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INFJ Career Interview #1

Interview by Ryan Smith

Hi Shawn. Thanks for doing the interview. Before we begin, what is your background for identifying as INFJ?

I'm a licensed psychologist and certified in the use of the official MBTI instrument as well. I've taken several different variations of the test, and I inexorably come out as INFJ. I've always felt that I was INFJ and never had any doubts about it. When I first read the description, it just made so much sense.

J/P doesn't particularly make sense to me - I'm not that well organized. But in terms of the cognitive functions, I certainly use Fe and not Fi. I've also been happy to learn that I'm an introvert. Likewise, I was happy to learn that there's such a thing as Sensation-Intuition, since most of my family consists of S types.

How did you first come into contact with the MBTI?

I got to know it through a friend I knew from university. I read up on Jung's typology and I thought it was very interesting. I read everything about it that I could. I was captivated by it and wanted to integrate it into my clinical work with patients. At the time, I was working as a psychologist in a hospital and I argued very strongly that my employers should finance my certification. I was very vehement that they needed to pay to have me do that.

Yeah, I've seen you in action - you're very persuasive when you want to be.

Haha - one reason I'm so persuasive is that I thoroughly believe it myself while I'm saying it. I got my certification, and my interest just kept building from there. Then I met you guys who are also very knowledgeable about this stuff - I mean, you guys know a lot. What I fell for with regard to typology was that it's a very systematic way of working with normal psychology which I could deploy alongside my treatment of abnormal psychology in a clinical setting.

It's interesting that you should say that, because most licensed psychologists tend to snub their noses at Jungian typology. Typically, they say that it's useless in a clinical setting.

Actually, I think Jungian typology is far more useful in a clinical setting than it is with regards to HR and team building, which are the officially sanctioned uses of the MBTI instrument. Jung's typology has only a limited predictive value, and the skills and approaches that people bring to the table in a work environment may be very different from what their personalities are like. But in a clinical setting, the patient normally has to make one or more ground-breaking realizations about himself and his place in the world as part of the therapeutic process. In that respect, Jungian typology has been very beneficial to me because it gives some archetypical cues to what the patient might really be like.

So you don't need to break out pen and paper and get the patient to take a test, or even to mention the theory explicitly in any way to use it. You just operate off the basics of it, which you have in the back of your mind, is that correct?

Absolutely. That's exactly correct. Out of the hundreds of patients that I've treated, I've mentioned Jung or the MBTI once or twice. I don't use typology to make my patients into little psychologists. Rather, I use it to explain to people why it can be okay to be open and adaptable, for example, and why such people shouldn't feel bad even if their parents and all of the people in their family are well organized and telling them that they should also be organized and plan ahead. Or I might use typology to explain why it's okay to get angry with someone who's being very rational all the time and why it's okay to see that as a provocation.

For me personally, it has also been fruitful to know that not everyone needs a very theoretical or abstract approach to their problems in order to transform and get better. In fact, most people do far better if you just give them concrete examples and analogies without the theory. Learning that has been eye-opening for me.

Another thing that Jung's typology has taught me is to be mindful of the value of Sensation types and their input. To me, nothing is more annoying than when you're in the midst of unfolding your great plan for how something should be, only to have an S type come by and throw a spanner in the works by calling attention to a lot of factual specifics that you have no idea how to deal with! Over time, I've come to be very humbled by the perspectives of S types - humbled in the way that lots of N types need to be humbled. You're looking up at the sky, noticing all these exciting constellations of planets and stars up there. In your mind, you're driving towards a better view of them and moving at great speed, only to have an S type come by and point out that you've run the car off the road and that it's out of gas to boot.

I'm sure our readers will find it reassuring to learn that you do not have a driver's license. - You have already mentioned your education to us, but what do you currently do?

I work as the chief psychologist in a psychiatric ward, which means that I'm the boss of a handful of other psychologists. My work entails a 50/50 split between doing typical psychologist's work (i.e. therapy and diagnosis), and then participating in organizational and administrative meetings with doctors, nurses, and other psychologists. I also have to organize and plan the work of my subordinates.

So how does that make you feel, being in charge of managing the work of others?

I wouldn't say that I have an easy time doing it. I've had jobs in the past where I've avoided management responsibilities like the plague, even when I held positions where I was expected to manage others. But in my present job at the ward, my subordinates are all very nice, so I can just about stomach my unease at managing them. If they were less cooperative, it would be harder for me. But because they're nice, that makes me want to be nice to them too. I could easily sit in my office and schedule their hours and responsibilities by myself, but I don't. I insist that we should all be involved in what we're doing and that everyone should have their say.

You insist on civility - you don't turn into a dictator.

Not a dictator at all. I do have firm opinions about leadership at the ward and how it should be done. But even though I disagree with the higher-ups, I don't necessarily speak out. For example, when it comes to the training courses that we can get as part of our continued professional development, the hospital management tends to act so erratically that there is no way of knowing who gets which courses, and no way of knowing which types of courses that the management is willing to finance. There's no transparency. It's all about what the individual doctor, nurse, or psychologist can talk the management into sponsoring for them, and that generates a lot of jealousy and wariness around the ward.

If I were in charge of managing our training regimen, I would insist on there being an open and overall strategy regarding which courses got awarded to whom, how to apply for them, who has gotten what, and so on. If the management did that, then they would remove all of the jealousy in a jiffy. But they don't. So as my own sort of silent rebellion, I've refused to go on any courses offered by the ward. I've secretly gone on some of them anyway, but I've paid for them myself. It's my way of showing them that I disapprove.

And how is that working out for you?

Well, after the management did the books for the last six months and realized that I had not accepted a single course, they've started nudging me to accept some courses - any courses, really. They can't have their chief psychologist not receiving any training. It looks bad for them when viewed from the outside.

"SHUT UP and take our money!"

Something like that.

Let's zoom out a bit. Did you always want to be a psychologist?

Oh, very much so. Ever since I was little - like in elementary school - I had this picture of myself in the archetypical psychotherapy setup - me taking notes in an armchair, patient on the couch confiding in me. I knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. I went to the school library to seek out psychoanalytic literature and picked up Freud's Totem and Taboo, which I read while I was still in middle school. I can't say I understood everything in it at the time, but the overall themes and that way of thinking - the young men killing their father and getting so overwhelmed by their bad conscience that they have to invent God to atone for it - that whole world and terminology just clicked with me. I knew right then and there that psychology was the most interesting thing in the world.

As I'm sure you're aware, INFJs are sometimes stereotyped as the "psychologist type." What do you think sets you apart from other psychologists?

[Shawn thinks for some time.] It's a funny thing, really. As a therapist, you have to be three things: Empathic, inspiring, and present. I always thought that my strong suit lay in being empathic, but recently I've discovered that my approach is much more about being present. Being focused on what's happening in the patient, bringing that out and validating the way he feels about it. That's where I excel. Even if the hospital bosses say that I have to use schemas, or that I have to approach therapy according to a certain procedure, I don't hesitate to abandon those instructions if something interesting comes up. I don't feel guilty if I spend a session talking with a patient about his girlfriend rather than about his OCD or depression. And besides - sometimes that OCD or depression isn't about the symptoms at all, but about something deeper which you can only get to by talking about what's really on the patient's mind. As a therapist, that's what I live for - those moments where the air in the room goes stiff and time stands still because the patient is having a life-changing epiphany.

What's the difference between being present and being empathic?

Being present is about being there - it's when you're totally filled up by what the other person is going through and not preoccupied with your own troubles in the slightest. Being empathic, in a sense, is just about mirroring the other person. Outside of therapy there can be situations where I'm only about 20% present, and really very bored by what someone is saying, but where I can still get that person to talk about himself for ages simply by mirroring what they're saying and reflecting that back to them. It has always BLOWN my mind how you can get people to talk and talk like there's no tomorrow if you just know how to do that. And it's often been a source of wonder to me why not more people do it.

Some people say that it feels like they're making fun of the other person when they are paraphrasing them like that - like it's really an insult to the other person.

Then that's because they think of it as a technique; as "something you do"; a glove you put on for a certain purpose, because you have to do a certain task. It has to come naturally to you. You have to work it into your approach. It was Carl Rogers who pioneered the approach, and to him paraphrasing wasn't about the other person at all - it was all about himself. To him it was simply natural to summarize what the patient was saying and putting it into his own words. It was not a technique, but the most natural thing in the world.

Well, another thing Carl Rogers said is that you can't really train psychologists - that some people are simply naturals, while others aren't.

That's pretty controversial. But to be frank with you, I completely agree that some people are just naturally better at psychotherapy than others and that, at its core, you can't really do much to change that. The generalized skills that go into psychotherapy - you can train those a little bit. But it's true that in some sense, the essential quality of being a good psychologist is something that some people are more or less born with and others are not. Like how you guys are naturals at typology, and others are not. Of course with Jungian typology, everyone believes that they're an expert, which is kind of a hoot, since typing someone correctly is far harder than a lot of the work psychologists usually do.1

Yes, that is an irony, and thank you for the kind words. But let's talk about something else. Did you always work as a clinical psychologist?

No. After graduating from university, I worked as an entry-level psychotherapist at a center for people who were socially troubled. In my current job at the ward, we work with psychopathology and clinical disorders, whereas as a social psychologist at that center, I worked mostly with patients who were socially vulnerable, but not necessarily suffering from clinical symptoms. Those kinds of problems were less interesting to me.

One day, my ENTJ friend from university called and told me that she was starting her own market research firm. She asked me if I didn't want to ditch the position as a social psychologist and come work for her instead. I already knew her very well, since we had worked together on some projects during our university years, and the two of us had bonded a lot as friends. I had mixed feelings about leaving psychotherapy for the business world, but in the end, the human element and my personal connection to the ENTJ drew me into it.

What was that like for you, working in market research?

Oh, compared to psychotherapy there is a huge prestige difference. I am still struggling a lot with that. Even though I love doing psychotherapy, the identity that goes with that is so different from what being a high-level business consultant in market research was like. As a consultant, your work has more impact, you earn more money, and people are more respectful of your time. One's aura is much more prestigious.

Also, once you reach the top in market analysis, the challenges that are presented to you have such a density and scope that the sheer complexity of that is just exhilarating. The insights you can come up with if you think really hard about those problems are just astounding. And because you're doing consulting for others, you don't need to worry about defending the status quo in the organization and how people might lose their jobs because of something you propose. As a consultant, you have the freedom to attack the problems in any way that you see fit, and you get an opportunity to really change how the whole organization goes about its business.

I could become completely obsessed with the projects that landed on my desk. For example, I was once responsible for a major analysis project pertaining to remote controls. For four months, my whole world revolved around remote controls. I learned everything I could about them, including of course how people perceived remote controls, how they reacted to them psychologically, and what they liked and disliked about them. When I finally presented my findings, the customer acknowledged that my take on the problem had been so incisive and made so much sense that it had resonated with everyone in the company. They said openly and without reservation that I was obviously right and that they had never thought of the problem in that way before. That made me so proud.

That's an interesting point about market research, actually - if you present a poor analysis, people will start questioning all kinds of things about your report: "How solid are your data, how big is your sample size, did you make sure to correct for this and that, and how about the other thing over here, and do you even know how to do this kind of advanced statistical analysis?" But if you do it well and present a spectacular piece of research, the findings will seem so intuitively true to the client that all these kinds of critical questions about "science" and "methods" just go right out the window. Not a word is said about those things. An average analysis tends to spark some discussion, but a brilliant analysis just goes right to the bone - that's one of the many paradoxes of market analysis.

So in your experience, success is not about winning the technical discussions about theory, method, and science. It's a much bigger 'win' for you to give people the critical insight that they need to make everything click for them.

Indeed. The most thankful audience you can have is when you're with a group of businesspeople and you have conducted a study of their business and have come back to present that to them. Presenting a report in that manner is really an opportunity to help the people involved to look themselves in the mirror. And that's when people get really interested. It's a tender moment where your listeners are vulnerable, yet also very open, and where you have the possibility of giving them new insight.

You mentioned that the owner of this market analysis firm was an ENTJ, so I'm assuming that the two of you worked together in some sense. How would you say that your approach was different from hers?

Oh, we were different in so many ways - in every way from the initial sales pitch to presenting the final report, we were really just so different. For my part, I tended to land projects because the clients liked me and because they felt secure in my presence. With the ENTJ, she lost a lot of projects because of the complexity inherent in some sales - she lacked diplomatic tact and the slow-burning patience needed to land some of the projects that required politicking and personal connections to come through. In particular, she couldn't acclimatize herself to the slow pace in much of the public sector where people don't proceed with the same urgency as they do in the private sector - people who were in no hurry to close presented a real problem for her. She was more of a cowboy, blasting it out with high-level bankers and real-estate firms, playing hardball with them and giving as good as she got in an effort to win their respect and be top dog. I didn't have the stomach for that kind of thing at all.

We were also very different in how we tackled the projects themselves. To me, the saddest moment of the whole process was the day when you had to return to the client and present your analysis, because no matter how much I had immersed myself in their world and the problems they were struggling with, I could always see how I could have gone deeper and uncovered even more implications about the problem they were trying to solve. The ENTJ was much more focused on coming up with a specific solution to the problem, rather than being interested in the problem itself. From the moment she landed a project, she'd think to herself: "What is the solution to the problem and how can we implement it?" And that was what the project would be to her.

Would you say that she was less of a perfectionist than you?

I don't know if it's a question of perfectionism, because you can be very perfectionistic about solutions too. She was very serious about coming up with concrete solutions and plans for how to practically implement them. A typical report of hers would end with a section entitled: "17 Things That Your Business Needs to Do."

I always found that kind of thing uninteresting. For me, it was all about grasping the entirety of the problem and then understanding that in depth. Once you do that, the steps tend to materialize by themselves. To me, the insights are more important than what you do with them.

In a way, it's like the Gandalf character from the Lord of the Rings movies. I know that the films were fine and aesthetically well made. But to me, they were kind of a snore fest. However, every time Gandalf came on, that really hit the spot for me. That, totally and completely, was truly the thing for me. It needn't even be Gandalf: It's the archetypical scene with the wise man who offers guidance to the hero in his struggles to achieve a certain quest. The hero is confused, uncertain, and looking for some way to tackle a problem that seems entirely insurmountable to him. Then, at the greatest moment of doubt, the wise man steps in from the sidelines and offers the hero some vital insight that he couldn't have thought of himself.

That's also how I think of what I did in market research: I was completely clear about the fact that I was not the hero, but the sage; the helper on the sidelines. To me there was a great satisfaction in being able to step in and create some mental clarity for others in the midst of the chaos they were struggling with. But there was also an awareness that, as the helper, you don't control what the hero will do afterwards, and that you won't be around by the time he acts on the insights you have given him; that you will not be there to participate in the celebration when he reaps the rewards and the champagne corks are coming off. There is a certain melancholy to that which I guess I also like.

The ENTJ had more trouble accepting those limitations. That was the problem in her approach - it was too arrogant. It becomes too arrogant when you want to be both the helper and the hero, and you think you can take on both roles better than anybody else. No one would have liked Lord of the Rings if Gandalf had just snubbed the hobbits and taken the ring to Mount Doom himself. They'd say, "Gee, what a smartass!" When you're in that role, you have to know your limitations, or people will stop listening to you. They won't give you that role if you're backseat driving them and being too hands-on.

Haha! It seems that you really sunk your teeth into that role and that you even found an outlet for your urge to do psychotherapy while working as a market research consultant. But in the end, you drifted back to psychotherapy proper - why?

In some sense, I always knew that I wanted to do psychotherapy more than market research. But on the other hand... [Shawn pauses a bit.] Let me put it this way: I've never had a job where I was not ambivalent about it most of the time. I could give you specific reasons - in market research there was too much bravado, and at the ward there is too little respect for what you do - but at the end of the day, I think that ambivalence has more to do with me as a person than with the job itself. There's always some side of me that's trying to see the light in the darkness and the darkness in the light. I guess that's also part of the reason why I went into market research even though I knew that my true calling was psychotherapy. And also part of the reason why, even though I was completely convinced that I was only going to do a short stint or market research before going back to psychotherapy, I ended up staying there for years.

Notes

  1. For a notion of why typology is much harder than other kinds of psychological work, see our article on Hayek's Epistemology of the Social Sciences.

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INFJ Career Interview #1 © Ryan Smith and IDR Labs International 2015.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and MBTI are trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc.

IDRLabs.com is an independent research venture, which has no affiliation with the MBTI Trust, Inc.

Cover image in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.

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