INTJs what does introverted intuition mean to you?

My intuition has been quite strong my entire life, I just didn’t realize it, I was interpreting what I was feeling based on what older folks who wanted control were telling me about myself.

As I grew older, I became much more introverted. To be alone with my thoughts. To learn why I feel things the way I do.

Intuition is your survival instinct.

However, in a world where everyone lives to be 100, most people don’t need to heed their intuition to survive. Ever.

Your intuition is anxiety. Anxiety is good. Anxiety means you need to move away from that situation. If you let someone else decipher your anxiety, they’ll make you feel like it’s just you; NEVER give another human the opportunity to TELL you what you’re feeling. You can never come back from that — they have just assumed control of your feelings and will take advantage of that when the time is right. They might tell you that you have depression so they can tell the boss they helped you work out your depression and get credit for something that was never there. Or they might discredit anything you ever say again because you’re emotionally unstable thus prolonging the anxiety.

Intuition isn’t meant to be discussed with others. Since we are all animals, apex predators, intuition must be strongest in those most capable of surviving. You don’t see animals discuss with each other before they run away from something scary — they just start running because they want to survive.

This world creates problems so it can create solutions, remember that.

Not everyone put in charge of you is there to help you. On a micro scale concerning individual interactions, you have most likely encountered individuals whom act illogically over and over prolonging the issue at hand and asking for help over and over or a boss constantly changing the rules once you’ve gotten the current system down pat.

When there is a clear divergence between logic and emotion, and the edge begins to rise in your chest, remove yourself from the situation. Don’t discuss it with others.

Know Who You Are – Sensing and Intuition

Today we’re going to be looking at the second letter in your type, represented by an “S” for “Sensing” or an “N” for “iNtuition” (the letter “I” was already taken by Introversion). This is a fascinating topic, but it can also be a strangely complicated one to understand, so let’s dive in and see what we’re able to do with it.

Sensing and intuition, in the most basic terms, have to do with how you take in information. As their names imply, sensors take in information through their senses, and intuitives take in information through their intuition. Buuuut, those are just words. What we really need…are stick figures.

Essentially, a sensor is doing this:

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Sensors use their five senses to take in information about the world around them. They start with the details and work towards the big picture. They are interested in what things are, and they use the information they gather to build on knowledge they already have. They try to make new information fit into their existing framework of understanding, like a new piece fitting into a partially-finished puzzle. They value what has worked in the past and they can sometimes be resistant to change.

Meanwhile, intuitives do something more like this:

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Intuitives are out-of-the-box thinkers who use their intuition to think more about what something could be. Of course intuitives use their five senses as well, because our bodies and brains are all designed to do that, but they’re interested in more than just what their senses tell them. They start with the big picture and work back to the details. They have more of a future orientation, and so as they take in new information they use it to shine a light on where they’re headed. They live in a world of possibilities and tend to embrace change.

This impacts so many of our conversations. There are going to be plenty of times that you may just look at another person and wonder if the two of you are even living on the same planet, because you’re taking in the same information but evaluating it differently. You may look at a puppy and call it an adorable gift to the world and the other person looks at it and calls it a hairy slobbery nuisance. You’re both looking at the same thing at the same time in the same place, and yet you’re seeing two different things.

Granted, in this puppy example there are a great many other factors that could contribute to these opinions. Maybe you never had a puppy growing up and always wished you had. Maybe the other person had an abundance of puppies and they were out of control and pooped everywhere and slobbered on everything and barked all night long. Those would be good and legitimate reasons to have those respective opinions.

But maybe neither of you have any experience to speak of when it comes to puppies. Or maybe you have the exact same experiences, and you’re still arriving at those different conclusions. An intuitive type may see the adorableness of the puppy, and think about dogs being man’s best friend, and remember how much they loved reading Where the Red Fern Grows, and see forward to all the happiness and companionship a puppy will provide. A sensing type may see and smell and hear and feel the current sloppiness and noisiness of the puppy and think about all the times they’ve visited houses with dog hair on the furniture and dog smell in the air and dog feet excitedly pawing at everyone, and they just see a mess they don’t want to deal with.

The point of the puppy example is simply that two people can look at the same thing and call it different things, without any dishonesty involved. The puppy is adorable. The puppy is a slobbery nuisance. Both of those perceptions are true. In casual conversation that’s not a big deal, but when something important is being discussed, those differences in perception can cause serious conflict. It’s where that feeling of speaking two different languages comes from, and why it’s so important to learn to speak the other person’s language, and when that is still not helping, to respectfully agree to disagree.

What does this look like in your businesses and friendships and families? What are the practical implications of understanding this?

 

SOME THOUGHTS FOR SENSORS:

Not all change is bad. Don’t fear it, don’t be a victim of it, don’t assume those who encourage it are out to get you. Help shape it, and also ask the hard questions about whether a change is good or bad. If you’re in a group of intuitives, who tend to be dreamers, it’s important for your voice to be heard.

Learn to trust the gut instincts of the intuitives in you life. There are exceptions to this rule, but most of them are more logical than you may realize. Hearing an intuitive say “I just really think this is going to work” may not instill much confidence in you. But if you were to press them on this point, most have an underlying logical process that is causing them to make statements like that. Because of their future orientation, they themselves may have a hard time pausing to evaluate what that logical process is, but it’s usually there. So learn to trust them, and if you’re still struggling with that, ask them to share their process. Open up good dialogue between you and the intuitives in your life.

Give yourself opportunities to dream. Find what inspires you, whether it’s books or music or nature or traveling, and take hold of that inspiration. Use it to pursue change that excites you.

But also accept how you’re wired. If you’re a sensor, you’re not going to be the person exploding with ideas at blue-sky brainstorming sessions, so try not to feel frustrated when that’s not you.

Also, we live in a world that seems to value a forward-thinking mentality, but the reality is that the majority of people are sensors (around 70%), so don’t feel marginalized when marketing and media campaigns are all telling you to embrace with open arms the latest and greatest things.

And in your business, take your wiring into account when you’re considering your branding and your clientele. If you’re a sensor, you may very well want to run a business that has more of a classic feel, or that at least incorporates elements of familiarity. Branding that is super hip or unusual or edgy is probably not going to sit right with you, and if your personality is at odds with your branding, that can feel inauthentic and prevent you from really coming alive in your work.

 

SOME THOUGHTS FOR INTUITIVES:

Not all change is good, either! Keep dreaming and trailblazing, but avoid change for change’s sake. If you’re always pursuing change, even when it’s unnecessary, you may begin to undermine your influence.

Recognize that the sensors in your life may feel the need for you to prove yourself, at least where those gut instincts are concerned. Because there are plenty of people who have “bad” gut instincts, going on that alone probably won’t be enough for most sensors, at least early in your relationship with them. But as they repeatedly see those instincts pan out, trust will come.

In the meantime, be willing to focus on the details. Help the sensors in your life embrace change by making the way forward more clear. You can do this by drawing attention to times that similar ideas have worked in the past, or by explaining contingency plans, or by mapping out what the first few steps towards the goal may be.

All that being said, please keep your ideas coming. Intuitives are visionaries, and because change often is necessary, we need intuitives to cheerfully and competently lead the way forward. So keep dreaming and innovating and working hard to make things better.

Definitely keep your wiring in mind in your branding and how your run your business. If you value being unique or original or contemporary or cutting edge, you want your clients to know that about you.

 

SOME THOUGHTS FOR EVERYONE:

A classic bride who wants a traditional wedding and lots of classy, subdued portraits is going to be looking for one kind of photographer, and a geek chic bride who’s having her wedding in a re-purposed warehouse and doesn’t want a single posed photo is going to be looking for another kind of photographer altogether. There’s a good chance that first bride needs a photographer who’s a sensor who values tradition and history, and the second one needs a photographer who’s an intuitive who values originality and thinking outside the box. Photographers who try to cater to both kinds of brides aren’t doing themselves or their clients any favors. Learn what your style is and who you click with, because you will do better work when you are playing to your strengths.

And remember: When it comes to sensing and intuition, neither is better. Just like we talked about with introversion and extraversion, the world needs both. As you learn to understand your own wiring better, recognize that you are surrounded by people who truly are wired in the opposite way. If you fear change, recognize that there are those who truly love it. If you hate doing what’s been done before, realize that there are those who thrive on doing what’s been done before. If you look at a flower and see the petals and leaves, know that there are those who see the garden the flower came from. Conflict will arise on this point, but if we’re really trying to understand each other more accurately, then we can help each other see the world in deeper, richer, better ways.

Christians, Take The Alt-Right Seriously

the alt-right appealed to the young men — all of whom are white, conservative, and Evangelical — because it’s daring, and because the spirituality of megachurch Evangelicalism (in the kid’s view) is insipid. There was nothing much to inspire or to hold them. The alt-right fake “gospel” offered them an easy explanation of why they felt alienated and powerless, provided them with an enemy, and stoked their rage.

..It is anti-Christian, and it has strong arguments to make — not “strong” in the sense of “persuasive” (Rose is very much against the alt-right), but not arguments that can be easily dismissed with cries of “bigotbigotbigot!”

.. The alt-right is not stupid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridiculous. They are serious. To appreciate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its presence on social media, where its obnoxious use of insult, obscenity, and racism has earned it a reputation for moral idiocy. The reputation is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and personal attacks are arguments of genuine power and expanding appeal. As political scientist George Hawley conceded in a recent study, “Everything we have seen over the past year suggests that the alt-right will be around for the foreseeable future.”

.. The alt-right is anti-Christian. Not by implication or insinuation, but by confession. Its leading thinkers flaunt their rejection of Christianity and their desire to convert believers away from it. Greg Johnson, an influential theorist with a doctorate in philosophy from Catholic University of America, argues that “Christianity is one of the main causes of white decline” and a “necessary condition of white racial suicide.”

..“Like acid, Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood,” writes Gregory Hood, one of the website’s most talented essayists. It is “the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.”

.. Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not rooted in the secular Enlightenment, nor is it irreligious. Far from it. Read deeply in their sources—and make no mistake, the alt-right has an intellectual tradition—and you will discover a movement that takes Christian thought and culture seriously. It is a conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary. Against Christianity it makes two related charges.

Beginning with the claim that Europe effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—it argues that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous to the West. A major work of alt-right history opens with a widely echoed claim: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

.. Nietzsche got there first, of course — and he was not wrong about Christianity being a religion that exalts the meek.

.. Oswald Spengler’s Decline Of The West as a foundational text of the alt-right:

If Spengler’s theology is tendentious, his portrait of Western identity is deceptively powerful. To a young man lacking a strong identity he says, “This heroic culture is your inheritance, and yours alone. You stand in a line of men who have attained the highest excellences and freely endured the hardest challenges. Albert the Great, Cortés, Newton, Goethe, the Wright brothers all carry this daring spirit, and so do you.”

.. The juxtaposition was comic, just as it is comic to think about an obese, slovenly white guy vaping in front of his TV wearing a t-shirt sporting an image of, I dunno, Charlemagne, and a slogan claiming to be part of his lineage.

.. someone who is poor and at the bottom of the social hierarchy would find it consoling to identify with a hero — specifically, a racialized hero

.. There is no better introduction to alt-right theory than [Alain de Benoist’s] 1981 work On Being a Pagan. Its tone is serene, but its message is militant. Benoist argues that the West must choose between two warring visions of human life:

  1. biblical monotheism and
  2. paganism.

Benoist is a modern-day Celsus. Like his second-century predecessor, he writes to reawaken Europeans to their ancient faith. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.” Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal. “Man shares in the divine every time he surpasses himself,” Benoist writes, “every time he attains the boundaries of his best and strongest aspects.”

.. Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient.

..  He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. 

Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”

.. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures. Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.”

.. its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.”

.. Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.

.. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own.

.. “Christianity provides an identity that is above or before racial and ethnic identity,” Richard Spencer complains. “It’s not like other religions that come out of a folk spirit.

.. invoking race as an emergency replacement for our fraying civic bonds. It is not alone; identity politics on the left is a response to the same erosion of belonging.

.. The alt-right is anti-Christian. But you cannot effectively fight the alt-right with progressive pieties and outrage. Nor can you effectively resist it with conventional conservative pieties, ones that do not address the crises that the alt-right is responding to

.. Richard Spencer is evil, but he is not stupid.

.. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large.

.. Conventional conservatism is doing nothing, or nothing effective, to resist this tyranny. Do you know who does stand up to it, unapologetically? The alt-right. Andrew Sullivan’s piece is not about the alt-right, but I see both him and Matthew Rose sounding a very similar alarm. Pay attention; this is serious.

.. You too, conventional liberals: your own acceptance and promotion of illiberal, racialist ideology under the guise of “social justice” is calling up these demons on the Right. The best way you can fight the alt-right is to fight the SJWs, whose militancy, and whose effective militancy, can only make the alt-right stronger.