E. writes:

Thank you for writing your blog posts. Lots of them have been practical (eg journal template, music suggestions, media links).

Nice work with the journal! I’m glad the blog has been helpful.

A comment: You appear to be in a 30 day challenge for writing daily on your blog. Am I right?

Not only no, but unfortunately I should probably emphasize that with a “hell no”, E., given the actual circumstances. :-) Sorry to be hyperbolic. Not that I’m against 30-day challenges, but here’s what you’re seeing.

My day-to-day coaching and web development businesses are like this lately:

Just a lot of activity. A lot of stuff to sort out. Problems to solve, deadlines to meet, and people to help. Maybe a few actual aliens to kill, or at least a few big spiders in the house. I wish those guys would stay out!

So the blog is my blowoff valve, and really—and I feel like a lot of you will understand this—my side-productivity gig, the thing that gives me a nice break to talk about whatever feels good and interesting as an INTJ.

As a coach I feel like it’s important for me to see it for what it is. Otherwise I tell my clients, “oh hey, did you read [productivity book]? It’s so freaking great” even though I woke up this morning and procrastinated 3 hours away just like the pre-productivity-book self would.

I’m considering urging most INTJs to treat productivity research as a hobby—that’s another finding. You can’t stop us from kicking our own kind of ass when it’s time, but we do kind of torture ourselves in between those times, thinking of ourselves as lazy, which isn’t true at all. The 3-hour procrastination session is often just one’s own body screaming for rest.

Speaking of 30-day challenges, I’ve tried the X-Effect before, and you know what I found? It was funny. I kept making those damn cards, man. Pretty soon I had this ideal of reaching like 10 x’s a day. I might try it again sometime, but I found it really hard to throw all my money in the “change your clothes daily” pile, or whatever it is I’m lagging at.

E. continues:

Also, I was wondering if you may write about the dynamics of your relationship with your wife? For example, maybe talk about her MBTI type, how you guys communicate, your frustrations and how you cope, etc.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but maybe not! My wife is a beautiful ISFJ. The dynamics seem to get better every year! I like that dynamic. We have gone through a lot of difficult experiences together—the loss of twin girls at birth, a wearying adoption process with a couple of near-adoptions, the traumatic birth of my ISFJ son, and more. So it feels like we have grown together a lot in this sense that transcends type: The shared experience, in which many of our perceptions are intertwined.

We also have a pretty vibrant life lately. Megan is very active. She works with refugees and arranges trips to gather their stories with the storytelling team at TSOS Refugees, an international refugee non-profit which recently published a very impressive book.

Even more undeservedly on my part, Megan is a REALLY good cook. She learned how to make pasta and pizza from a gracious Italian mamma while living in Italy. And she will try making my favorite Japanese food even though it’s not really part of her own past, but then she wont stop—she’ll theorize how to make it better next time, and the time after that! It’s awesome.

Plus she runs marathons, she’s really into helping with local school and community efforts, and she actually likes taking day-to-day productivity stuff off my plate, which is very helpful.

I am not sure what I give in return, but she likes that I’m a coach and refers clients my way all the time. She’s way more socially adept than I am in the “somehow remembers to maintain friendships” way.

My kids: ISTP son, 9, ISFJ son, 8, and ENFP daughter, 6. I watch Doctor Who nightly with my sons before bed. They remember stuff about that show wayyyy better than I do. And they tell me some seriously funny stuff sometimes. One of my favorite things is hearing them laugh about something they read in a book, or something somebody said at school.

My daughter, well, she’s just a cutie. She likes to write sweet cards with those little ENFP-Fi caveats, like “Dear Mom and Dad, I love you both, even when you get mad at me.” In that way I’m glad I know about personality type, or I’d probably be like, “CAN YOU NOT JUST WRITE A CARD THAT’S 100% NICE.” We laugh about it though.

The kids come out to my office and play every couple of days, when I leave my office door open. We’ll play a few rounds of golf on the computer, or have a dance party, or talk about their friends at school.

Our most recent family purchase is a putter, some golf balls, and an indoor putting hole. We are attempting to get ISTP trying some more introvert friendly sports because he’s really introverted and yet athletically gifted. He’s also amazing at video games. Fortunately I helped a client’s son get a full-ride e-sports scholarship, so ISFJ trusts me with the job of making sure his video game play doesn’t just mean lazy stuff. Which is what it totally looks like, but his brain is whirring the entire time.

Communication

We communicate really well just hanging out and chatting. It’s fun to send articles and memes back and forth. It’s a little bit harder to communicate on projects together when there’s something on the line, like an important deadline. In those cases we both have our “own way” of doing a thing, so it’s really important to watch that we don’t exclude the other by snapping back to only our own way. A quirk of the Je (extraverted judgment; Te-Fi/Fe-Ti) personality combination. We each have to be patient with the other’s dominant process sometimes as well.

Frustrations

OK, an example. With an ISFJ, part of the game of life can be something like “schedule Tetris.” I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen the way ISFJs naturally do this Tetris thing with their Ti, but not only can they be REALLY good at the video game, they are (I should really say they can be because I don’t mean to paint every ISFJ with that brush) good at things like loading moving trucks, packing up boxes, etc. Like, amazingly good—no space wasted. The same goes for a schedule, or a block of time to fill.

So when you go on vacation as an INTJ and you’re thinking “ahhh, relaxation,” you better run that by the ISFJ because vacation often means doing things together and “gosh I sure hope you’re OK if we visit friends A, B, and C while we tour this distant and foreign continent? I promise we will do things you want to do in between.” When actually, watching entire days float by is probably one of my favorite vacation activities, period.

So, I find that one really helpful thing is to not get run over by all this. Right? I don’t want to feel really pouty at the end of the day because not only did I let it float by, but all of the stuff we did involved connecting with Facebook friends. So I’ve learned that I need to be a good J-personality and let her know that I’m doing this or that tomorrow, and then asking her to help me figure out how we can each do what we want. She wants me to enjoy the vacation, too.

It’s really a Fi-Ti sort of concern: Figuring out the kind of activity you value, and setting a boundary: OK, we’ll do your stuff too, but I want to do my stuff in there somewhere. So let’s figure it out: Can it work? For a long time I acted as if “being a good husband” meant “just let her do her stuff” but that didn’t help at all. And being a coach, I know how important it is to do stuff that is meaningful to you. As an INTJ-T, always open to change and learning, unfortunately one of the traps is that you get to be so perceptive that you can end up letting people walk over you. Megan never really did that, or wanted to do that, but I didn’t do anything to prevent it from inadvertently happening.

Does that help? That’s one thing. Like I said, there’s a lot. Sometimes even just knowing that while an ISFJ might be echoing your exact sentiments (a gift I envy in some ways!), they don’t necessarily agree—that alone can be really helpful. You might say, “man I hate yellow cars!” and they’re laughing with you, but then a couple days later you might also hear, “when you said you hated yellow cars, honestly that really made me feel angry inside. I’m sorry but I kind of still like them, BUT I also see what you mean.” This can happen—it’s not terribly logical, it’s not how INTJs prefer to operate, but it’s important to understand that it’s also part of being human.

Conclusion

I can always detect a little bit of sensitivity on the part of my INTJ clients when they talk about their family members’ personality types; maybe they’re afraid I’ll tell them they chose the wrong spouse, or whatever. But really, my philosophy is that your spouse reflects a part of you, and often a very aspirational part at that.

Knowing about personality type has overall been really great for our family.

Have a great day E.!

Filed in: Relationships /78/ | ISFJ /6/ | Anxiety /32/ | Ti /30/ | Productivity /120/

One of my recent favorite productivity tools is a graphics driver issue which forces the shutdown of the Chrome browser about 4x daily.

All my tabs freeze up, and I have to kill the browser application and restart. Naturally, harnessing this as an opportunity to make a fresh start in life, I refuse to allow the browser to restore the previous 20-40 tabs.

Should I risk an upgrade? Unsure. I’m seriously considering writing such a script for all my browsers, randomly killing them after, say, an hour has passed.

Maybe Relevant Note: I am generally anti-productivity-pride when it comes to INTJs. In my experience, treating ourselves as productivity warriors is dangerous and needs to be balanced with an understanding that we are also procrastination warriors. Run with it, ride the wave, don’t sweat it. So laughing at my productivity levels has become a favorite activity, even though I’m also most definitely a secret badass like every other INTJ. ;-)

Filed in: Productivity /120/

Working with taxonomies, categorization, and tags a lot in my other, tech-oriented business, I generally find a philosophical taxonomy-thinking split across INTP and INTJ developer personalities, like so:

• INTP developers don’t generally enjoy the idea of a single taxonomy and categorization system for a given body of information. Instead they prefer to develop those only as needed. In my opinion, the technology we refer to as “tagging” evolved from the Ne-Ti mindset: “Anything can be an anything. Don’t limit me. And, precisely speaking, a “doohickey” is also a word that ends with y, in addition to being a word that starts with d. Tags naturally suggest themselves.”
• INTJ developers don’t generally enjoy using tagging systems without also developing a firm categorization, or a way in which the information ought to be consumed. We can be pretty didactic in that way. However, a typical INTJ has, or likes to think they have, a natural intuitive sense for the type of presentation that would benefit people using the system, and this often involves a firm information hierarchy. The INTJ prepares an interface for the foreseen best-outcome, and if some of the outliers have to look a bit harder to find what they want, so be it.

It has helped me greatly to be able to walk into a meeting with a client and get an idea of the ratio of those preferences, one to the other.

And these days, a lot of developers would say: ¿Por qué no los dos? However, one thought system usually takes priority in the overall scheme.

[Aside: Wading into philosophy a bit deeper, you might say the is-ought problem reflects a key perspective of the INTP psychology, and is related to this blog post’s question of ought information structure vs. is information structure.]

Well, thus & therefore one of my intuitive visions for this blog has always been the integration of a menu system which goes into topic and sub-topic, as opposed to only reverse-chronological content and loose tags. Because dammit, let’s get some structure around here!

I generally hate using blogging software for websites that will need that kind of topic & sub-topic formal taxonomy. But this blog evolved pretty organically on purpose, and one of my outcomes was, “this time I’ll fix it and make adjustments as I go along, for fun, which will get me on the road faster.” So far, it’s worked. The tech is really easy to manage with regard to presentation.

However, this menu system thing—getting that on the road could take a bit of thinking and it’s tempting to make the thinking pretty grandiose. Which is kind of the opposite philosophy, as compared to what got us this far.

There’s quite a breadth to the information I’ve shared here, and also a certain depth, and this (my head is expanding by the second) gets us into some pretty nerdy layout possibilities. I hate to say it, but I’m almost thinking we could really benefit from three columns or more for the wider screens here, guys. :-) We’ll see. In my personal projects I’ve been up to five columns where it made sense.

The important part, I’ve learned, is to keep gardening. Where I used to abandon sensory projects like this after a few weeks or months when form didn’t match vision, I’ve learned to kind of let them take their own shape over time, with adjustments made on an ongoing basis. I started this blog as a humble study blog, just a place to keep myself accountable and enjoy yet another secret blog where I could tool around.

One way of keeping it humble and avoiding a near-certain, raging, late-night design session is to start keeping a simple log regarding my thinking on the blog design. And so I’ve started a simple log, next to all of my other logs on topics from keeping a houseplant to birthday shopping for my wife.

I’ve also looked backward into this blog’s past a bit, and reviewed some old notes. INTJs are generally the type of people to hesitate to look back at the early phases of their projects because it makes them cringe, but after studying SJs for so long, I’ve learned that when you write the story you almost always end up celebrating the history. There’s a lot to that, and it does feel good to be able to stabilize the project in that way. Otherwise it’s simply never good enough—it never just is what it is, and that’s kind of a bummer.

Well: I’m looking forward to my next 100 years of blogging, as various progeny take up the task of keeping the dream alive, family relationships are strained, feuds are started, wars are waged, and incantations listing the hex color values of favorite pixels are chanted in between furious exchanges of laser fire.

[OR: You may see some big changes here, or you may not. This depends on how busy I am—the busier I am, the more procrastinating I do, the more changes you will likely see here.]

Filed in: Procrastination /23/ | Productivity /120/ | Technology /41/ | Therapeutic Practice /145/ | Ni /42/ | Ti /30/ | Thinking /70/ | Intuition /63/ | INTP /7/

One of the things I see happening over and over in the world, and especially in the UFO world, is a hyperbolic sensory-to-intuitive switch which can just about overpower people who have given the bulk of their life’s attention to sensory things.

The way this often plays out in the UFO world is, “hey, I’m just a nuts-and-bolts guy, not really the type to let the imagination run wild, haha…”

“…and by the way, I did see a UFO once.”

Personally, I don’t like to let my thoughts gel too quickly in areas like UFO research, and that is one reason why.

Carl Jung described this kind of condition, a switch from one function to the other, as a sort of “rebalancing act”. For example, lots of sensory work leads to a massive switch to a focus on intuitive perceptions, and vice-versa. This is where we originally got the idea that an extravert needs some introversion time at the end of the day, or an introverted hobby, and introverts need some extraversion—it’s deeper than that, but that’s the gist.

Well, going back to sensation and intuition, the pattern is this “nuts and bolts type of guy” sensory personality description which then gives way to the “yep, saw a UFO” possible-pure-intuition experience.

Personally, this gives me second thoughts about a lot of the UFO-related content that I read. That’s not to say I believe, or don’t believe, but I personally don’t feel pressure to define myself as being in one of those camps.

Example Video

Here is an example of a video which concerns me: Interview with Kevin Day

Noteworthy time stamps:

• 9:17: The guy has spent 18 years on these ships. Wow. That’s extremely sensory work, day in and day out.
• 10:10: He had a secret wish to see a UFO!
• 15:50: But we’re not going to speculate about what we saw—we don’t know if it was military tech or what
• 18:33: Discussion about any lasting “psychic” effects of the experience begins.
• 20:53: This made me cringe as it sounds exactly like a Ni-type experience, wherein Kevin became convinced he could find a gold motherlode. And…
• 21:28: He found the “source of the gold”! Wow!!! But…
• 22:28: “My family never wants me to mine it…” Wait, what?

So I’d guess—and this is just a guess—that he “saw” the gold in his “mind’s eye.” As in, he couldn’t show it to you such that your physical sensory organs could see it, touch it, smell it, etc.

I’ve read this kind of thing many, many times before.

And unfortunately, this is exactly how Ni can be warped into “reality” to get people to believe in telepathy, secret cities under the earth, religion origin stories, etc.

“Look with your ‘spiritual eyes’” was one way this was communicated by religions at least as far back as the 1800s, and it still is today.

Effectively, and I hate to say it, but a lot of this stuff ends up being an exercise of the imagination.

Furthermore, the person who experiences it is sometimes so unfamiliar with the intuition that they firmly believe they have a special power (see the first outcome category below).

Two Concerning Outcome Categories

There are two main outcomes from this “intuition switch” that concern me:

• First, “I believe it all, here’s what I saw, here’s what it means, and the experience went even deeper” (deeper inside my mind, but I’m kind of merging sensation with intuition at this point because I’m convinced of the power of intuition without even knowing what ‘intuition’ is or how it works). I remember checking out a really well-known UFO believer’s book about “who the aliens are and what they’re up to,” and it read exactly like a metaphorical Ni (introverted intuition) / active imagination exercise. I felt pretty embarrassed for the author, to say the least, though more research is needed here. You can always take Ni deeper, and it usually gets weirder and weirder, especially if you don’t realize that you’re most likely encountering subjective metaphor.
• Second, “Here’s what I saw, I don’t know much about it, don’t really care to follow up.” This gets answered by UFO critics as, “WOW, WOULDN’T YOU WANT TO FOLLOW UP?! I SURE WOULD!!” and they just don’t understand how much psychology in this “care to follow up / don’t care to follow up” area can differ among humans. While irritating on one level, it’s also a potential strike against their ability to rationally debunk UFO stories on another. This is unfortunate for their cause, and I see lots of little things like this on debunker sites—again, not claiming they’re wrong in total, but it’s unfortunately not a favorable sign regarding level of education.

Conclusion: But what about the objective aspects?

What about the fact that our ship’s hardware sensors captured this or that? Well, unfortunately for the UFO community and for people of many faith communities, etc.—Ni and Se are ever bound in a grand commingling of psychological information. A great deal of qualitative work is required to begin to separate objectively reliable and subjectively “probably not so reliable” information.

Personally, I also use this to weight my own exploration of the UFO topic: I am undergoing a lot of life changes myself, here in my mid-life years, so I would expect imagery of the unknown to be more of a feature—and an attractive one—to my subconscious. That doesn’t mean UFOs do or don’t exist in some form, it just means that I know I need to zoom out from time to time and keep that factor in consideration.

Well: What do you think? UFOs are in the news a lot lately thanks to the U.S. Navy’s decision-making regarding the reporting process. It’s been interesting to follow, and as I mentioned before, a big part of this for me is just the fun of exploring it as a topic.

Filed in: Sensation /40/ | Ni /42/ | Intuition /63/ | Se /25/

To use one of my grandma’s favorite phrases, this video tickles me pink.

The video, in which a young American boy goes solo camping in the snow, is great. It’s fun, adorable, and interesting. And it helped bring its creator over seven million views and 329,000 subscribers.

If I had to guess, I’d put his personality at ESFP. You never know, and am not the kind of guy to tell somebody “you are definitely this or that type based on my watching you on Youtube,” but sometimes it’s fun to guess. He reminds me of a good friend of mine and brought back some great memories of being a kid.

Part of what I like about this video is just the sense of child-like fun. There’s a huge need for that in the INTJ psychology, and it’s very easily ignored when we get sucked into amazing person projection mode or other risky or even dangerous lines of thought/action.

The fun, I think, leads to the charisma—the kid is pumped. He’s excited and he’s ready for action. I’ve coached ESFPs before, and when they’re low on energy, when they’re a workaholic—yeah, you aren’t going to see a fun Youtube video, though you might get one that’s really informational.

An example of someone who I think could be an ESFP who took her career in a very informational direction (not necessarily in an unhealthy way!) is Linda Moulton Howe, former Miss Idaho pageant winner and Miss America contestant, now a standby in the UFO research community and an independent investigative journalist.

Linda Produced the film A Strange Harvest, a documentary on cattle mutilations, which is something of an interesting historical artifact on its own, and which you can view in its entirety on IA. The video does show mutilated cattle, but personally while I’d normally be a bit sensitive to this stuff on my lunch hour, this one didn’t affect me much. The anonymous mutilators made some remarkably clean cuts!

Filed in: ESFP /4/

A belated and huge thanks to blog reader Mike (we have multiple Mikes in our readership, and even multiple Mike C’s, so I will check and see how much credit he’d like) for providing me with a beautiful and easy-on-the-ears recording of When Intuitry Beats Memory, my essay on the power of intuition. The MP3 is available for download at that link.

Isn’t Mike’s voice awesome? I love it.

It’s risky in a sort of “weird information gets out” way, but I think I’ll send the recording to my mom. She’s a very proud ESFP, so the risk is that she tells people that I’m “well…I forget…but it’s something like, Marc is producing audio books for Carl Jung” or something like that, but she also likes to hear really great voices and loves audio books.

Collecting Voices

I have noticed that I enjoy collecting little snippets of on-air recordings from time to time, and “voices I enjoy” are one reason I might do that. Here is a favorite “found” voice from a recent HF net (The Noontime Net) on the 40-meter ham radio frequencies, 7.2835 MHz to be exact: The Noontime Net Recording [MP3, 1.3 MB]

For the non-hams here, a “net” is an on-air meeting. The net control operator there (I don’t know his name yet) is checking people in, an important part of these nets. If you haven’t listened to a net before, there may be one local to your area that’s worth checking out, and the equipment to do so is cheap (recommended quick starter set, despite only four stars worth of reviews) and easy to find. Even if you don’t have a ham radio license yet, you can type in the frequency and listen (not talk, but hey we’re introverts right) without needing a license.

I like the really executive nature of the net control’s voice here. And it goes a bit beyond that. He’s not only executive, he’s fast, he’s friendly, he’s forgiving (for example, forgiving of the operator who used “Germany” in his phoenetics, when “charlie” is so easily confused with Germany, and “Golf” is more common) and he’s a bit humorous. It works well. So I had to capture it.

Another plug for WebSDR which makes it dead simple to start/end/save recordings at the touch of a button.

I also found that when I use Hoopla I tend to bookmark favorite narrators and listen to other books they’ve narrated, even if unrelated to the book to which I first listened. As narrators (and actors) go, Bill Nighy (example at link, headphone warning but funny commentary) is a perennial favorite.

If you haven’t seen The Worricker Trilogy (spy thriller / drama) yet, in which Bill Nighy plays the lead role, be sure to check it out.

Filed in: Se /25/ | Sensation /40/

I just woke up from a nap and wrote down a post-nap “9/10 appraisal” of my day, accompanied by glowing notes like “things are pretty good. I think (crazy hectic project) will turn out well.”

This happens more, the more I learn to take productive naps. And today it was so pleasantly shocking, in its own way (I have traveled many moons from the harsh desert climate of those 3/10 days), that I thought I’d once again point out the importance of periodic naps, and share some of my notes.

Here are some of my most common napping-related practices:

Noticing when I’ve “furrowed out”

My body seems to run in cycles from high energy to sleepiness. I have learned to notice when I’ve hit a furrow, or the bottom of a cycle where I’m relatively sleepy. If I wait too long to fall asleep, I might not be able to get there.

When I’m headed toward that furrow, it’s a great time to think about a nap.

Noticing high-anxiety activities

Some of these activities naturally point to the need for a nap. For example:

• Listening to loud music
• Overeating / stress eating
• Getting into Internet arguments
• Making no headway on important to-do items
• A feeling of being slightly agitated or keyed up in an uncomfortable way
• Surfing too much web

Pre-nap Executive Thinking

Being a J personality (judging – executive / organizational), and yet a Pi-dominant personality (Ni in this case; can be too perceptive-focused and ignore the executive work) at the same time, I have found that some structure and organization is usually or even always helpful to me.

It helps me to do some executive thinking before a nap. That is, instead of just taking in information, like “oh yeah, a nap feels like a great idea”; directly address the question of tiredness, what you’ll do about it, and how it will affect your work or other plans.

I find that if I don’t do this, concerns can pile up in the back of my head and make the nap difficult, if not impossible. Or, I may just wake up early and feel agitated.

It helps if I can somehow both justify and rationally explain how the nap will coexist with and support my other tasks, in other words.

This is best done in speech or in writing. Today, I talked it out with my wife casually as we ate lunch.

It’s important to get some thinking done regarding my post-nap work, as well. I don’t usually plan my immediate post-nap sequence in detail ahead of time, but I do like to have a basic written idea (not in my head! Too easy to forget) of what I will need to do in order to get started on my post-nap work.

In other words, I want a handle on my work so that I can more easily pick it up. Otherwise I have to rely on my innate memory, and my mind is great at blanking that stuff out unless I work to trick it somehow.

Pre-nap preparations

• I send a message to my wife and let her know I’ll be laying down for a while.
• Lights off
  • In my office there’s a skylight, so having something like a hat to place over the peripheral vision helps
• Relaxing music on – Example
• All phone notifications off
• Computer notifications off
• Attention paid to comfort level of body
• Shoes off, maybe socks off
• Items taken out of pockets
• Blanket, hoodie, or both available as needed
• Drool-proof pillow (kidding, just clean the pillow. But man, one of my least favorite parts of having a beard is naptime drool beard)
• Alarm only if absolutely necessary because an alarm can prevent sleep

When laying down, attempting to sleep

Sometimes I’ll read just before sleep, and I have to tell you that Sherlock Holmes books are fantastic for this. :-) Also helpful are biographies and other calming titles, for example Michael Crichton’s Travels is another favorite here, as is The Andromeda Strain, which I find incredibly calming for a thriller.

Putting the book down, I usually try to find a mental image that calms me into a meditative state. I can’t often predict the imagery that will work. Today I imagined my middle son growing into a healthy adult. The mental image of him standing healthy and happy in his athletic clothes and preparing to play some sports on a warm summer day calmed me down and I drifted into sleep for a few seconds. When I woke up I thought, “that’s cool, I like that image, I’m proud of my son” and then I was out.

I do find it common to fall asleep, wake up, and then repeat this a few times before finally falling into deeper sleep. I do my best to persist through it.

Back when I spent a lot of time building models out of paper, imagining the process of building a MiG-21 model out of paper seemed to put me to sleep within a minute or two every time.

When the imagery isn’t working for any reason, I find that focusing on my breathing can help.

After waking up

While I’m still in a drowsy post-nap mode, I try to take a quick glance at a clock to see if more sleep is either needed or appropriate.

Sometimes I’m able to capture the relaxed mode of my brain immediately after a nap and use it to get really good answers to hard questions (“I’m locked up in situation X, what do I do?”), or do silly things like rapping for a few minutes in a way that I’d never be able to repeat outside of such a mode, or cracking funny jokes. Try it sometime—it’s kind of fun.

After a bit of that though, it’s common to feel a need for an executive-type “break out” and a way to take the nap energy forward into a productive day.

During this time I tend to grab my phone and make a quick to-do list. As a productivity hack, my to-do lists never include general descriptions of things (everything must be broken down into max 2-5 minute tasks), so today’s list was:

• Take supplements (100mg caffeine, 200mg L-Theanine, Gingko & Phosphatidylserine). I like to take some caffeine after a nap to capitalize on the productive circumstances. L-Theanine seems to reduce my natural anxiety floor just a little bit. And the G&P, IDK what those do. Oh yeah! They support good memory, or something like that. (Still in the prospective phase with this one)
• Transcribe meeting notes from yellow note pad
• Print out PDF document
• Hydrate
• Put a movie I’ve already seen, or a podcast, on in the background

After I’ve written “enough” to get going I’ll know it because one of the tasks feels easily doable and even motivating to think about, or I’ll think an anxiety-inducing thought (if I go into the house right now, so-and-so my wife’s friend might not be there yet) and find myself instantly getting up.

Back at Work

After doing that simple post-wakeup stuff, I inevitably find myself back at the office desk. At these times I try to keep up the executive tempo by filling out my journaling template, and otherwise getting the thoughts out of my head and onto paper, or the computer, etc.

When a Nap Can’t Happen

If the nap simply can’t happen, simply getting into a relaxed position (I prefer to lay down) and listening to energizing music while e.g. doing some light reading or closing the eyes is very helpful. In addition, if I can do some active imagination, this is also helpful. In order to accomplish active imagination in a productive way, I try to imagine a healing area from my memory. One of these is a favorite park I visited as a child. I then let my intuition change my experience and I stay open to various interpretations.

There are so many specific forms of meditation that I hesitate to call such an activity “meditation,” but I find that the resulting feeling of re-balancing is similar.

Summary

Phew, I can’t believe how much information that was, yet I just do that all naturally at this point. So keep that in mind—it took me a while to learn, and it may take you some time to get yourself into a comfortable state where you do this kind of therapeutic napping in an improved way.

Good luck with your naps!

Filed in: Therapeutic Practice /145/ | Thinking /70/ | Anxiety /32/ | Sleep /10/ | Energy /121/ | Productivity /120/ | Te /36/ | Rest /22/

So it was, indeed, a fun UFO weekend. I listened to a few podcasts, did a lot of UFO-related web surfing, and spent some time on Simeon Hein’s Youtube Channel. After watching an hour of his videos, I’m comfortable saying that Simeon strikes me as an ENFP personality type, and ENFPs are often found in journalism (journalism being the role he’s naturally playing in the community).

By the way, the thing I like most about ENFPs in journalism is that they value the story and are willing to just listen for long periods of time. This lets the rest of us into the research with what I’d call “minimal filtering based on subjective informational construct”. Speaking of ENFPs as a group of course, their subjective filtering would tend to circle around relationship-values, so in areas like UFO research which are fairly devoid of human relationship drama, this saves us information guys a lot of time in having to weed out “here’s my own grand idea and personal agenda” from “here’s what people are actually reporting.”

In between videos I reflected on the psychology of it all: What are the implications, what can be done, what theories can be tested. And, can other models be applied or developed; if so, how, and to what end? After all, us NTs love to think of ways to “address and adjust the system” when we observe unwanted, human-psychology-based, emergent effects. As an ENTP friend once said to me regarding a sticky human problem, “we can solve it with software.”

I also did a bunch of ham radio hobbyist stuff, and coordinated with a friend to set up a WebSDR server for our local area. If you haven’t used a WebSDR before, let me just warn you: It can be really fun AND you can get into a UFOs, crypto, & Black Ops area of this hobby pretty quickly. The SIGIDWIKI.com HF database has been very helpful to me in identifying what I’m hearing in the past. And also, sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and listen to a couple of ham radio operators chat about this or that.

Finally, I also made a personal record, a low-power simplex wide-band FM contact of 15 miles, using my Yaesu FT-65 handheld transceiver, a speaker mic, and a 42 inch telescoping whip antenna. Longer distances than this are definitely possible, but it was a lot of fun for a casual on-air chat with a new friend. Where I live it’s also helpful; in this case the friend let me know about a wildfire (it turned out to be a controlled burn in this case) that was approaching his area, which is the kind of information which in an emergency can buy you valuable time.

In between ham radio and UFOs—I never fill you guys in on this stuff, but: I watched my three beautiful children play and swim in a creek, catching tadpoles and finding heart-shaped rocks. My wife and I shared an absolute monster of a chocolate ice cream cone at a local burger joint, and I played almost an hour and a half of ping pong with an ESFP friend who’s a medical doctor; we exchanged theory and discussed experiences and I don’t think I’ve ever kept a rally going so long in my life (not the full hour and a half, but really consistently long rallies while we talked about all kinds of things at the same time). At one point I had to ask him: “Do you think our keeping this ball in play for so long could be something psychological?” Certainly there’s a lot of cognitive similarity to consider in this opposite-type, similar functions-balance relationship.

While at UFO-play, I also reflected on the fact that a lot of this hobby is just pure, speculative fun, and it can be just as healthy as any other hobby or sport. Along those lines, I imagined myself throwing a UFO party and thought I’d talk to some friends and try to get something scheduled. This is just personal health-level stuff—it’s about taking care of yourself.

But having been out of the action for a while, I was surprised to hear someone in the UFO research community nearly echoing my own psychology-based coverup theory, be it somewhat less dramatic than the usual coverup theory.

I happened to be listening to a Phenomenon Radio podcast interview with Black Vault’s John Greenwald, and John spoke to this directly.

The real meat of John’s findings starts at about 35 minutes in when he says the following:

“…not only is there a UFO coverup, but they [government / miltary] simply have no idea what they are. They really don’t.”

And…

“…I think the national security threat is not only the existence of the phenomena […] but more than anything else, that they may just end up being clueless.”

Wow. To me, this is also perhaps the most frustrating and concerning part of what I’m learning so far, if you remember what Colonel Halt, USAF said himself — “I think this is beyond us. So quit worrying about it.” This perception and accompanying shallow judgment is a maddening echo of the overall military psychology.

John and I may differ a little bit in that John seems to think that the motive for the coverup is “we don’t understand it, therefore let’s keep this under wraps,” while I tend to think the prevailing psychology effectively transforms information of this kind into the proverbial water off a duck’s back: Lack of applicable perception tools (intuition zone of conceptual awareness) leads to a shallow judgment process, which leads to the information effectively being discarded as “likely worth nothing to us or even worse if pursued institutionally” and tremendously undervalued.

I do also see a “heads up” risk as perceived by the ISTJ organizational psychology. That is, in an ISTJ organization, you keep your head down. If you start talking about the unknown, this creates chaos and attention. Attention is the last thing you want; to be seen as an attention-seeker generally runs counter to the organizational values except in cases involving institutionally-approved attention-seeking; the war-hero general, etc. But going “heads up” regarding UFOs—that’s crazy. You just don’t know what they are, and you don’t know what will happen to you if you raise the topic. So your psychology effectively blocks it.

But coming back to John’s conclusion—where he and I both really seem to synchronize: “they may just end up being clueless.” That’s the disaster, right there.

It’s the kind of thinking which is not just an offense against our NT theorist values, blocking out potentially helpful information because of a fear that it’s “beyond us;” it’s also an existential threat to our world.

It may seem to be dramatically oversimplifying things to say that “ISTJ-style organizational values are subverting human progress” but such an abstract viewpoint does seem to promise some leverage in this case. It could also potentially help define new approaches to the problem of coverups, detecting them, freeing important information, and let’s not forget the big one: Advancing human progress, technology, and awareness.

[While we’re at it, spare some good thoughts for our ISTJ friends who are actually keeping the government running. Every weakness comes with an accompanying set of huge strengths…]

Filed in: Therapeutic Practice /145/ | Interests /111/ | Openness /49/

OK, here’s a theory regarding the sudden UFO-related “let’s look into this more than we were” stance.

This is in response to an article I just read, titled What The Hell Is Going On With UFOs And The Department Of Defense?

Remember how I talked about the way the military’s organizational personality might make it an unwitting sponsor of UFO cover-ups?

Now let’s take the reverse. What kind of personality type would you bet would want to know? Like really want to know exactly what a thing is?

First, extraverts would be my bet. And I mean—as a group, right? Because type is a group thing. And Jung’s position on extraversion was that it essentially indicated a type of person who was energized by “outside objects”.

Anyway, zooming in a bit further, I’d have to give the “would want to know” award to the Se-dominant ESTP.

Which: We have an ESTP Commander-in-Chief right now, here in the USA.

So imagine with me, a conversation…

• Navy Admiral: “Mr. President, it’s nice to meet you sir.”
• CIC President Trump: “It’s very nice to meet you Admiral, thank you for your service, you guys are—we have an amazing Navy today…” (Blah blah blah ESTP Fe-Se stuff)
• But Still President Trump: “Hey listen, what do you make of these UFOs. You’ve seen the videos—that was a Navy incident right? Back in 2004 or something.”
• Navy Admiral: “I…I don’t know, sir. It’s a mystery for sure.”
• President Trump Going Full Sensor: “But don’t you want to know? I mean, I’d want to know. These things, they fly faster than our jets, and they can really maneuver!”

And that, right there—I’d say a conversation like that could 150% cause the aforementioned “what the hell is going on” stir within the Department of Defense. The guy is the CIC, we’re the Navy, he wants to know something, and we HAVE THE INFO. Well, we have some info at least. And we did make the darn video.

So: 1 + 1 = 2, intuitively speaking in this case of course.

Another factor to consider is the emergence of To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, which has attempted to exert pressure on the US Congress. To what degree this has been successful, I have no idea. The team and its communications strike me as near-bizarre, but I haven’t made a very deep dive. [Does DeLonge feel to anyone else like a rocker ESFP who has taken a sudden hard turn toward the INTJ sphere of interest? Reminds me of a few people I know…and you never know what kind of e.g. publicity or other help they can lend to us intuitives. Also, when the guy sets up three corporate divisions and those divisions are Science, Aerospace, and Entertainment, I mean it’s getting hard to reach another conclusion here, right?]

The The Drive article linked above is great though, and links to some interesting Youtube videos which I haven’t finished watching yet.

And Jason Turner, in that last video, talks about the existence of a SES, or Signal Exploitation Space, within the USS Princeton. How freaking cool is that name? Apparently it’s existed for some time now but it’s the first time I’m hearing of it. And I mean, you know how I hesitate to really boost your ego, but given the way Ni works you could safely say that the INTJ brain is a Signal Exploitation Space. Right?

This weekend just went into the UFO zone. Man I swear at least 75% of my weekends do this.

Filed in: Technology /41/ | Sensation /40/ | Se /25/ | Openness /49/

If you get Thinking over-involved in solving your procrastination issues, you’re gonna wear yourself out at some point.

Some thinking will help. My Productivity Triangle model can help in that way.

To over-involve thinking looks like: Jumping from one productivity tool to the next, trying to find the holy grail, then getting to the point where you feel like a failure, yet still hold out hope for a solution, a way to leave no project unfinished!

But a lot of INTJs, ISTJs, ESTJs, ENTJs, and on and on…need to get away from thinking for a bit and learn how to develop, and maybe more importantly normalize their system of boundaries. Make its expression sound less selfish, or learn to express it with more nuance.

Here’s one way that can look:

Mental Model

“It’s just part of who I am. I procrastinate some things.” See, Fi is, at least partially, about developing a model for what makes you, you. And what makes you acceptable and even valuable in the face of your weaknesses.

Remember the article about Se and how badass we’d love to look? This can get in the way of a perfectly fine solution to procrastination, one where we give ourselves the freedom to laugh at ourselves and admit that we procrastinate.

And…

Additional Considerations

Here’s how that can look. Imagine that your romantic partner just asked you to build them a gazebo, and the last one took you almost 6 years to complete (which culminated in an amazingly busy weekend in which 80% of the work was done).

• You know what kinds of projects you procrastinate (you’ve analyzed these right? Example: Stuff other people requested; stuff that’s really sensory, etc.)
• You know how you feel when you procrastinate (the distance between real and imagined self has never seemed so great)
• Therefore, because this project seems like the kind of thing you would procrastinate…
• “I’m sorry, I really wish I could take it on and do an awesome job for you, but I think you should ask X to do it instead.”

Nailing the Communication of that can be Hard

It’s easy to piss somebody off if your Fi hasn’t been sprinkled with a little Fe. So give that some consideration. Nobody likes to hear “I could help you, but I won’t.”

If you have decided to set a boundary and you are not going to take on the project, consider your relationship to the person making the request. If they’re relatively close to you, see if you can provide a little help in some other way. Say you’re sorry about it. Give some suggestions on who to ask. Or, offer to get the project started and then mentor them on it, as a way of teaching a new skill.

Another layer of Fi which can help out

Another part of this is doing more things you personally value in your life. This can help you understand that you can make a difference, and that what you want can be enough for yourself, even if it doesn’t seem enough for others.

Maybe this means changing your job, or maybe it means understanding your job even better, or maybe it means concluding that life outside the job is so fun that I don’t even care about my job not being a perfect expression of my gifts anymore. I can live with it now, and by doing so I just saved myself a huge amount of trouble.

You never know where Fi will take you, but it should generally help you feel more energetic about, and appreciative of, life.

Summary

People procrastinate different things for different reasons. INTJs are possibly least likely type to procrastinate things that are important to them. By definition, they tend to find themselves automatically doing those things. But that can leave others in a lot of pain, if the communication is mishandled.

By the way: All types struggle with procrastination. The dynamics are different, and not everybody needs to learn about Fi for extra help. Some need to learn a little bit of Te in order to not get fired because they literally cannot take seriously the boss’s request to make a checklist, for example. As weird as that is to hear for INTJs…

Filed in: Productivity /120/ | Te /36/ | Fi /35/ | Procrastination /23/ | Thinking /70/ | Feeling /64/ | Control /111/