Category: F/T (Page 1 of 2)

Click to read the epic conclusion of Super Simple Volume 1, and see how the cognition process gets assembled

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 5: Assembling the Cognition Process

October 1, 2016 / Calise Sellers

Hello again! 🙂 Welcome back for the pivotal climax to understanding the cognition process! Now we can finally put together all the pieces we’ve accumulated over the course of the past four posts (1, 2, 3, 4). We’re going to complete the cognition processes! :O Let’s do it!

And as I always say, *don’t* start here! You’re going to be so ridiculously confused if you do! Are you one of those people that flips to the end of the book?! Well, you can’t do that with this! 😛

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 4: Function-Combinations

August 31, 2016 / Calise Sellers

Hey! Welcome back! How was your between-posts intermission? Did you get everything you need? Hydration? Nourishment? Bladder relief? Well then, let’s move on. 🙂

Oh and of course, if you haven’t read Parts 1, 2 and 3 yet, then I love you but you really shouldn’t be here yet. Go read those first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’m patient. 😉

Alrighty, I’m really excited for this part too because there’s a lot about why Functions function the way that they do that I really haven’t gotten the opportunity to explain to the whole class, and they are really pretty frickn’ awesome!
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Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 2: The Four Functions

May 12, 2016 / Calise Sellers

Hello again! Welcome back to Cognition – The Super Simple Series! If you missed Part 1: Cognition and the Four Types of Information, go check it out now. 🙂 Otherwise you’re going to be super lost instead and no one likes that!

I’m very excited for this post as there is sooo much confusion and stereotyping about what functions really are. In this post we’re looking at just how simple and straightforward cognitive functions are, and yet how they’re complex in application and, when understood correctly, should help us understand our complexity as humans more, not limit us into boxes. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. 😉

If we define “Cognition,” as we did in Part 1, as the action of your mind acquiring and processing information, “Functions” are the tools our minds use to acquire and process that information.

Typing Tutorial (plus Character Spotlight!)

August 23, 2015 / Calise Sellers

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?

July 9, 2015 / Calise Sellers

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

Q&A Quickie: Letter Combinations

November 24, 2014 / Calise Sellers

Travel back in time to Halloween to hear Vanellope von Schweetz and Mal Reynolds answer the question, “How do personality typing letter combinations work?”

PPP Show and Tell: Feelers and Logic

June 23, 2014 / Calise Sellers

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!

Type Specializations: What Makes My Type Special?

February 12, 2014 / Calise Sellers

There’s an age-old outlook, put blatantly by Syndrome of The Incredibles in his Moriarty Fear, that if everyone is special, then *no one* will be. To this longstanding catch-22, I offer the following rebuttal: What if everyone is special in a way that is both utterly unique and utterly essential?

What if, like colors, genders or flavors, Personality Types create a beautiful cornucopia of complexity and balance, where each member contributes to the whole, an equal and necessary component, without which there would be a gaping hole? And what if becoming special is simply a matter of owning who you are and choosing to pursue the very thing *you* love most?

These are Type Specializations.

This topic is one of my very favorite things about personality typing because it’s so wrapped up in what every type *is* and not only what every type specializes in, but what *drives* every type. It’s easy to focus on cursory traits that may or may not come with a certain type – yes, ISTJs are usually fond of rules and yes, ENTPs often like taking risks; yes, INFPs spend a lot of time exploring inside their own heads and yes, ESFJs can often be found being great hosts and hostesses – but why? What is that common thread that laces itself through a personality type? What means the world to *your* personality?

Type Specializations are made up of two components, Scope and Objective. Continue reading

What Do All These Letters Mean Anyway?

January 7, 2014 / Calise Sellers

So, once upon a time, you stumbled upon a really cool website. It had interesting pictures combining all your favorite characters in ways you weren’t sure made sense, but it was also pretty cool to read, even if the girl who wrote it liked to use lame phrases like “Rock-awesome,” used too many ellipses and was a little too fascinated by crossdressing. Despite her obvious strangeness though, the things she had to say made pretty good sense and you found yourself pulled in by her unique approach to humanity, obvious geekishness and adorable stick figures 😉

But, whether you were completely new to this personality stuff and wondering what the heck she was talking about, throwing letters around willy-nilly, or if you’re an absolute pro who has been studying this stuff since you and Jung were eating bratwurst together, you need to know what I mean when I throw out a four variable combination, whether it’s ENTP or Unicorn-Daisy-Tomato-Orange. Personality Typing means squat if you have an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of what the variables mean in the first place.

And so here, boys and girls, is where I define my terms… in no uncertain terms 😉
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Comment Response: Of INFJs, Principles of Typing and Characters that POP

November 9, 2013 / Calise Sellers

The other day, I got a fantastic comment on Type Heroes: INFJ – The Paladin by a cool INFJ named Match. In addition to comments about liking the blog in general, he brought up some great questions about why I typed some of the characters in the INFJ collage the way I did. Because it was a fantastic and well thought out comment, I thought it deserved a well thought out response. I started typing and this behemoth came out. Rather than try and fit it into like 50 comments all broken up, which would end up feeling like I was spamming everyone on my own blog -_-, I decided to turn it into a post that might set the precedent for future response posts that deserve this kind of care and attention.

I hope you really wanted that reply you asked for, Match 😀

Intro and Principles of Typing

Okay, important things first: Match is a really cool name! Can I just say that?

Also, I’m *so* happy you’re enjoying the blog! The things you said about Hercules Syndrome and the stick figure post make me feel giddy 😀 This is exactly why I write and it thrills me to know it’s working and that I’m touching individual people. That’s really my purpose as an ENTP, helping people see their own individual potential and know how to reach for it; helping people be awesome in their own unique ways 🙂

You brought up really excellent points about those individual characters. I also *loved* what you said about people making personality typing about cut-and-paste horoscopes! I couldn’t agree more. I think the one principle I’d like to bring up before going into specific character typings is that, while you’re obviously looking past the surface of types and I can tell you don’t type shallowly at all, it’s important to remember that personality types are a measure of the way a person *thinks* which ends up resulting in their actions, but *isn’t* their actions. I know you know that principle, but it’s easy to forget that when other people are judging by the surface. It’s easy to forget that two people may make the *exact same* decision for *entirely* different reasons. Make sense?
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