My second semester of college, I needed a class that was a few more credit hours but nothing I looked at seemed quite right.  I was taking everything I could that semester for the major I wanted (probably the eighth major I’d settled on) and I would have been happy to just focus on classes I actually cared about, but I had a partial scholarship that required a certain number of credit hours, so I had to take something.  Rather than a fun class, I felt obligated to take something useful and my eye fell on a class called “Life Planning and Decision Making.”  I told my INFJ (who was my ex-boyfriend at the time) that I finally decided to take the class when I couldn’t decide whether or not to take the class.

While that was funny and ironic, the class was an amalgamation of bullet-point “always/never” instructions, which seemed far too over oversimplified to apply to my real life.  That, plus the depressing novel I was supposed to read for it that made me feel like life was meaningless, and the real life things I was dealing with, which the class was certainly no help with, made it so I wanted to be spending my mornings anywhere else.  I ended up having a panic attack and just stopped going to the class and flunking it because I thought if I dropped it, I’d lose my scholarship.  Say what you will about my decision not to stick with the class, but the point is, taking the class in the first place was a bad decision.
Not everyone makes decisions in the same way, nor should they.  The whole point of personality typing is realizing that we all think and process the world in different ways with different strengths.  Most “Good Decision Making” advice you can find, whether in the form of books, classes or even religions, is written from an EJ perspective.  While there is nothing wrong with EJ’s making decisions in an EJ manner, there *is* something wrong with the implication that *everyone* should make decisions their way.

Since EJ’s put action first in their cognitive process, it’s their greatest strength; understanding consequences and which action to take based on what they want the result to be.  So when EJ’s say “To be a good person, you need to take this specific action,” it often works for them because their actions are more likely to reflect their intentions.  But since the other types don’t specialize in action the same way, telling them specific action usually *doesn’t* work for them.

For IJ’s, while they’re the next best at taking action, being told what to *do* limits their ability to find nuance in the action they plan on taking, which they draw from their strength of understanding widely applicable principles.  Being told what to do specifically limits their unique ability to see the big picture and the direction actions will lead within that picture.

For P’s, their attention is supposed to be on exploring the world, rather than directing it; it’s what *makes* them Perceivers.  For IP’s, their greatest strength is understanding details and situations, drawing conclusions and knowing when they’re missing information.  That conclusion-drawing is EJ’s biggest weakness and they’re notoriously bad at knowing when they’re missing details that could potentially change their entire understanding of a situation.  An IP following strict directions of action gives up their main strength and ends up ignoring important details that only they can see.

And it’s poor little EP’s that get the biggest shaft in an EJ decision-making culture.  As understanding specific action and consequences is EP’s greatest weakness, an EP trying to follow a list of specific actions they’re supposed to take just gets confused and looks like a total idiot… as most EP’s look like these days.  One need only brave looking at YouTube comments or at the quintessential dumb teenager to see just how confused the EP’s in our culture are, because *no one* caters to their unique and non-inferior way of decision-making.

EP’s unique and foremost strength is people-exploration, meaning observing individuals as whole entities and making character judgments based on reading people’s intentions, starting with their own.  Ironically, EP’s are usually told that making character judgments is mean because often for especially TJ’s it is, because blanketing a person’s character needs to be done with extreme nuance.  But EP’s with their constant reception of information from others, *have* to determine who is a worthy source, otherwise they’ll just act more confused and stupid.  I speak from experience 😉

And in an oversimplified action-based culture, even well-intentioned EJ’s get shafted and restricted from using their own remarkable strength of knowing intrinsically which action will get them and their group where they want to be by understanding consequences; if someone has already been there and made their decisions for them, EJ’s can end up applying an action that may work in one scenario to an entirely different one where the same rules don’t apply.

So how should *you* make the best decisions for *your* unique life without neglecting *your* greatest strengths?  In a way that is entirely unique to your personality type and the way you take in and act upon the world.  I’ve broken this down into three parts, so that you can utilize all the tools you need for your own special decision-making process.  They are:

Part 2 – Playing to Your Strengths
Part 3 – How to Be Sure *You* Are Making the Right Decision

With these tools, understanding that who you are and the way you think is not only valid, but absolutely necessary and needed in the world, you can feel empowered to move the world and your own life in the direction you want.  You never have to feel trapped again.