Role vs Identity

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 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.

For some, they’ve chosen to make their primary role their identity.  Ask any random person the question, “what do you do?” and more than likely the answer will be their role as a income earner, i.e. I’m a maintenance engineer or I own my own business.  The danger in closely identifying your Identity/Self with your roles is that roles can be taken away.  Your role as an athlete might be arbitrarily taken away by a drunk driver.  Your role as a employee might be downsized because of the economy.  If we make our Roles our Identity, what happens to us if those roles are suddenly taken away?  We end up “losing” ourselves.

Also, making Role as Identity becomes a huge issue for INFPs because INFPs project their ideal/future roles into their Identity.  However, some roles are not readily available.  Not everyone can be a bestselling author or an international man/woman of mystery.  So what happens when that role we’ve so long identified with doesn’t come to fruition?  We end up feeling like failures.

Our roles are not our identity, and more importantly failure in a role is not failure of Self.  Sometimes, I’m not such a great dad.  Other days, I can’t seem to solve a problem at work and I fail as an employee. Just because we fail in a role, doesn’t mean we are a failure as a person.  How can a person fail at being who they are?  We only fail at achieving results in roles.

As we go from role to role in our daily life, we find that we have more success with some roles than others.  Also, some roles seem easier to play than others.  Why is this?

Each role requires certain behaviors, some of which may be against the INFP type preference. To be a successful employee for most jobs, we can’t show up anytime we want.  INFPs will show up on time if they have to.  INFPs can and will do many things against type preference if that role requires them to and if success in that role is important to them.

Sometimes for an INFP, certain objectives feel like two steps forward one step back because the role is so against preference that our natural tendencies sabotage the behaviors required for success.  At other times, a role seems easy because behaviors for success are closer our INFP preferences.

I think it’s Role-Identity confusion that is the main source of different results when a person takes the MBTI or its many variants multiple times. Most of these online variants are self-administered and don’t take into account that people will answer according to which ever role is dominant at the time.  I think that’s why so many people seem to hover between letters and cannot figure out if they’re J or P, or F or T.

Take for example question 69 of the Keirsey temperament sorter.  Do you prefer the (a) planned event (b) unplanned event?

For myself, in the role of the father, I prefer the planned event. My unplanned events with my young children, usually ends with bored kids getting into mischief.  In my role as a friend, I prefer the unplanned event. I’d rather go over to a friend’s place and hangout.  This is where self-directed, forced questions assessments fail because some questions leave test-takers scratching their head thinking, “well I do both.”

The inevitable reply from test-givers is “Which do you prefer more?” in regards to planned/unplanned events.  What I hear is: which do you prefer to be more successful as:  your role as a father or your role friend?  The results end up being skewed unless the test-taker can separate their Role from their Identity.

So if Role is an outward manifestation of Identity, wouldn’t answering those questions as any role give an accurate result?  I don’t think anyone wants to be a failure in any of their chosen roles.  So we end up adopting behaviors outside our preferences to be successful. The MBTI and variants assess behavior not the reasons behind those behaviors.  It doesn’t measure our want or need to be successful in a particular role.

Also, when we answer a personality inventory, we take on the role of test-taker.  For an INFP, we want our results to show our Ideal Self, to reassure and reinforce the idea that we are better than our current behaviors. Generally, people have a natural tendency to want to look good.  There is no lie scale built into any of these assessments so the results don’t take into account Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the observer effect.  The act of measuring affects the results of what’s being measured.

So how does one really know if they’re an INFP?  INFPs have a reason for being INFPs.  Some INFPs answer questionnaires, some just read the descriptions but every one of us has a reason as to why we decided to see ourselves as INFP.  For INFPs, the reason is everything.