hopelessness to the way people today are conceptualizing their lives and sense of future, and that there seems to be no underlying confidence that things are going to work out for the best. The comfort and stability of the earlier ages seem to have left us.

That conversation left me thinking. To me, Socionics is a positive force in the world. It isn’t a powerful one necessarily because it has a small following, but it definitely is positive.

Socionics, in its way, is really about connection. It’s about understanding yourself and other people conceptually, about putting together a worldview in which people fit together in a certain way. In that sense I think Socionics is creative rather than disruptive. It does not seek to highlight the ways in which things don’t work socially. It seeks to explain how people may be given to thinking about things in certain ways, which can then lead to dissonance. Instead of being dystopian and hopeless, Socionics is more utopian and structured, in that it suggests a unified method that everyone can use to personally relate to everyone else.

This might be an especially Beta way of thinking about Socionics, because to me this thought pattern is really Ni+Ti. But I can see the way in which Socionics works passively against the background of a generalized sense of disconnect and hopelessness. It gives us tools to connect with others, and to replace hopelessness with understanding.

Socionics itself can be used as a tool for connection through understanding. Despite much internet controversy, I see it as generally a unifying system that brings people together under its umbrella. It not only gives you tools to dissect your relationships with others, it immediately removes many endemic issues of class, gender, and other forms of inequality by making space only for the functions of the type personalities. Instead of asking whether you share interests and values with a stranger--which can easily be a mask for questions of economic similarity and culture-specific values--it asks whether you share valued functions and the personal ways you each express them. That is what is most humanitarian about it, and I think at this point I couldn’t ask it to be more meaningful to me than that.

MBTI vs Socionics: Cognitive functions vs Information Elements

There are two schools of thought when it comes to contrasting MBTI and Socionics:

Incompatibilist: A person's MBTI type does not necessarily correlate with its Socionics type.

Compatibilist: A person's MBTI type does necessarily correlate with its Socionics type.

For the great article discussing these two views, read "A brief overview of the two philosophical assumptions about the relation between MBTI and Socionics". 

I fall firmly into the incompatibilist point of view, because I think part of the basis upon which both systems are structured--namely the cognitive functions, or information elements--are fundamentally differently defined. So we might use the same terms--Ti, Fe--but we mean rather different things. Hence, if two parties say they both use the color green to paint forests, but one group defines 'green' as a blue-looking color and one defines 'green' as a red-looking color, their forests will look very different.

Here's a basic breakdown of how MBTI defines cognitive functions vs Socionics definitions. You can see how the systems focus on different ideas for each cognitive function/information element; even when they are similar, the focus is on different parts.

Sources:
Understanding the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, "The 8 Cognitive Functions" 
The Meyers-Briggs Foundation, "The Eight Function Attitudes"
WikiSocion, "Information Elements"

A Shorthand for Model A

This is a type map, a shorthand layout of the personality. I made this map to group together various information regarding the different function positions (Leading, Vulnerable, etc) within which the Information Elements (IEs) are laid out. For any type, the structure of the map is the same, but the colored parts, the IEs, correlate to different functions. 

The parts that are especially interesting are the words grouped to the bottom of each function position. Most of those are dichotomies: Strong vs Weak, Valued vs Subdued, etc; here's an article on function dichotomies. Here's an article regarding function dimensionality. 

Here's my page of type maps for all the types in the Socion. 

INTP/ILI - Intuitive Logical Introvert

Reciprocal functions and self-sufficiency

Here's the complete Socion with the reciprocal relationships of Duals' leading vs suggestive functions highlighted blue, and duals indicated by colored pairs:



A lot of Socionics materials considers the way functions inter-correlate between dual pairs, and there is similarly a lot of discussion on the expression of each information element in any given personality type: how the leading manifests vs the creative, etc.

Socionics tends to look at different kinds of information elements as operating distinctly but combining their expression to create the 'flavor' of the type. Socionics also has as one of its base assumptions the belief that among the various kinds of information types process, each type has a preference for receiving some forms--via suggestive function--and expressing others--via leading function, for example.

But perhaps types are not collections of specifically arranged information elements so much as those expressed qualities are conferred to individual types by the 'shape' of the personality, where function dimensionality and positioning really just describes the peaks and valleys of the personality. Perhaps where there is a Ti PoLR as a valley, the valley arcs up into an Ne Leading as a cliff. Perhaps those are not distinctly functioning information elements but are given the quality of information elements in the way the personality shapes itself: making functions more like gradients on a scale rather than individual bits in different positions.

What does this shift in thinking mean for individual types? It means that regardless of the interconnected relationships via function processing, types can exist in a vacuum. Being a landscape of peaks and valleys--positive functioning elements vs under-functioning elements--is not the same as thinking of types as being half of a whole duality pair. It means each type can be an individual flavor, good entirely on its own, without the need for a complement or admirers. In short it means an individualized instead of inter-complimentary view of the personality.

MBTI already does something like that in that it looks only at what Socionics considers the valued functions (check out a previous post about the PoLR/Inferior functions). That supports the idea in MBTI that in order to self-develop, one must develop all 4 of the functions in one’s type, even though they are of various strengths. Perhaps Socionics can learn something from this perspective: where instead of thinking of the activation and suggestive functions as functions on which we seek information externally, they can be self-developed.

To some extent this is already a commonly, albeit silently, understood fact that people naturally come to learn how to take care of themselves on their weak functions, especially their valued weak functions, as they mature into adulthood and self-sufficiency. ILEs learn to cook for themselves; IEEs learn to keep their homes clean; ILIs learn to stand their ground; EIIs learn efficiency and exactness in their work. But I think that despite these ways people grow into their personalities and come to terms with themselves, it is not well-enough discussed in the community. Instead there is a hopeful focus on relationships with potential duals--or dualization of a sort with other types--as a means of getting what one is missing from the world or themselves.

There are too many people living on their own these days--both functionally and emotionally--for us in the Socionics community not to account for the ways they are self-sufficient. There are too many people engaged in intensive self-development for us not to accept the ways they are growing into themselves, their whole selves.

Finally there is also a way in which Socionics supports a static view of self, giving types a chance to say “That’s just how I am” about their weak functions, without seeking ways to support real self-transcendence by remaining content with coping mechanisms. Instead there is value in seeking to find as many ways of applying our strengths through and upon our weak functions as possible.

Besides: a landscape doesn't have inherently better or worse parts to it. It is simply that people find it is nicer to build their self-identity upon shores and not in lakes, or on cliffs and not beaches. But it is the whole that is beautiful. 

'Acting out' through dual-seeking functions

In discussion with an LSE friend, we compared notes on ways that we 'act out' for a specific kind of attention from the world. Both ways happened to reflect dual-seeking function expression...

I find myself play-acting toughness. An easy example: when I was in high school, I started a fight club to fight and grapple with lots of people who eventually became friends. In college, I would invite people to fight me as a tongue-in-cheek form of flirting. Secretly, I always hoped to lose--hoped for someone to show me that I was right to merely pretend to power and strength because I in fact had neither of these things. I wanted someone around to whom I would lose time after time, who would kindly and forcefully push me in other ways towards fulfilling my goals.

Unfortunately, in my own way I am single-minded and driven, and I come from a long line of powerful matriarchs; my pretending to be tough did a lot of convincing to others that I was, in fact, tough. I became tolerated among my friends as a willful, strong person. I routinely was told not to push or pressure people. 

Nothing could be further from the truth than the sense of me being tough or heavy-handed. Internally, the experience is one of 'stepping up to do my part' in the absence of a stronger personality. This twisting and play-acting quality of acting out for attention from a dual--which perhaps expresses itself more manipulatively or pitifully in other personality types--is one of the ways personalities can become warped in their self-expression over time; spend enough time laughingly protesting that you really are tough, or any other suggestive-function quality, and you'll find that with enough practice at those qualities, you might come to resemble quite a different personality than your own. 

PoLR/Vulnerable vs MBTI's Inferior function

MBTI functions, loosely translated to Socionics, go something like this, where pink is MBTI cognitive functions and black are Socionics' function positions:

1: LEADING	2: CREATIVE
DOMINANT	AUXILARY
4: VULNERABLE	3: ROLE
6: ACTIVATION	5: SUGGESTIVE
TERTIARY	INFERIOR
7: RESTRICTIVE	8: DEMONSTRATIVE

You can deduct this lining-up of structures when you consider an MBTI type vs the same Socionics type (where introverted MBTI types switch the J/P determination for the purposes of this review). Take an MBTI ESTJ vs a Socionics LSE for example:

1: LEADING	2: CREATIVE
Te	Si
DOMINANT	AUXILARY
4: VULNERABLE	3: ROLE
Ni	Fe
6: ACTIVATION	5: SUGGESTIVE
Ne	Fi
TERTIARY	INFERIOR
7: RESTRICTIVE	8: DEMONSTRATIVE
Ti	Se

Clearly, the functions that are considered weakest are not identical in their positions in each typology system. MBTI's inferior function--the least evolved, sometimes called the shadow function--is considered an area of neglected needs; a weak point in the personality with which there is a love-hate relationship:

"People don't focus on information coming from their Inferior Function because they know that it isn't their strong point - they cannot discern information well in this area. It feels strange and unfamiliar. People may feel like they are being childish when trying to express themselves in grip of their inferior function, and no one will take them seriously. They feel like they are not going to make much of an impact...People don't rely on information coming from their Inferior Function directly because they don't want to compromise their world view and how they perceive and feel about themselves." ~  "Form of the Inferior Functions"

Reading about MBTI's inferior function sounds as though it is anticipating constant support externally, which is really how the Suggestive function is structured. Yes, that could apply to the Socionics relationship of a type's vulnerable function correlating with their dual's demonstrative function, but MBTI's inferior function also carries with it a sense of unmet needs: that this function's information is needed for their health and wellbeing, but they are unable to themselves provide it; that is far more in line with Socionics' suggestive function than vulnerable. In MBTI the idea that each individual is a complete personality and is capable of reaching ideal functioning without external support is an individualistic perspective, while Socionics assumes the interconnectedness of relations as a base: that people are meant to fit together a certain way and express various functions in tandem. I can see how MBTI supports a needs-unmet paradigm for characterizing the inferior function, and therefore frames it as something that individuals can cultivate to positive ends; but I find more value in thinking of Socionics' Vulnerable function as being the Achilles' heel of personality, where no real improvement is lasting and coping mechanisms are defensively justified as personal evolution. This isn't the way the Inferior function's correlation, the Suggestive function, is described in Socionics. However MBTI considers it to be the weak point in personality, so it isn't improper to contrast MBTI's inferior function with Socionics' vulnerable function.

Socionically speaking, considering a type's vulnerable function is a particularly direct way of determining whether a person has been accurately typed. It is 1-dimensional, which can, among other things, denote a stripped-down quality. Its dimensionality also can be interpreted as having for a reference only one's personal experience in using it, as well as a limited and simplistic personal perspective on the way others use it. In the function dichotomies, the Vulnerable function is considered to be weak; mental; producing; inert; subdued; evaluatory; cautious; unvalued; and hated. To extrapolate, the literature suggests that one spends time thinking painfully about incompetence on this function; attempts to use it in the world but in ways that are found to be inappropriate, too little or too strong, anxiously underachieving or stressfully overachieving, even though one is cautious in its use; and one certainly prefers not to use it if not forced by circumstance.

MBTI thinks of the inferior function as a blind spot, an overlooked spot, an internal position which puts the personality at a particular disadvantage in a way that blocks growth and personal development. But Socionics suggests that the vulnerable function is a painfully conscious one. It is not ignored, however much one would like to--instead, it is consciously and painfully worked through or around, circumstance after circumstance.

The vulnerable function: the place of least resistance: it's the major flaw in personality. As a type with Te in the PoLR position, I find that I [guardedly] relate to this:

"A type with Te PoLR tends to reject facts given from a source which they are personally unfamiliar with, firmly believing they can make their own decisions that are solely based on their own perspective and reasoning about it. They will tend to become defensive when questioned about their rationale or efficiency, pointing out that there is no such thing as objective "fact". Also, these types experience a significant level of stress in tending to day-to-day must do's and responsibilities in life (like routine maintenance or working productively), manifesting itself as a general laziness or hyper-diligence." ~ "Super-Ego Block Functions"

In working with information on the vulnerable function, it's especially clear when other functions come into play: faced with a string of factual data, for example, the most effective method of working with it for me is to consider emergent patterns--that is, consider it through an Ni lens. Or, 'surrender' to it as an inevitable requirement--Se+Ti lens. Still there is an impulse to turn away, move away from it somehow, to be minimalist in its use.

But, similarly to how the inferior function and the suggestive function is perceived, there is also a nagging experience of lack when there is no constant, subdued, high-quality information coming in from the world on this function--or perhaps when there is no demonstrative function working externally, supplying the missing qualities. If only someone would come and take the burden off. If only circumstances were not so demanding of me, one might silently think.

I think types generally are given to thinking of negatives in their worlds through the lens of their vulnerable functions. I know my experience of it is a world filled with a silent shaming demand that I improve my work productivity, my general production...that I carry out the details of work with precision and exactitude, that I say exactly what I mean, that I achieve factual accuracy and accept information as it is given.

The light in all this is the realization that one's weaknesses, Socionically speaking, cannot ever improve to become our strengths; however, one can use one's strengths to cover the inadequacies of one's weaknesses. 

New card

I got tired of meeting people at fantastic meetups (such as the NYC Socionics and NYC MBTI group meetups) and having to try to quickly mention Socionics resources, or telling people to find me on Facebook. Hopefully having these lovely cards will make it easier to help connect people with Socionics. :)

Typology without self-definition

It’s common for people to look to Socionics (and to other typology systems) to find encapsulating ideas or structures from which to understand themselves and their world. One can use those structures in order to understand yourself, your stories about who you are, what this means about your preferences and needs, about your ideas on how to meet those needs with like-minded people…

It’s common to want a set of ideas to cleave to, so that you know how you should behave in everyday life in order to be internally and externally consistent and liked by the people you like. And it is straightforward to look to Socionics for a circumscribed explanation of self and others. There is this sense that as long as you come to structurally understand yourself and others, you will come to know yourself; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be similarly aligned with you and without conflict; and generally, become happy.

But there comes a point, sooner or later, where every seeker must move past structure, labels, and concepts, to accept that neither they nor anyone else fits neatly into a pre-made package. It isn’t enough to just say that as the commonplace saying it has become; it deserves to be really understood. The things people know about themselves—their likes and dislikes, their past behavior, the things they are drawn to and the types of ways they think about it (in short, their stories about themselves)—those things themselves do not adequately describe who that person is, nor can they fully predict their behavior.

Typology is all about understanding ourselves and other people by attaching an encapsulating or structural label. This label is by definition well understood; from there, it is up to the person making that determination to explain the way in which a person’s behavior lines up with the given type, or explain away behavior that does not line up.

Joe is always full of ideas, often shows an almost-childish excitement, finds it easy to start new things but boring and difficult to finish things he’s already started. According to those behaviors, Joe types himself as an ILE (ENTp).

But now one of the great silent issues rears its head as Joe asks himself: is it normal for an ILE to brood, have doubts, become loud and excited? Am I still an ILE if I am not interested in new things? If the type description says x, y, and z, and I am not these things, does that mean I am not an ILE?

Now, I am not saying that it is a problem for people to question. Not at all. And in fact mistyping is a common occurrence. I am speaking now about people who struggle with these questions, who continue to seek answers, clarity, and explanations, and for whom this goes on and on.

This is about people who are trying to find themselves within their type.

Many people who are struggling with these questions of labeled identity often seek ways to become more sure of their typing: they speak to their friends and loved ones, they read about other types and compare their traits against them, they try to gain a stronger understanding of the system, they post videos of themselves for other people to type them, they get involved in various Socionics groups, etc.  At the heart of all these different ways a person might try to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ is a set of problematic assumptions.

• Assumption #1: The question ‘Who am I?’ can be answered satisfactorily by a standardized, external system of types. This is the basis of seeking: the assumption and silent belief that you can find yourself in an external entity. But it is impossible to find yourself in anything but within yourself: your qualities, possibilities, inclinations, values; your personal history and potential future; your genetic and biological and psychological parameters; your self-stories about what kind of person you are, what you strive towards and what you use to meet your goals and needs: all these together might be able to define and describe you, although even these cannot predict you 100%; but no external system made by another human being can do more than give you ideas and resonating insights on who you are. Socionics, as any typology system, is great at describing what is already there and drawing insight for that type to consider, but it cannot itself explain who you are.
• Assumption #2: the type a person uses must explain and predict the core and detail experiences of their personality. This builds off the first assumption in that it suggests anyone can be satisfactorily and fundamentally explained by an externalized system. But no external system can be expected to be so thorough when you as a person is not truly bound by any imperative to act or not act in a certain way; to think or not think certain thoughts; to feel or not feel certain feelings. No such imperative, no such definitive line really exists except where the mind or your history tries to self-impose it; you generally express your most common personal habits and values as behavior, but you are not truly bound by anything you have ever done, thought, or felt previously. And if you are not bound, then an external system like Socionics can only describe what you are presenting to the world and to yourself in the moment. It assumes that you will continue to present this and attempts to type you so that your type reflects the changes you choose to make in the future, but while it is a great and useful descriptor of what you already show, it cannot define your potential or put boundaries on your behavior.
• Assumption #3: as soon as a person catalogues themselves fully, they can determine who they are. What does it mean to catalogue yourself? It means to think about what you know about yourself and to try to make that knowledge complete. You ate cereal this morning, you ate cereal yesterday morning, you ate cereal the day before, and you liked cereal all those times, so you can conclude that you are the kind of person who likes cereal. This is a data point you can use in cataloguing yourself, and you can repeat this until you have incorporated all of your recurring themes, experiences, and interests. But all that you will have done is formalize and recognize the stories that you tell yourself about who you are. We tell ourselves these stories in order to have a continuation between one moment and the next. We tell ourselves these stories in order to remember the reasons in the past that we have done or said or felt something, and to stay true to that in the future. We tell ourselves these stories so that we can have an address in the universe: I am Joe, son of Jane and Adam, brother of Sarah; I am an engineer; I am a baseball fan; I like the color blue; I live in New York City; I am 35 years old; I am a happy, unhappy, wealthy, poor, driven, unmotivated, perceptive, uncaring, normal, special human being.

You can put yourself into these parameters. You can use typology to create an extraordinary and complex map to yourself. But if you are driven by this as self-definition, you will seek for the type you choose to 1) fully explain you, which it cannot do, and 2) set boundaries on your behaviors, perceptions, interests, beliefs, and feelings. Instead of finding yourself, you will be trying to engrave yourself in stone.

If you accept that the stories you tell yourself about who you are ARE who you are, then you can continue to type yourself as best as you can and keep yourself within the parameters of that type as a way to establish and understand your self-identity. But if you move away from that kind of typology, that kind of approach to self-knowledge, you can release the hold that answering ‘Who am I?’ has on you.  You can simply be the person you already are.

So here is what I said before: There is a common yearning in people coming into Socionics for a circumscribed notion of self and others. There is this sense that as long as we come to structurally understand ourselves and others, we will come to know ourselves; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be aligned to us and without conflict; and generally, become happy.

This feeling, that structurally understanding ourselves and others using these systems can lead to all these great outcomes, is, unfortunately, false. That is not to say that people don’t reach that outcome: they certainly do. But how can a system teach us about who we are? The system can only teach you through the proxy of a type. Being exposed to typology can teach you interesting ideas to which you may respond by growing into or because of them, but no structured type arises from inside your own head and heart. You only find solace through seeing commonalities between your perceptions of yourself and the types that are described in the systems.

That solace, as my generic Joe showed, can be easily disturbed. This is because once you attach yourself to a label, you begin to ask yourself whether what you do and think aligns with this label. You may assume the label is more valid and more important than your own thoughts and behaviors, and try to change outlying behavior or thought patterns to fit more comfortably inside the parameters of the type. Although plenty of people find themselves also changing their idea of the type to fit their personal parameters, either way there is a constant strain towards alignment with the abstract.

You may assume the label is more valid and more important than your own thoughts and behaviors, and try to change outlying behavior or thought patterns to fit more comfortably inside the parameters of the type. 

That ongoing struggle makes it both less important and less noticeable when you don’t accept things in yourself or others. This is especially problematic in relationships, where it’s often the case that one or both partners try to change the other to suit their own concepts of who that person should be like. Typology only makes that more structured and valid—it is one step further from honest acceptance of reality for what it is. The urge towards wanting to feel happy, to feel connected and aligned and loved for your strengths and supported in your weaknesses can be especially difficult for people who earnestly subscribe to Socionics, which talks about Quadra and duality relationships as being just the places where you may feel all those great things. Once you are in such a relationship, you might come to police yourself in order to not step outside of the acceptable parameters of the type’s behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses: playing a role instead of opening up to who you are in every moment.

All of this is about attachment: attachment to good things; connections; being accepted; understanding your stories about yourself; staying firmly within the boundaries of your known self; staying within relationships with people you’ve typed as compatible; structuring your home or your life to suit what your type would prefer; attaching yourself to the system as a way to get your needs met, and as a way of finding and keeping a particular role or position in your life.

It is when attachment is threatened by circumstance that any of it becomes a struggle. When you don’t align your ideas of reality to reality—that is what suffering is. You cannot stick to one or more systems or method of understanding yourself and your world when reality changes despite whatever story you may tell yourself to explain it.

So to those who are seeking to find or explain themselves through these systems: don’t put yourself in bondage. Gaining insight through the proxy of a type into the way your inner structures of self work is a wonderful thing and it is clear that Socionics is an extremely useful system for just that sort of thing. But don’t ask yourself whether a type would act this way or that, or if a type wants this or that, or feels comfortable among this or that. Ask yourself that question first. Seek to understand your own behaviors, your own stories about yourself, your own choices without any explanatory lens. This is the process of becoming aligned internally, and once you shift your focus to that, you might find that your questions finally have satisfying answers.

Paradoxically, once you begin to accept your behaviors and your expressions of self, it might make it that much easier to then find a type within one or both of these systems that will adequately describe these behaviors. At that point, it becomes much more easy to find a resonating type within these or any psychological systems, and you can begin to learn about that type without being impeded by your own doubts, fears, and needs.