If you happen to be this rare personality type - INFJ - bask in your uniqueness, and then read on below for more info about yourself.
The next rarest types are ENTJ (1.8%), INTJ (2.1%), and ENFJ (2.5%), while the most common personality types are ISFJ (13.8%), ESFJ (12.3%), and ISTJ (11.6%). Of the 16 possible outcomes, the INFJ personality type - which stands for introversion, intuition, feeling, and judging - is the rarest, accounting for only 1.5% of the population, according to data from the Myers & Briggs Foundation. “Your type reflects how you view and move through the world, and can be very useful in recognizing your own strengths as well as mitigating some of your potential weaknesses.”
“The Myers-Briggs test consists of a series of self-reporting questions that help determine a personality type based on the work of Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology,” Jodie Solberg, CHT, a mental wellness coach and certified hypnotherapist, tells Bustle. If you’ve taken the quiz before, you know how extensive it is. Online quizzes are a surefire way to feel uniquely understood, especially if you take the popular Myers-Briggs test and realize you have one of the rarest personality types: INFJ. All you do is kick back, answer a bunch of fun questions, and just like that you learn which Harry Potter house you belong to, your perfect career path, your best astrological match - the list goes on. All the letters and all their effects are simply results of what your mind naturally prioritizes in life, based on what you want most.There’s something oddly satisfying about taking online personality quizzes. This leaves all behaviors, attitudes, and abilities open to you, yet you will always end up approaching them in a way that reflects your deepest desire. Your mind constantly chooses what to focus on first, based on this desire that reflects the core of everything it means to be you. Being an INFJ means that deep down, what matters most to you is understanding the way life works and living accordingly, because everything works better when you do. These unwitting choices display what matters to us the most. In every thought, every experience, and every interaction, we each make unconscious choices about what we’re going to focus on most. These letters are merely a representation of the way you naturally approach the world. As you come to understand the way you already cognate, you’ll naturally end up getting out of your own way, striding forward as the person you’ve always been rather than sabotaging yourself by trying to hide who you really want to be. Human thought is far more complex than that!īeing a cognitive INFJ does not place any limits whatsoever on your abilities, talents, career aptitude, behaviors, or attitudes. They’re stereotypes that have nothing at all to do with cognition, coming from shaky definitions of the letters that end up contradicting themselves and falling apart under the rigors of experience.
Well good, because those sorts of oversimplifications are simply untrue. INFJs are often portrayed as pretentious, overidealistic, soft, out of touch, do-gooder hermits, so you may have been tempted to think you couldn’t possibly be INFJ. Perhaps when you opened up this document and saw INFJ, you immediately remembered unpleasant stereotypes that certainly don’t apply to you. Getting back to the roots of cognition, your underlying thoughts and reasons why you do what you do, allows us to cut past all the simplifications and subjectivity. Worse, it leads to simplified misconceptions about what INFJ actually means.
This leads to a difficulty in really nailing down who is and isn’t INFJ, causing subjective arguments on the matter all over the internet.
But behaviors change throughout a person’s life, and two people might do the same behaviors for very different reasons. Unfortunately, the way most sources define those letters is often a little shaky, focusing on behaviors instead of cognition. You’ve probably run into the letters INFJ before, maybe online or in books you’ve read. So, what does it really mean to be a cognitive INFJ? This equips you to derive ever greater benefit, insight, and enjoyment out of being the incredibly complex and unique person you really are. It’s a set of tools, an open-ended guide to help you better understand everything that’s already been going on inside you. Learning to understand how you think, why, and what you can do with it, naturally helps everything in life go more smoothly.Ĭognitive typing is not a listing of simplistic limits or divisive caricatures. Your secret desires, interests, and fears make sense. There are numerous stereotypes and misconceptions about personality typing, but here we’ll get to the root of it all: Cognition, the underlying thoughts and desires that make you who you are in your own individual way.