Yesterday, my 6 year old daughter’s teacher told us that my daughter R. has been acting up in class. Mostly, it’s just refusing to do the current class activities.

When did this happen? I thought everything was going fine. R. can read Harry Potter and recently used “discombobulated” in a sentence which excites me to no end. So she still has to count seven plus two on her fingers. I was good at math but I don’t think it’s that big a deal if she’s not up to speed with the other kids.

At home, I drop everything when I get off work and spend time with her and her sister equally. We play whatever they want. Mom helps R. with her math homework and R. is usually done with her reading homework already. R. is pretty well behaved for a 6 year old INFP who can’t sit still for one moment. My wife and I write that off to her free spirit personality. I figured everything was okay.

I think that INFPs are the worst at confusing Role and Identity because the idealistic part us wants our roles to be our identity. Everyone plays many roles in the life, but we only have one core identity.

In my daily life, I play several roles: father, husband, employee, blogger, friend, etc. Each of those roles requires a certain set of behaviors to be successful in that role. Also, those roles are transient. I haven’t always been a father and sometime in the future, my role as a son will pass away with my parents.

Our Identity or a better term, our Self, is a not so fleeting. We are who we are and I posit that we have always known who we are. Our Self is an amalgam of our values and beliefs. Our roles are an external manifestation of those values and beliefs.