I was thinking about some early-stage adult INTJ development moves today. Here’s one idea of three basic moves, or migrations, to start early on:

First, learn to separate rumination from intuition. A key difference is that ruminations are like intuitions or imaginings that over-emphasize fearful or stressful contents. This change will help you move your focus from “the problems I can imagine” to “the actual problems that are literally in front of me, right now,” and this will make you a more efficient, productive, nimble person on a day-to-day basis. Your INTJ intuition can otherwise start to weigh you down.

Second, learn to offer, and listen for, gentle communication. This change will help you move from “giving” to “expressing” in relationships, which is really important because a huge segment of the population, including people you will meet and wish to befriend, mostly cares about how you express yourself, not what you’re giving. Keep an eye on the way people word things. Your typical INTJ focus on “goodness” can quickly be subverted by phrasing that is too direct or blunt.

Third, learn to be so forward-thinking and open-minded that even the worst ideas and outcomes, sitting in front of you right now, don’t cause you to waver from your confidence in yourself and others. This change will help you move out of the critic role, which can only take you so far in life, and into more of an exploratory creative role, which tends to get INTJs really excited to take on new projects in the future. Otherwise your INTJ focus on critique can quickly lead to unnecessary social and professional alienation.

It was fun to try to narrow these down. I think they would be my big three for early-adulthood INTJs. What do you think?

(P.S. I also just noticed that these moves each generally focus in the direction of extroversion: Toward a direct appraisal of circumstances as they are, toward proactive relations with other people, and toward new, future-facing ideas.)

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