I continue to irritate my dad over not knowing what I want to be when I “grow up”. I only recently hit on the notion of the was just a means to support the habits, but I didn’t want a career to be defined by. Cool

Here’s practical advice which you may choose to ignore. Your wife wants to go out and do something fun because there’s value that she has that’s currently not being met. You don’t have enough space and alone time because there’s some value that’s not being met (which I think is Freedom).

So here’s the steps:

1. Have you and your wife separately write down your dream list of everything you want to have and do. (If you don’t know remember to want something passionately like I did then the problem runs a bit deeper and requires a whole post)
2. From your dream list, extract the values. Write which values attaining that dream will meets. For example, if one of your dream list is travel to Africa, the value behind that is probably Adventure.
3. Figure out your top 3 values. It’s usually what values show up the most often.
4. Currently, the way you’re living probably isn’t meeting yours or your wife’s values.
5. Next brainstorm together what it would take to meet those values in a small way right now.

When your values are met, you’ll discover you won’t need as much alone time as you need now and your wife won’t want to spend all your time together.

Also, you must consider this. You married a healthy capable woman. You are not responsible for her happiness. She is not responsible for yours. In the long run, you can’t make her happy and she can’t make you happy, but you can work together to figure out to meet your own needs.

Thanks for reading my blog.

It’s been interesting meeting INFPs over the last 20 years and seeing how they live and how different their lives are from each other. It seems we start a little lost in our late teens and early 20′s but then we come into our own as we get older and and up living happy and fulfilling lives. It just seems to take a little longer.

As you say with introversion, intuition and perceiving preferences getting in the way it is amazing that we manage to decide to get out of bed in the morning!

Actually is that an INFP thing – sometimes I lay in bed wrapped up in the comfort of my own thoughts and the idea of getting up and having to deal with the outside world seems pointless!

This is such an amazing resource you have built up for the often ignored introverts in the world. In the US I remember a study showing that 75% are extroverts. In the UK I think it is a bit more balanced (60/40 perhaps)

This post reminds me of a metaphor I use for people who are perfectionists. The Navaho Indians always left a knot in the wonderful rugs they weaved. They did this so that the gods would not be angered and think that the weaver was trying to be a god. It is a story about what is important and what is not! Having said this the beauty in nature is often created by small imperfections rather than perfection.

Anyway I am rambling on in my INFP way although I will say that you are not always introverted. We can still function in a world designed by and for extroverts. However introverts become very tired under the pressure to be interesting and dealing with all the ‘noise’ out there. We have to retreat into ourselves to regain energy.

I am glad I have found your blog and that this niche subject is being taken notice of. My realisation recently is that I have a port folio life. Since leaving a big corporate 10 years ago to start my own business I decided that I didn’t want to separate work and life. I just do different things which form the whole of my life. Music, personal developent, Reiki, Ki Aikido, coaching, facilitation, mediation etc etc. Is that an INFP strategy for survival I wonder?

I will enjoy exploring your INFP world. I wonder if it is as crazy as mine.

Best wishes

Andy

I like your mention of starving on a diet of potential. I’ve felt that way a lot in my life, you’ve said it perfectly.

Part of this feeling has been related to circumstances (particularly limitations as a child) which didn’t seem to allow opportunities to live out my inner ideals. One of the worst times for me was when I was going to a school that had uniforms, so I wasn’t able to wear the old-fashioned styles that felt like “Me”. That’s just a small way I currently live out my ideals – I learned to sew and make many of my own clothes now. I remember also feeling as a child that all the energy and time I poured into being a perfect student, could have, in the long run, been better spent developing my other skills which weren’t required subjects in school, but which I now look to to provide both my living and the persuit of my ultimate goals. I can’t help wonder how much closer I’d be to reaching them now if I’d been able to go to schools with more specialized classes, or had been homeschooled in a more rural setting where I could have been exposed to non-city life and therefore soaked up more know-how for my ideal life.

I think this may be an issue for a lot of Idealists which can lend to depression – feeling that because of circumstances beyond their control from the time they were born they have been unable to live the kind of life they ‘idealize’. One of my ideals was to have a life-long friend best friend, but when the first friend I’d ever made who was closest to me throughout childhood moved across the country in 6th grade that ideal was lost – and there was nothing I could do about it. That was a hard thing to reconcile myself to. I did, however, realise at that time that deep long-term friendship was one of my values and I understood why her moving was so devestating even though I had other friends. I’ve used that understanding of myself to help me choose friends, and to motivate me to keep in contact with people and keep feeding friendships that could potentially die out if I didn’t take the effort to invest in them.

Something I’ve felt happen in myself is that my action switch has gotten a little rusty. I think this can happen during childhood (or other times) when most of our decisions are made for us by someone else. When we are busy fullfilling duties to others (in my case it felt like it was always school) we quell the urges we have to do actions that are internally motivated. The way we deal with our ideas and dreams gets set on automatic ‘backburner’ mode, something for a mythical future time when we won’t have our actions regulated and our time managed by outside forces. After a while, I think that inner motivation can give up and just stop firing. And when we stop feeling or being aware of those inner urges or “Inspiration” we can feel like we’ve lost ourselves and don’t even know where to look anymore. Then, when we try to do things on our own we have trouble finding our direction and motivation. So we may just let ourselves get swallowed up by going through the motions suggested to us by others – but it’s never fullfilling.

Stoping to take a look at what You really want to do is really important! Examining why you want something is especially important when your’e not sure of what exactly you want to do. It’s also important to remember that, in essence, the future is now – every ‘tomorrow’ will be experienced as ‘today.’ So we can’t just wait for the mythical future we idealise to suddenly come to us after letting it brew on the backburner for years. Writing down our goals, I think, can help bring that idealised future onto today’s plate for us, helping us to think about the steps in between. Unlike our thoughts which can make pretty big leaps, our outter lives still need the step by step, moment by moment process to get somewhere. Although we prize our dreams, dreaming alone can’t give us the inner-outer life congruency which we need.

It seems to me that we have three (or even four) traits that can encourage not acting on the ideas and goals that we have.
- Introversion -not liking the interaction necessary to make the introductions or connections we need to be able to do some of the steps toward our goals
- Intuition -prefering to contemplate things over persuing experience & action, which makes us less likely to ‘realise’ the things in our heads, and may leave us without the physical skills we need to reach our goals (I think a lot about stuff I’d Like to learn, heh)
- Perceiving -which keeps waiting around before making a decision and moving forward because maybe we’re missing a better option – often we wait in vain.
And just to add in an extra boost we don’t have the strong ‘logical’ Thinker voice in our heads reminding us that the only way we’re going to get those castles in the sky is to endure some personal discomfort and do what we don’t feel like doing.
It seems like we have a quadruple whammy when it comes to trying to get off our butts, as the saying goes. I think we are probably most likely to know ourselves well, and to be very comfortable living mostly in our minds – thus we have difficulty getting motivated enough to take the actions needed to make our outer lives live up to our visions.

(wow I am so long-winded! sorry for that lol!) ^^;