I’m changing. Or at least, I’m trying.

Self-help guru Tony Robbins says that change happens in an instant. It’s not some long drawn out process. It happens the moment we decide. I choose to believe him.

People decide and then take action in that direction. Someone decides to stop drinking then they take action to go to AA. Someone decides to stop living paycheck-to-paycheck then they re-evaluate their spending habits. Change happens in an instant, but results from actions require time to come to fruition.

Time enough

For INFPs, time becomes the problem. How long does it take us to decide anything?

We ask ourselves endless questions. Is whatever I want to change as bad as I think or am I just overreacting? What will this mean to me afterward? It could take years before we reach the point where enough is enough and we make decision. It’s those years of inaction that we regret later, wondering why it took us so long.

Even after we decide and start taking action, we don’t allow enough time for results to appear. We’d like to think our life is nimble, easily picked up and moved, but lives lumber like freighter ships weighted by the regrets of our past and the relationships in our present. After we turn the wheel, it takes time for that ship to actually turn. After we take action, it takes time for things to change.

INFPs are terrible at delayed gratification. We want to enjoy things now. So when we do something and don’t see immediate results, we stop taking action.

Wherever you go, there you are

Two sayings are ever-present in my head:

• You can’t do the same things and expect a different result.
• Wherever you are in life is as far as you can go with what you currently know.

If someone wants to be more comfortable in social situations, sitting in the corner, not talking to anyone like before won’t produce a different result. If someone has had a string of bad relationships, going through the same decision process in choosing who to date is not going to fix that problem.

All the crappy things that happen in our lives are results of something we do or don’t do. I drink way too much soda. I should stop, but I don’t. That’s where the second saying comes in. Where I am is as far as I can get with what I currently know. The only fix is to know more.

All the crappy people people in our lives is because we made a bad decision. Crappy people were crappy people before we met them and allowed them into our lives. We made a decision to have a relationship (friends, acquaintances, business partners, etc.) with these people. We can’t fix crappy people. We can only make better decisions.

Nothing quite like the feel of something new

Change would be easier for INFPs without the diametrically opposed forces pulling us in opposite directions. In one direction is our need for the familiar, for the dependable like friends, sources of income or a good book. In the other direction is our dislike of the routine like repetition at a job and rehashing the same conversations with friends.

To compensate we embrace the different, but we avoid the new. If we write, we start working on a different story. We don’t decide to paint our idea. If we enjoy being with friends, we convince those same friends to try different activities. We don’t find brand new people because that would be unfamiliar.

Have you noticed that you and your friends use the same catch phrases? When we spend enough time with someone, we end up picking up the same vocabulary. We also end up picking up the same ideas. Same causes mean same results.

For me, new means brand new. New is something for which I have no reference. New means an adjustment period where I suck at whatever is new. This adjustment period forces me to grow.

My process

I call this period molting. As INFPs, the hard armor we’ve built around ourselves with our ideals and beliefs to protect us from the world, does not fit anymore. We feel constricted. As we begin to re-evaluate those beliefs, it feels like shedding old skin. As with all molting creatures, we become short-tempered and irritable.

INFPs are extremely vulnerable during this stage. In order to become something new, we’ve had to let go of the ideas and ideals of what we once were. Everything we used to protect ourselves is now suspect and until we rebuild a new layer of protection, we become extra sensitive to the outside world.

The first thing I do is I stop everything that I do regularly if possible. It’s the same process as figuring out food allergies. If someone knows they’re not feeling 100% and suspects their diet, they go through a cleanse and then reintroduce foods one at a time. It’s the same way with my change process.

I do my cleanse by eliminating or restricting every activity and outside influence for a few weeks. For example, every week I go club dancing. I have since I was 21 because it keeps me sane. I haven’t gone in a month. I’ve also haven’t seen my friends either.

During molting, I monitor to see if symptoms subside. Phase 1 of molting, is about figuring out what I don’t want. Many things I do are external distractions, enjoyable distractions but they help me avoid things in my life that I don’t like. If I pause those distractions, the stuff I don’t like becomes more glaring so I have to pay attention.

After some time, I add one thing back. I started dancing again, but not at the clubs. I went to learn Blues Dancing instead. It’s not brand new, but different enough that I’m uncomfortable. Monday, I had a late night diner hangout with a new friend who I haven’t seen in weeks.

Everything I add back into my life can’t be too familiar or else I end up the same me as before. It’s also at this point I go through my 20/80 process to figure out what to get rid of. During Phase 1, I move away from stuff I don’t like. Phase 2 is where I set new goals and move towards something. I’ll have to cover that in a different post.

Last thought

My friends ask where I’ve been and I answer with a non-committal “I’ve just been busy.” They mistake it for recharging and I let them. I’m not recharging, I’m rebuilding and some of them might end up with smaller roles in my life when I’m done.

Rainer Maria Rilke in his novel The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge wrote:

What’s the use of telling anyone that I am changing? If I am changing, then surely I am no longer the person I was, and if I am something else than heretofore, then it is clear that I have no acquaintances. And to strange people, to people who do not know me, I cannot possibly write.

This, of course, was before the internet so blogs don’t count.

I love the New Year. It’s my favorite day on the calendar. It’s the day where I can chalk up last year as a loss without guilt and try again. I love New Year’s resolutions. I like my yearly deadline and the whooshing sound it makes when it goes flying by. This year, I’m doing things a little differently for my resolutions.

1. Realize I can’t solve all my problems by myself

People make resolutions to fix problems. I want to eat healthier so that must mean my current diet is causing some type of problem or else I wouldn’t be resolving to eat more green stuff (healthy green, not moldy green).

All those problems I had a week ago. Still there. Resolutions aren’t going to magically give me the answer.

Don’t get me wrong. I love problems. It’s my way of evaluating progress. At no point in my life will all my problems go away. Progress in life is about going from one set of problems to a better set of problems.

Twenty years ago, my problems usually centered around finding a way to buy alcohol while I was too young. These days, my problems center around finding a way to retire before I’m too old. For me, that’s a better problem to have.

So about all those problems I had a week ago. They’re still there. I’d solve them if I could, but I can’t, not with what I currently know. That means I have to look outside myself for answers which INFPs are loathe to do. INFPs feel that if we think about something hard enough, something will click and we’ll come up with that amazing answer. So how’d that work for me last year?

It’s definitely time to do something new.

2. Take a small step forward each day

I don’t find many people who’s life is complete crap. Some parts are good. Some parts could be better. Everyone has to balance relationships, finance, personal development, career, health, family and more. Not all of those are going to be completely awesome all at once and all the time.

Resolutions are pretty overwhelming. They’re overwhelming because resolutions require a change in habits. Habits take about 45 continuous days to kick in. If there’s one habit I need to form first is to take one action each day that gets me forward. All the other habits I want will come easier after that.

3. Avoid long-term unhappiness over gaining short-term happiness

INFPs are amazing at doing things that make them happy in the short-term. I would say we’re better at that than any other MBTI type. The problem is that the extra cookie, the additional charge on the credit card, the call we’ve put off again is that one step back for every two steps forward we make.

The excuse we INFPs use is that we want to be happy now while we can still enjoy it, not later. Who knows what’s goign to happen tomorrow, right? I love that extra cookie and it makes me happy now. But it’s not the only thing that would make me happy now.

I need to do the things that make me happy now, but also won’t make me unhappy in the long-term.

4. Stop thinking about me

I’m the first to admit that INFPs are a bit self-involved. We’re a work in progress that we’re always working on. For me, the problem is that if I concentrate on something for too long, I lose perspective. It’s the can’t-see-the-forest-from-the-trees problem.

Also, I’m usually happiest helping others in little ways. INFP relationship rule 1 is you can’t fix other people’s problems. However, it’s nice to make their journey through life a little be bit easier.

I am so screwed.

Let’s do the INFP thing and begin at a seemingly unrelated topic: fractals and complex systems.

Fractals have a property called self-similarity which means that if you just looked at part of the fractal, that part would look roughly similar to the whole.

Complex systems have self-similarity. A person’s life is one of those complex systems where interconnected behavior act upon each other to produce various outcomes. Say you’re an early riser. That behavior produces a different set of outcomes than if you were a night person. Different opportunities present themselves. Different actions are taken. Different results are produced.

Self-similar properties get observed when you take the entire span of a person’s life and map the ups and down and sideways of that life. That pattern of a lifetime would look very similar to an hour of a person’s life which would be similar to a day which would look similar to a week or a year.

On an average day, I wake up and go to work. It takes me some time to get into the swing of things so I do the easy stuff first. Answer emails. Respond to calls. Finish up the boring paper trail leftover to do from the previous project. Then I start coding which is my most important task as a programmer because it produces tangible results. Around 3pm or so I start losing focus because of things that have come up.

Calls have been ignored, emails have gone unanswer and tasks for other team members are deferred because I don’t want to break my focus on the task at hand. Those things become urgent around 3 because I need to start getting ready for tomorrow.

Around 4pm, I’m “caught up” on the miscellaneous or as caught up as I will ever be. I start planning on how I will leave things. I figure out what needs to be done and get everything in a place where the next person can pick it up if I got hit by a bus.

Then I go home and though I wouldn’t mind time to myself, I have a family who needs me. Sometimes I can sneak a few minutes for myself. At 9pm, I put everyone to bed and then the rest of the time is mine. I stay up as late as I can because when I wake up tomorrow, my time won’t be mine own anymore.

Compare that with my life so far. I think I spent the first 19 years of my life just easing in, trying to get my bearings. I didn’t start doing the real work on my life, ie job, family, home until my mid-20s. Right now, I’m heading into 40 and it seems my time is largely devoted to other people’s wants and needs because they need me.

So the question is: how long before everyone goes to bed so I can have my time? Will I be 50 before I start my novel? Will I be 60 before I have to time to just figure out what I want? If that’s how it is, I am so screwed.

Okay, that’s the stick. Here’s the carrot.

It’s called emergent behavior.

In this complex system called life, behavior is also self-similar. In other words, how we do anything is how we do everything.

If a person waits to the last second to finish cleaning up their room, that same person will wait to the last second to finish cleaning up their life. The go-getters who jump into their morning are the same people who jump into their new job, new college life, new marriage and so on.

So what if you’re the type of INFP that can’t figure out what you want to do for a job let alone what you’re going to do for the rest of your life? What if you’ve tried different things to find out later that those things didn’t make you as happy as you idealized them to be? Is your entire life going to be that self-similar pattern where on your deathbed you realize that the life you’ve lived really didn’t make you as happy as you thought you would be?

Take this blog for example. I get all excited about this blog because it’s new. I launch and write a few things in a very short time. Then I can’t figure out what I want to say next so I take a break. Now that I have an idea, I’m writing again. So is that my life? I go from dilettante to middle-class family man in a relatively short amount of time. I haven’t be able to figure what’s next so I’ve taken a break from accomplishing stuff. I worry that this is a bad pattern I can’t break from.

What the theory of emergence says is that complex systems arise from simple interactions. Complex behaviors and patterns start from simple behaviors. Also, the complex behaviors that do arise can’t predicted examining the simple behaviors. You can’t predict the honeycomb by looking at just the drone bee.

Simple behaviors like saving one quarter a day or meeting one new person a day creates far reaching results that can’t be predicted because from those simple behaviors will cause other behaviors to emerge. Basically, it really does come down to you can’t do the same thing an expect a different result.

I’m trying to change my life in a big way because I’m bored, exhausted, pensive, unexcited, all of the above. Most of all, I’m really comfortable which is more draining for me as an INFP than I had imagined when I was young and struggling.

I’m starting small. I’m trying to focus on this blog even though I want to know where it leads before I put so much of myself into it.

I think if any personality type is capable of great change it’s INFP. Just start small. I am.

Ready. Go.

Don’t you wish life could be more like that?  Why not?  So I’m calling a do-over for this blog.

When doing something new, like blogging,  I’m the type of person who doesn’t really know if I’m doing it right, but I definitely know when I’m doing it wrong.  It’s that intuitive part of being an INFP that gives me a nagging feeling in the back of my head that something isn’t quite right.

I’ve been reading about blogging (geeky, but why re-invent the wheel) and I’m learning alot.

Blogging is like sex.  Too many words is a turn off unless the phrase “do that some more” is involved in some way.  Also goats are bad.  If it involves goats, you’re probably doing it wrong.  So no blogging about goats.

Hope you stay tuned.  I’ll be adding the shiny later after I redesign the blog (hopefully not on an INFP schedule).

I’ll be writing posts more often.  Please comment.  Comments make me happy.  Comments with the words “do that some more” make me “happy”.  Just sayin’.