Getting a New Perspective on my INTJ Posts

There’s a little bit of a language warning in this post, if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing.

Myers-Briggs and being an INTJ are by far my most popular blog topics, and the most fun to write. There are occasional criticisms–I’m too wordy for an INTJ, I come off as arrogant (a common criticism of INTJs, I can’t resist pointing out), and I seem to portray myself as faultless.

Plot twist: Just like 99.9% of humanity, I am actually highly insecure and deeply imperfect!

Sometimes I get called out because my posts like How Not to Be Hated by an INTJ read like an overly complicated to-do list that puts an impossible burden on non-INTJs. I seem to demand endless concessions, offering none. Even though that wasn’t my intention, I kind of understood where they were coming from. And now, I think I get it even more.

One of my definitely-not-an-INTJ coworkers (not naming names but you totally know who you are and yeah I assume you’re reading this at some point) recently took a personality test geared toward people in leadership roles. The results were highly accurate and detailed, providing various lists of strengths, weaknesses, ingredients for an ideal job, and suggestions for how coworkers should treat him.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading and discussing/laughing at the test results among our coworkers. But when reading tips for how other people should treat him, I felt exhausted. The advice made sense, and the results were accurate, but there was so much of it: give criticism (if you must) only a certain way, help prevent boredom, don’t say “this is how we’ve always done it,” provide creative freedom, don’t do this if you want that to happen, use that approach but not this one, be aware of your language and tone and timing when making suggestions and asking questions, etc. etc. etc. I’m sure it was more aspirational and less 100% realistic–after all, that’s how my own “how to deal with an INTJ” posts are intended–but it did seem overwhelming! I was tempted to laugh it off and say, “You’re asking for too many accommodations from other people. How are we supposed to remember all this????”

And then it hit me: that must be how some non-INTJs feel when they read my INTJ posts. My attitude of, “If everyone else thought the way I did and catered to my personality in these precise ways, things would be so much easier!” must be similarly exhausting.

A lot of it is tongue-in-cheek, but perhaps I do go a bit overboard in my “how to relate to an INTJ” posts.

Now, this isn’t a retraction of anything I’ve written before about INTJs, or an apology for the tone I take sometimes. But in future personality-related posts, I will try to be more conscientious of how they sound.

Not too much, though–what do I look like, an ISFJ?