INFJ: 3 Motivation Secrets (When You’re Unmotivated)
– Hey everyone, what’s up?
Thank you for clicking on this
video, I sure appreciate it.
We’re talking about motivation today,
losing motivation and gaining it and
getting motivated for
our big goals in life
or maybe even just small things,
motivated to do my workout today,
motivated to make a YouTube video.
We’re talking specifically
about the INFJ personality type.
Everyone, regardless of personality type
has issues from time to
time with motivation,
getting motivated, what can we do,
but we’re just focusing on INFJs for now.
Sorry, other 15 types, but I
think there’s things in here
that anyone can take away from it.
So keep watching.
So, we’re talking about
the three big things
that can trip an INFJ up and
like sap all your motivation
and related to those things,
how can you find the
motivation or keep it up,
keep it going?
Number one, too much
introverted intuition.
This is gonna be an INFJs
problem in many areas of life
because it’s our dominant function
and the dominant function,
while it helps us out
in many circumstances
will also be a problem
’cause we do it too much.
Introverted intuition is big on planning,
you always hear about INFJs and INTJs,
who also have dominant
introverted intuition.
They’re always planning
way out into the future.
We love to plan but guess what,
you can over-plan, you
can do too much of it.
So an INFJ will take
something they want to do
and plan it so much that they begin to…
Like with dough if you’re making bread,
if you need the dough too much,
it becomes tough and you
can’t really use it anymore.
So, it’s the same thing with planning.
You plan too much, it’s
like you’ve just ruined it.
You’ve poked too many holes and it’s like,
I don’t even want to do this anymore.
So then you throw it out and you’re like,
I got it start all over,
I gotta find something else to do,
I got to start from square one.
This is in many ways
related to perfectionism
where we wanna make sure we
get everything perfect before
we begin implementing anything,
but the problem is that
because introverted intuition,
like any introverted
cognitive function is narrow.
It’s not broad, it hones
in on like a few things.
Imagine looking through
a toilet paper tube,
if you are lucky enough to have
some toilet paper tubes lying around.
It gets very focused on one thing.
So it really over-plans.
It feels like ah, man, I got
this great plan going on,
but it’s so narrow that
it just like forgets about
a bunch of other stuff around it.
So ironically, you’ll be
over-prepared in this small area
and then mostly unprepared
and all these other areas
when you go to do this thing
which will either make you
never get started because
you just feel this anxiety,
it’s almost like we know
that we left something out,
we’re not seeing everything.
So we get this anxiety
and we never want to start
or we get started, fall flat on our face,
because we just get taken by
surprise by all this stuff
we didn’t see when we were planning.
Getting stuck in the planning phase
is a great way to lose your motivation
and get burnt out before
you even start doing
any meaningful work.
So, here’s what you have to do.
You have to intentionally
limit your planning.
This is not gonna be comfortable.
I feel like me just saying that
has probably got some of you at home
freaking out, reaching for
the inhaler on your desk,
you know (laughs),
digging for the EpiPen in your purse,
I don’t know why you would
need an Epi shot for that,
but you tell yourself I can only plan
for this amount of time and
then I have to do something,
I have to get to work on it.
I can only plan for three hours.
Then I have to start writing
the next chapter of my novel,
I can only plan for a
week and then I have to
start taking steps to
get my business going.
It depends on what you’re trying to do.
If you’re trying to build
a rocket to go to Mars,
don’t say I’m only gonna
plan for 30 minutes,
then I’m gonna build it.
You know, be a bit smart
when it comes to that stuff,
but we always think we need
to plan more than we do.
So just limit yourself.
Say, “I can’t plan more
than this amount of time.”
It doesn’t mean that has
to be all the planning,
it just means you limit
the initial planning,
then do something, get
something done in the real world
and then you can always go back
and plan a little bit more,
but you gotta limit it.
You can’t just go effing crazy with it.
This will help you stay motivated because
you will feel like you’re
always moving forward
little by little and that’s a great way
to keep your motivation up
is by realizing that I’m
moving, I’m doing things.
When you feel inert, when you
feel like you’re just stuck
and you can’t move forward at all,
your motivation is just gonna dry up,
like
a
thing that dries up in the desert.
Wow.
Should I redo that and try to
come up with a better analogy?
I probably should, but you know what?
We’re gonna leave it.
Before we move on, let’s stop
for a quick commercial break.
We’ll come right back,
get on with the show.
All right, awesome, you’re back.
Number two, when it comes to motivation is
avoidance of the
extraverted sensing, right?
So we talked about introverted intuition.
That’s the dominant function.
extraverted sensing as I
think we all know by now
is the inferior function of the INFJ
and being that it’s the inferior function,
it’s the one that we are
always trying to avoid,
we’re always trying to repress
it because we just wanna do
introverted intuition all the time.
We just wanna perceive the
world through that lens
and
avoid,
jump over the extraverted sensing,
which in plain English means
we like to avoid doing things
in the physical, concrete world.
We just, we would rather not.
This is why we over-plan
’cause we’re just trying
to come up with shortcuts
to avoid extraverted sensing.
That’s what it is
and you know what, this over-reliance
on introverted intuition and
the constant avoidance of
extraverted sensing makes us afraid
of extraverted sensing, makes
us afraid of the objective,
concrete world, like
what is just around me,
I’m afraid of it because
I’ve been avoiding it.
The fear comes from knowing
that you’re repressing it
and that you’re not seeing it clearly
and that is just gonna sneak
up on you one day and get you,
it’s gonna overwhelm you,
it’s gonna swallow you up
with all the stuff that
you’ve been ignoring
and when it comes to implementing
these things in our lives,
these projects that
we’re trying to get done,
the stuff that we’re trying
to motivate ourselves to do,
we know, once we start
to get our hands dirty,
there’s gonna be this crush of details,
it’s just gonna come in and overwhelm us.
So when we get into these situations
where we started to follow
through on our plans
and we get this sudden wave of
details in the sensory
that we didn’t anticipate and
they’re just bogging us down,
rather than just deal with it,
the fear kicks in and we wanna
retreat and just go back to
planning again.
We just want to be like,
“Whoa, that didn’t work,
“that blew up in my face.
“Let me just see if I can go
back to the drawing board,
“if you will and over-plan some more,
“over over-plan and then I
can find a way around it,”
and the problem is it works sometimes.
That’s the kicker
and the killer.
It works some of the time when we go back
and we just over-plan
and then we get past it,
we’re like, hey, that was great.
Clearly, what happened was
I did the right thing there
and the extraverted sensing
is something to continue
to avoid because I can get away with it,
but here’s the problem,
sometimes it won’t.
Sometimes you’ll go back
to the drawing board,
you’ll plan some more
and then you’ll go back and
get your butt kicked again,
but it’s gonna be worse,
it’s gonna build up
and at some point, it will
make you just want to give up
on what you’re doing, on this project.
You’ll lose all motivation
because it’ll feel like you’re
banging your head against the wall.
It basically feels like
you have this great idea,
this ideal thing that
you’re trying to achieve,
but you’re getting mired in BS
and it’s all these details
in the physical world,
like you wanted to…
Like for example, you have
a business you wanna start
and you have this great idea,
you know exactly what
it’s gonna do for people,
how it’s gonna, like,
totally kill it out there
and make a lot of money,
but you didn’t anticipate
having to like make a website,
how do I do that?
Where do I sign up?
What’s the best place to go?
How much is it supposed to cost?
What do these things mean?
What’s a domain?
I don’t even know, do I go to GoDaddy?
You just start to get overwhelmed
by these stupid things.
It’s like I didn’t sign
up to make a website,
I signed up to make a business.
You know, I’m here to save the world,
I’m not here to figure out
what version of QuickBooks
I should sign up for.
And so, I mean, obviously,
I’m making it sound
kinda stupid, but you can
probably look at your own life
and see where you’ve
become suddenly bogged down
by unexpected details and maybe even quit
’cause it just seemed like too much.
So what you have to do to fight this,
hang on to your butts ’cause
you’re not gonna like it,
you have to accept responsibility for it.
You just gotta accept,
yes, once I start doing this,
a bunch of stupid BS is gonna come up
and guess who’s gonna
have to deal with it,
me, I’m ultimately responsible for it.
Now, you know, I’m talking
about business and stuff.
Of course, a lot of times in business,
you just delegate it
to someone else to do,
someone who is strong in that area,
but you’ve still got
to ultimately be like,
you know, if it all falls
through, it’s on me.
I’m the one who’s ultimately
taking responsibility for it.
When the things come up,
I have to deal with them.
I can’t just go back to planning
because I’m responsible for all of it
and I think that once you
take responsibility for it,
then rather than seeing it
as a stupid inconvenience
and obstacle in your way
that you shouldn’t have to deal with,
you’re like, no, this is
how I’m achieving my goals.
This is how I’m getting
closer to my dream,
is by doing all of these little things
as inconsequential as they
may seem in the moment
and it’s just a simple mindset change
and as soon as you do that,
it will add fuel to the
fires of your motivation
because you will get that
sense of forward motion.
Like I said before, one of the
biggest killers of motivation
is feeling like you’re stuck in place
and when you can turn it around
so that every little thing I
do, I sign up for my website,
boom.
That adds fuel to the fire.
It makes you feel more
motivated, I did something,
I’m moving closer to my goal.
It’s just a simple mindset
shift of taking responsibility
for the extraverted sensing.
Point three is a big one
and you’re not gonna like it.
I don’t like it.
I felt uncomfortable when I wrote it,
but to support this channel really quick,
let’s just take another
short commercial break.
We’ll be right back, get
on with number three.
Oh, hey, you’re back.
Let’s get on to number three.
You don’t trust yourself.
What Frank?
Why did you have to confront
me with the truth there?
You might not think of it in those terms,
but there’s this whole thing about having
extraverted feeling above
introverted thinking
that sort of makes a
person not really feel like
they can rely on themselves to
do things and make decisions.
Like I said, this might not be something
that’s consciously in your mind,
but it’s how you’re
operating if you in fact have
Fe, extraverted feeling, above
Ti, introverted thinking.
INFJs do this thing, not
just INFJ, but like basically
all IJs and EJs do this
thing where they’re like,
they seem to be bragging
about what they’re doing
in their life and the
plans they have and stuff
and it gets irritating,
but you know what?
It’s not like an ego thing.
It’s not them trying to like
build themselves up ’cause
they think they’re better
than everyone else.
Though it might seem like that,
what it really is, is
looking for validation.
They’re bragging about
what their plans are
and what they’re doing
because they want you to say,
“Wow, that sounds great.”
“Good job, good idea.
“That sounds like it
will work out perfectly.”
We need that kind of stuff
or we feel like we need it.
In a way, that’s what
extraverted feeling wants,
is people to say, “That idea
that you have, that’s good.”
And if we don’t get
that, we wither, we wilt.
We’re like, well, crap.
If other people aren’t telling me
that they like the ideas that I have,
suddenly, I’ve got to rely only on me
and I don’t like doing that.
I don’t feel like I should have to take on
the full responsibility
of making decisions.
I need to make sure
everyone else is on board.
Like yeah, I know what I wanna do.
I have this decision that I wanna make,
but first, everyone else
has got to tell me good job
or at the very least, I need to know
what everyone else’s opinion is
so I get a general feel for
on the scale of good to bad
how good or bad
is my
idea,
even if everyone else
isn’t unanimous in saying
good or bad, I can sort
of fill out where I fall.
You see what I mean?
Introverted thinking is the
subjective interior
decision making function.
So, when to a degree, like I
don’t wanna make it seem like
every little thing in life comes back to
the functions, but in some
ways they get touched.
Everything gets touched by functions.
Not everything is like a
function coming straight from it,
but when we decide I
wanna make a business,
I wanna write a book,
this is what works for me in my life,
that is, in many ways, coming from that
internal decision making process of
the introverted thinking
and we don’t like to rely just on that.
Like I said, we wanna get
a variety of opinions about
that Ti, that is basically what Fe is.
We wanna know the objective feelings
and feelings are values,
which is basically like
good or bad.
Do people like it?
Do they not like it?
We need to know.
That’s why the Fe people
are always asking people
a bunch of questions.
It’s irritating, we’re irritating.
We’re always like, we wanna
know what are people feeling?
We can’t know unless we ask.
So,
yeah and that’s because we need to know,
like how do we make decisions
unless we know what everyone
else thinks or feels.
Now to a degree, you can
do extraverted feeling
as an internal stimulation in your brain,
because it’s not like you
have amnesia and you don’t remember
what people have said in the past.
You know, you can take the temperature of
what everyone is feeling about stuff,
just by looking back on the past,
what they’ve said about previous
things that are similar,
you know what I mean?
And so in a way, you might
not have to bother people
to see how they feel
about what you wanna do
because you kind of know
how they would react
or what they’ve said in the
past about similar things.
I can’t say the word
similar correctly anymore
’cause I just made fun of people
for saying it incorrectly.
What a jerk.
The thing is when you have that internal
extraverted feeling, you
can motivate yourself easily
’cause you’re like, man, I
know people would be on board
if I asked them,
so I’m just gonna go ahead
with what I wanna do,
but sometimes you don’t always know
and that’s when the
motivation can get like,
sapped from you,
is when you don’t know
what people would feel,
how they would react.
So then you have to ask them and maybe
they don’t like the idea
or maybe they seem tepid.
Maybe they just don’t even respond
the way that you want them to respond
and that will throw you off
and drain the motivation from you.
Now, here’s the thing, people ask a lot
and you know, I do live
streams on the weekends,
people ask a lot of typology questions and
a big one that comes up regularly is
like the difference
between different types.
People ask the difference
between INFJ and INFP.
When it comes to this sort of thing,
this is a marked difference.
An INFP, if they have
something they wanna do,
they’ve made a decision
and then other people say,
“I don’t really like that,
“it doesn’t sound like a very good idea,”
the INFP might be a
little bit hurt by that,
but they’ll sort of just be like,
“Okay, well, I’m gonna do it anyway
“’cause that’s what I wanna do.”
Because INFPs have introverted feeling
as their dominant function.
They’re sort of just all in on that,
that if they like an idea, they’ll do it.
If they’re doing what they
like, they’ll keep doing it.
They don’t really care
what other people think
and in a way they repress
other people’s thoughts.
They’re like, this is
not my responsibility to
do what you think is a good idea.
INFJs are not like that.
They will, I mean, you
know, everyone is different
and INFJ can press past
negative feedback,
but they’re much more likely
to be deflated by that
if a bunch of people tell them that
they don’t like the ideas
that they’re putting forth.
They’ll be like, “All right,
well I’ll go forward with it,
“but I’ve gotta like tweak it now
“so that they’ll like it eventually
“or I’ve got to somehow
convince them to get on board,”
or, you know, “What can I do?
“I gotta have them tell me what I could do
“so that they theoretically
would like it,”
or maybe you’ll just give up, you know.
That’s a big difference
between those two types,
theoretically.
I mean, every one is different.
You see it play out in
different ways, but yeah.
What you’ve got to realize is that
it’s okay to tell other
people your plans and,
you know, your goals and your ideas
for what you’re gonna do,
but you have to realize,
whether it’s conscious or not,
the reason you’re doing that
is because you want
them to say, “Good job.”
You want validation
and that can trip you up ironically,
like you’re looking for
a source of motivation
through their validation,
they might not give it to you.
It could trip you up.
So, realize that, when you hear yourself
starting to talk about
what you wanna do.
Some people have even said
that even if they say,
“Good job,” ironically,
that can trip you up
because it activates
your brain in such a way
where it’s almost as
though you did the thing.
You know, if you say,
“Hey, I wanna write a book
“and it’s about this,”
and everyone says, “Wow, that’s great.”
You feel validated and so
then you don’t write the book
’cause you’re like, “Well,
“I don’t need to write the book.
“They liked the idea of it.”
Two totally different
ways that you can just
lose motivation because
of people’s reaction.
In a sneaky way also,
we wanna know what people think about it
and we want people to say, “Yeah,
“go ahead with what you wanna do anyway,”
so that when it falls apart,
we can go and point at them and say,
“Why did you tell me that man?
“Why’d you give me that bad advice?
“Why did you think it was a good idea
“when clearly it wasn’t?
“It failed.”
It’s like a way of us
avoiding responsibility
for the decision making.
It’s like, well, it wasn’t just me
saying it was a good idea,
it was everyone else.
Do you see (laughs)?
It’s so ridiculous, man.
Like, what are we doing?
So what you’ve got to do is realize
you can trust yourself, man.
You don’t need to know
what other people think,
you don’t need to get them on
board to do what you wanna do.
If you think that what
you want to take on,
whatever it is, whatever goal it is,
even if it’s as small as
cleaning out your closet
just like Eminem,
you’ve got to take
responsibility for that yourself.
Take it all on you.
I’m the guy making the decision here,
it’s my responsibility.
If it goes well, if it
doesn’t go well, it’s on me
and I can trust myself to
make the right decision
even if other people don’t like it,
even if I don’t know
what they would think,
even if they like it, I
can’t just stop there.
I’ve got to do it for me.
It might even feel wrong in a way because
the Fe people can feel really motivated,
especially when it’s
like charitable stuff,
like oh man, if I build
this house for this person,
they’ll be really happy.
That’ll be great.
So then when it turn…
And, you know, that’s a good thing.
That’s a good source of motivation,
making other people happy,
but then when it comes
to something we wanna do,
it can feel like we’re being selfish.
Like, this isn’t necessarily gonna help
a bunch of other people.
At the very least, that’s
why you want to get people
happy for you
if they like the idea,
so it feels really
wrong almost to be like,
I just wanna do this
for me
because I think it’s a good idea and
yeah, it feels like you’re
being a selfish jerk,
but you’re not.
That’s the way that personality plays into
a lot of things in life is that
you think something is
reality when it’s not,
when someone else of a
different type would say,
“What are you talking about?”
You’re just going after a goal.
You’re just living your life,
you’re doing what you wanna do
whereas we’re sitting over here thinking
but that’s selfish if I do
what I wanna do, you know
and you can find the
motivation in yourself
once you give yourself permission
to go forward with your
goals and what you wanna do
without the validation.
You can take responsibility for it
and be like yes, I can motivate myself,
I can draw the motivation
from doing it for me,
proving to myself that I can do it,
not doing it for someone else.
I appreciate you watching.
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and until next time,
stay cool and attractive.
