Confidence and Personality
Imagine the most confident person you can think of. He does what he feels is right, whether or not society agrees with him. He allows his authentic self to shine without worrying that others won’t accept him. He identifies what’s important and works to achieve it. He doesn’t judge those around him; instead, he offers help wherever he can. He strives to improve himself while accepting his flaws.
This confident person could have any personality type – confidence is not dependent on how extraverted or introverted you are, or whether you make decisions with your head or your heart. As an INTJ, you can take advantage of your personality type to develop confidence in your own unique ways.
INTJ’s Biggest Confidence Shakers
INTJs tend to be very confident in their abilities and ideas, but less confident in dealing with people. It is usually assumed that this is caused by their Introvert and Thinking preferences, which make it difficult for an INTJ to relate to others on an emotional level. However, the problem is largely due to the fact that INTJs are easily misunderstood by others. They easily make intuitive connections between seemingly unrelated facts and ideas, but often forget to explain those connections to other people.
Misunderstood
An INTJ’s thought process and priority in dealing with the world is somewhat unusual. Their interest is in:
- Gathering objective information about the world,
- Organizing that information into rational systems,
- Determining whether each new piece of information is useful or not,
- And re-evaluating previous beliefs and systems to accommodate the new information.
In this way, INTJs continually seek to learn and improve. INTJs also have highly evolved intuition, which they use in combination with their logical mind to quickly understand any concept. They know that their intuition and understanding is often correct, so they trust their own judgements and opinions.
The problem of being misunderstood arises when an INTJ is required to explain their insights and viewpoints to other people. Because they arrived at their conclusion in such an intuitive way, based on their large database of internal information and trusted intuition, their conclusion seems utterly obvious to them. It is not obvious to anyone else, though. If the INTJ hasn’t learned how to reverse-engineer their own thought processes, they will have a difficult time explaining themselves.
Consequently, they tend to blame misunderstandings on the limitations of the other person, rather than on their own difficulty in expressing themselves. This tendency may cause the INTJ to dismiss people too quickly and appear to be arrogant or elitist.
Unrelatable
As Introverts and Thinkers, INTJs are aloof, reserved, and they appear to be unemotional. They do have emotions, but they don’t express them very readily. Since their focus is on logic rather than feelings, they have a hard time relating to outward expressions of emotion from other people. They may also feel awkward about offering emotional support in the form of praise or affection.
Because of this lack of emotional connection, people may misunderstand INTJs as being set in their ways or inflexible. This is the opposite of the truth, because INTJs are always seeking to improve themselves or their environments and they welcome new information. This is another case of INTJs being misunderstood, but it can be alleviated when INTJs make more effort to express themselves. If they don’t, they run the risk of becoming isolated. After many years of being misunderstood, an INTJ will be less and less motivated to learn how to deal with other people’s perceived shortcomings.
INTJ’s Biggest Confidence Boosters
The best way for INTJs to be happy and confident is to consciously work on their two main issues: making time to explain their thought processes, and becoming more relatable as a person.
Explain More Thoroughly
INTJs will find that they will be more easily understood when they make an effort to thoroughly explain their thought processes. INTJs have the ability to make quick connections between seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces and reach an insightful conclusion. INTJs are then dismayed when they hand those same puzzle pieces to another person and he does not make the same connections, instead looking at the INTJ with a blank stare. Over time, this can make INTJs feel like the world just doesn’t “get” them.
The good news is that there’s a simple solution to this: INTJs should take time to fully explain the thought process that led them to connect the puzzle pieces and form a conclusion. This affords them an opportunity to connect with people on a deeper level without feeling misunderstood.
Become More Relatable
As Thinkers, INTJs can become more relatable by recognizing and adapting to the Feeling traits of others. INTJs don’t readily display their emotions or offer emotional support, so they can appear to be cold and distant. There are two ways to easily improve this:
- Recognize when a friend or loved one wants emotional support. Your natural response to this is to offer a logical solution. Instead, remember that people often want a friendly ear or shoulder to cry on, and that support is actually helpful for them.
- When someone is expressing their emotions but you feel unable to match their enthusiasm, go ahead and acknowledge that. If you at least express your feelings in words, the other person will have more opportunity to understand your perspective.
Most INTJs are very interested in self-improvement because they seek to improve everything around them. They have a natural ability to gather data, analyze it, and put it to good use. INTJs who study personal relationships can gain enough insight into humanity that they will be able to pursue their own goals and interests without being held back by the difficulty of relating to other people. Any INTJ who wants to make this improvement is certainly capable of doing so.
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