The upside to doing everything yourself is that you get total control over outcomes:

• I see how everything can be improved. So I jump in and get involved with every outcome-influencing process from the start.
• This creates some “perceptive drag” on executive processes early on. But look, we’re avoiding big risks here.
• You see? I foresaw a problem and prevented it. A huge win for my visionary intuition! I know the best way to do things. (INTJ as risk-mitigator)
• But literally every detail is also now my responsibility, and I have to micro-manage people, or take all the work onto my plate.

The rest of the downside spirals into an epic saga:

• You can’t really work with anybody. They annoy you because they are not you and don’t think like you.
• They don’t like working with you. They’re annoyed that they have to hear your critical commentary on everything they do.
• You’re too stressed out due to all the attention people and things require of you, and too much is on the line for you to enjoy life.
• You reinforce a lack of tactical, moment-to-moment engagement and response, because you have converted every executive process into a perceptive process which is way too drawn out and risk-averse.
• Things break anyway, of course, despite your oversight.
• You can now do less about broken things than you could before, because you’re generally overwhelmed.

The nice thing is, you can start to reverse this spiral by working in little chunks:

• Ah, here’s an element by which I’m overwhelmed. I’m probably way too controlling about it.
• Instead of controlling, I’ll release some control in exchange for an increase in my own energy reservoir, and create a system for responding and engaging with this element when/if problems arise.
• OK, now I have less direct control, but I also have created a system for diving in when problems occur.
• This is not as stressful.
• (Repeat)

The annoying thing is, you probably have to work against the ol’ INTJ intuition when doing this:

• The intuition is subjective. It draws on your past experience.
• In INTJs, it’s dominant and always demanding a voice, especially when you’re tired.
• So if you haven’t trusted other people or systems in the past, it’ll be hard to let go at first, no matter how great your yet-unseasoned engagement and response tool-set.
• In this way, the intuition can easily wrest control away from people who aren’t aware of how it works. They trust it too much. And it creates a really long, annoying loop of crusty, unwanted results.
• The “system thinker” INTJ becomes a victim of a system. But they created it, and fear engagement with a “wrong” part of themselves, so instead of changing it, they credit the ego and just get emotional/pouty when others complain about the results.

It takes practice, but one can break out of this. And even the most painful, stumbling practice which involves learning and development is far, far better than nope-ing out of huge quality-of-life upgrades.

This is especially true for INTJs who are in “executive” career positions. People expect executives to experience, engage, and execute. They do not expect executives to anticipate, control, and interfere/micro-manage. If you can sprinkle some anticipation and a tiny bit of control into your experiencing, engagement, and execution, there’s a good chance people will be really amazed.

Filed in: Productivity /119/ | Control /110/