Category: ALL Types (Page 2 of 4)

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 1: Cognition and the Four Types of Information

Hi!  If this is your first time visiting A Little Bit of Personality (aLBoP as we like to call it in endearing tones), welcome!!  I’m Calise and I’m *sooo* super excited to share this introductory, condensed, no-frills version of how people think and how to use that information to understand yourself and everyone around you!

The purpose of this series is to explain as crash-course-ly as possible the basic building blocks that form the 16 types of cognition.  No prior understanding of cognition, psychology or personality types required (though a basic understanding of people, decent reading comprehension and a certain level of human decency are all requested).  There will of course be many pictures. 😀

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Typing Tutorial (plus Character Spotlight!)

Hey!  This is Justin!  Since I’m gonna be doing a lot of Phase 2, it’s probably good for me to say hi.  It’s been awesome getting to talk to you guys over chats and emails, and I’m excited to finally get to do some character spotlights!

For this first one, we’re going to be focusing especially on how to type people.  A lot of you have asked for help with typing people yourselves, so let’s walk through the process!

We’ve also convinced a couple of stick people, Gwen and Phil, to sacrifice their dignity and show us how *not* to type.  They’re going to do their best to type correctly, using oversimplified, stereotypical methods and definitions, and we’ll see how they do.

 

For this tutorial, we wanted to type a cool, engaging character who’s also kinda obscure.  That way, we shouldn’t have to worry much about preconceptions of the character’s type.  We wouldn’t want to start out with Darth Vader, say.  (We’ve seen Lord Vader typed as pretty much every single type :P)

That’s exactly the sort of subjectivity that we’re excited to get past here!  Regardless of whether we’re typing someone’s behavior or their cognition, if it all ends up coming down to subjective arguments over what type they are, then there’s something wrong with our methodology.  A reliable, repeatable, useful science needs to be objective, no matter who’s looking at it.

This kind of independent objectivity isn’t something a lot of people would associate with personality typing.  All too often, personality typing gets misused as a vague, horoscope-ish way of boiling people down to a simplistic little list of traits that could really be true of almost anyone.  Gwen and Phil are gonna demonstrate how this vagueness doesn’t work.  Aren’t you, guys?

We, on the other hand, are all going to show these two the consistent roots of cognitive typing.  We’re going to walk through how the cognitive definitions of the letters leave no wiggle room for subjective fudging; once we know how the letters work at their root, then every typing becomes clear.

So who’s our lucky, obscure victim for this demonstration?  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you…

…a peacock.

But not just any peacock.  This is the nefarious Lord Shen, the brilliant and, in my estimation, very charming villain of Kung Fu Panda 2.  Yes, there really is a movie called Kung Fu Panda, if you didn’t know.  Two of them, actually, with a third on the way.  And they’re really fantastic, with excellent themes told in a skillful way, and very good plot structure, and also very pretty.  Continue reading

What If I’m Not the Type I Thought I Was?

 For over a year I’ve had an impending fear.  It lurks in the back of my mind, nagging at me whenever I go to type anyone, real or fictional, whenever My INFJ and I have worked on nailing down just which facial patterns follow human cognition, and it pulls on me whenever I get excited about just how uncannily well Facial Typing works and how the facial similarities between people of the same cognitive type just can’t be unseen!  It seems silly, that the reason I’m scared is because Facial Typing works so well; shouldn’t I be more scared if it *didn’t* work?  So why does fear haunt my Facial Typing days?

Because I know that in mere months (if schedule goes according to plan, which I’ve totally stopped counting on), I’ll be ready to release a series of posts full of scientific, photographic evidence that *so many people* aren’t the type they think they are.  And then I’m readying myself for the pitchforks and torches, because I know they’re coming for me.

And you know what?  It’s understandable (to a point) that people get so up-in-arms when I tell them they’re not the type they thought they were.  It makes sense that when we have to correct people about their type, or what defines types in general, that they often react as negatively as if we’d corrected them on their religion, politics, sexuality or gender. Continue reading

They’re Here: Personalized Typing Packages and COGs!!!

They’re here!!!!  Yay!!!!

The new and improved return of Personalized Typings and introducing Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks (COGs)!!!

What are COGs?
Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks or COGs, are aLBoP’s definitive guides to the 16 cognitive types.
Each one includes:

  • E vs. I
  • P vs. J
  • First and Last letter combinations
  • N vs. S
  • F vs. T
  • Middle Letter combinations
  • Each type’s unique Cognition Steps
  • Type Specializations
  • Type Angsts (including all *8* that haven’t been released yet!!)
  • Paradoxitype

And averages 10,000 words each!  That’s just under 160,000 words total :O!

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It’s Coming…

There’s something coming… {Insert Jaws music here}
 
It’s the big thing you’ve all been waiting for… {Insert summer blockbuster music}
 
And it’s all for *you!!* {Insert cheesy game show music}
 
With the educationalism of a show with puppets, and accessibility that may make many “How to Draw” books hang their heads in shame… {Insert “Learning is Fun!” music)
 
And all with the aim of making *you* feel like you don’t need to have a cape (or be like someone else) to be a hero.  And this is exactly the real-life applicable guide you need to do it! 😉
What we used to attempt to cover in our Personalized Personality PDFs has now had an extreme makeover (I never watched that show, did it have music?) and has now been transformed into our insanely longer, incomparably more in-depth Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks or COGs (Spoiler alert: we tried for the cool acronym ;D) — 16 distinctive eBooks with more info than ever before on the following:

–  E vs. I
–  P vs. J
–  First and Last letter combinations
–  N vs. S
–  F vs. T
–  Middle Letter combinations
–  Each type’s unique Cognition Steps
–  Type Specializations
–  Type Angsts (including all *8* that haven’t been released yet!!)
  Paradoxitype
 
All in an easy to understand, this-leads-to-that format 😀  Are you excited yet?  I hope so!!  It’s been such a labor of love… for you guys! <3  We’re so proud to be *about* to release our babies into the world!!  Soon.  So soon!  I’m not kidding, all the words are done (160,000 of them :-O), I just have some pictures to finish!
 
Just to get you a little more stoked, here’s the first two pages of INFP – The Ranger:
So get ready, and before you know it… {Insert creepy little girl whispering “It’s here!”}
 
Much love,
<3 Calise and Justin, her INFJ

Give a Little Personality: A Gift Guide by Type

 

Give a Little Personality
A Gift Guide by Type

Merry Christmas everyone!  Or whatever you celebrate 😉  Better late than never and as requested, we have a handy little guide for giving gifts according to personality!

Rather than a specific list of individual items, we thought it would be of more value to share with you the principles of what motivates each type and the trends we’ve noticed about what each personality enjoys!  So then this will be useful all year round and not just two days before Christmas 😛

This is our first hybrid post (woo-hoo!) with both a video and written portion (mid-term flashback *shiver*).  Watch the video for our full in-depth versions of what we think each type would like and why (with the option to skip forward 😉 It’s a pretty long video), and check out the summaries and full-sized pics below for each type at-a-glance!

 

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PPP Show and Tell: Feelers and Logic

Hi everyone!  I hope your summer (or winter, down under) is going well!  Lots of fun and informative stuff coming your way the next while, but one thing we’ve been working on a lot is Personalized Personality Typings.  Thank you if you’ve ordered one, or even if you wanted to!  This time the first two tiers of price points got sold out in 24 hrs!  So we’re sorry if you didn’t get to order yours at your desired price point this time, but when we finish this batch up, we’ll be releasing more (and if you miss that one, same dance next time!).
In the meantime, since we put so much love and care into these, and since they include so much information that we’d like to share with *everyone*, we’re starting this new series, “PPP Show and Tell”, where we share quotes from the various Personalized Personality PDFs we’ve personalized to people (enough Ps, eh?)  While we’ll never share quotes from *your* email, because obviously that’s personal, we do want to share what *we’ve* said to you.  In your PPPs, questions and things about personality typing come up that have either come up many times before (like this post’s content), or that we might not have thought of addressing otherwise, that the whole class could stand to hear.
This time we have lots of quotes from a bunch of *different* PPPs, about the common misconceptions people have about Feelers’ relationship with logic, and what defines F in general.  All these quotes happen to be by my INFJ because, even though we read through your emails, determine your type, and figure out bullet points of what you need to hear, together, he has been writing the vast majority of the PPPs themselves to free me up to write blog posts, comments, social media stuff in general, and not go out of my mind with laundry.  Also, he happens to be an excellent writer and has a sexy grasp of principles.  But, you know, that’s why I married him 😉  (Well, that and he’s a good kisser.)
I hope this clears up a lot of the comments we get regarding “That person couldn’t be a T, their decisions are too emotional,” and “That person couldn’t be an F, they’re too smart,” that make me feel :(.  And hopefully this information will help *you* feel better about the person you are personally, and help you understand others and where they’re coming from.  Because any person can be both useful and meaningful, logical and human. ~
“Now, regarding F, there is a plentitude of misconception about both F and T, to the point that both are often mischaracterized into narrow parodies that are true of only the unhealthiest people of any personality type.  Many of the misconceptions about F are in fact true of unhealthy Ts, and vice versa.  Originally and empirically, those who cognate in the way we refer to as ‘Feelers’ focus first on the meaning and significance of things, and in practice that has complex effects.  For example, a Feeler who had been led to believe that it was cooler, more fun, or in any way better or more meaningful to be a T… would place great meaning and significance on trying to behave as a T, even to the point of attempting to focus on the use of things before meaning.  But through all that, their root motive is still meaning, the meaning of themselves as a person in this case, which they feel requires them to be a T.  Different types will often do the very same things, but for very different reasons.  This is part of why it’s dangerous to type someone based only on what they do, rather than on why they do it, and this is also why attempting to change one’s own actions in order to try to behave as another type tends to result in only a mimic of the other type.”
“Remember, none of this means that you are limited to these strengths.  You can develop the strengths of all the types, of Ts, of Is, of Js, and of S-es.  But in order to gain the strengths of other types, we must first master the strengths of our own type.  If we seek other types’ strengths before first mastering our own, then our own type’s weaknesses will be left unmastered, and they will get in the way.  People who try to master the strengths of other types without playing to the strengths of their own type become merely a parody, attempting to mimic other types without truly becoming them, and trying to hide their own weaknesses without having mastered them.  But as you learn to be proud to be a meaningful F, an observant E, a thoughtful P, and a conceptually-minded N, as you learn why your own strengths are good, then you will naturally and easily begin to develop the entirely new strengths of other personality types.”
  
“…to be human is to have emotions, but frequently Ts are portrayed as being unemotional, while only unhealthy people, F or T, suppress their emotions.  The quickest way to be controlled by your emotions is to pretend they’re not a factor, thereby letting them run unattended through fields of fear, insecurity, and pessimism, usually.”
“Healthy people of all types should cultivate logic, and healthy people of all types should cultivate carefully bridled emotions, since without emotion logic loses context and perspective.  There are many unempirical stereotypes which suggest that logic is a T trait, but it is simply a trait common to all healthy types.  And an attempt to be unemotional is simply unhealthy, the same for Ts as for Fs.  Healthy Ts are not unemotional and certainly not detached from others.  Again, an attempt to act like another type without first mastering one’s own results in mere parody that fails to master the strengths of either type.
“The desire to be unemotional tends to be a very emotional desire, common among unhealthy Ts and unhealthy Fs alike, usually resulting from emotions such as fear, pessimism, doubt, or insecurity.  These negative emotions tend to hinder logic much more commonly than the more cliché, bubbly emotions do.  Negative emotions are emotions, and when we try to ignore their presence they are left free to color our vision and skew all our thoughts.
“A prime example of this is in your references to religion.  ‘[Quoted description of unhealthy religion].’  This description, which you use to refer to all religion, seems to fit only a very small subset of particularly foolish religious people.  But since this unhealthy version of one specific religious group made you feel invalid, telling people that they would go to some hell because of the person they are, which is a fundamentally invalidating thing to imagine, you have formed an emotional opinion against religion as a whole.  The logical act is to acknowledge how much the beliefs of this one group of people made you feel incredibly invalid, and then perhaps to carefully note apparent trends among other groups of people who seem to share the same sort of unhealthiness.  It is not logical, however, to make blanket statements about religion due to the negative emotions that fill your descriptions of these particular groups of people.  In short, to be human is to feel emotions, and that is good because emotions, when mastered, give us perspective and remind us of points that thoughts alone are unable to keep track of.  But the people who tend to be the most hijacked by their own emotions are those who pretend their emotions are not affecting them, thereby turning a blind eye and allowing their emotions to go unmastered.”
  
“Significance and meaning [F], when approached healthily, must be just as objective and measurable as use [T]; subjective reaction is neither F nor T; it’s simply human.  While platitudinous oversimplifications often stereotype Feeling as being irrational or subjective, that has nothing whatsoever to do with T or F; no healthy person, of any type, should indulge in irrational subjectivity, and yet all types are equally vulnerable to it when unhealthy.”
  
“This doesn’t mean you’re doomed; no type is destined to have some laundry-list of weaknesses.  It just means that _______ is a weaker area to keep an eye on.  The thing about weaknesses, however, is that if we face them, they can become stronger than if we’d never had the weakness in the first place, due to the focus that we have to put on them!  And we face them best by using the areas in which we’re strongest, rather than denying our weaknesses or trying to compensate for them.”
 
 
Learn all about receiving your own aLBoP Personalized Personality PDF here!

Why There Weren’t Any Posts in April

So there weren’t any posts in April.  Not one.  Not a Type Angst or a blog update, and certainly not Type Heroes: INTP – The Alchemist, or Group Dynamics: The Avengers, which I said in the Live Q&A I wanted to post in April.  Nope.

Now, until last week, the hundreds of drafts I wrote of this post in my head were all apologies.  “I am sooo sorry I didn’t post the things I said I would!  I am sooo sorry you had to wait!  I am sooo sorry I haven’t responded to everyone!!  I am sooo sorry I suck at life!!!!”  All those drafts were full of excuses too.  “I was organizing my house” (which I was), “I was reorganizing the blog” (which, doesn’t it look lovely?), “There were personal and family issues” (true also, and those happen), “I was having multiple nervous breakdowns” (eh, also true).  But all of those were excuses; not because they weren’t valid and real claims on my time, because they were, but because all of those things were just excuses in my life for me to ignore the real reason I didn’t want to write.

And oh, how pissed I was at myself that I didn’t want to write!  Here I was, at the end of March, coming down from this insane blog high; we had just finished our first Live Q&A, that was amazing!  Everyone was so supportive and loving and awesome about it!  We were finishing up our first wave of Personalized Typings and there were so many of you begging for us to release more (and we haven’t forgotten you!  I just hope you still want them…).  I was getting daily emails from amazing readers gushing about how they’d never read anything quite like aLBoP.  It was humbling and often brought me… well, I was going to say to tears, but I’m more of a can’t-stop-smiling-till-my-face-hurts when I’m touched, type person.  So when everything seemed to be going perfectly, just what I’d always wanted, then why couldn’t I write?  Why would I seek out other activities and “responsibilities” to *avoid* writing?

I could write about all the myriad of possibilities I considered these past two months for what *could* have been the problem, but that would take a long time lol.  It’s amazing how many possibilities with merit an ENTP can come up with in two months.  But, while some of them were useful in their own ways, and I learned a lot about myself this past while, none of them were the root cause behind why I was dreading pulling up Blogger.

The real reason?  I was sick of MBTI culture.
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