- Practical Personality
- Posts
- The Edge of Your Comfort Zone
Context is King
Take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Don't worry, it's not my intention to deceive you. Everything I put to paper, I genuinely believe.
I write these articles to document and organise my personal experience, my struggles, and the lessons learned. It's beneficial for me to do so, and I hope it will be beneficial for you too.
Be weary because my perspective is limited and biased.
I know of this bias and understand its most common shapes. I do my best to take it into account when I speak, and especially when I write.
But I'm not kidding myself. I know I cannot escape it—and neither can anyone else.
I'm a self-absorbed introvert, who tends to over-think things and struggles to connect with others. This is my experience. It stems from a lens I was given at birth, unbeknown to me at the time.
The closer your personality is to mine, the more likely you'll relate to my experiences, and the more value these articles might hold for you.
I do not see reality as it is. My view is distorted.
Everyone suffers from the same affliction. No matter how wise or accomplished someone may be, their perspective is limited and distorted.
If you take people’s advice out of context—the context of their experience, their struggles, their personality type—and apply it to yourself blindly, it would probably go horribly, horribly wrong.
But if you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t have to.
Misapplying Advice
In my previous article, I wrote about lessons I had picked up from the author Michael Singer. As much as I can learn from that man, he is very different from me.
His results are indisputable, but it's crucial to understand the context from which they emerged.
Michael and I have rather different personality types. His full type is FF-Si/Te-BP/C(S), while mine is FF-Ti/Se-CS/P(B); we are both social type #2.
In contrast to me, he is super extroverted and more adaptable in social situations. He relies heavily on external circumstances and other people to tell him what work to focus on. Michael proudly states he never made any big decisions himself, he let life make them for him.
His biggest struggle is dealing with unpredictable change. Whenever he had built something throughout his life, he naively assumed he was finally finished, that the temple or the company couldn't possibly grow or change any further.
Again and again, life had other plans for him. Outside forces pressured Michael to change, and surrendering to these forces was his biggest struggle, and the lesson he emphasises the most.
I navigate the world differently. I am self-driven and cultivate strong preferences for what I want to work on and how. Change and chaos don't affect me as much. I rather use personal discernment to actively look for new opportunities that might serve me on my chosen path.
If I were to blindly follow Michael's advice to "surrender to the flow of life," the results could be catastrophic.
I might ignore my inner voice and natural strengths and become even more passive than I am by default. I cannot rely on others to tell me what to do because my mind isn't attuned to the tribe's needs in the way Michael's is.
If I'd interpreted “surrendering to the flow of life” as “I shouldn't stick to my plans,” I might end up moving endlessly in circles without ever getting anywhere.
If I force myself to act against my nature, I could end up miserable and depressed.
No matter how well-intentioned or generally sound, advice must be filtered through the lens of your personality and circumstances. What works for one person may be counter-productive for another.
However, if you know both your personality type and the person's type you're receiving advice from, you can follow a more nuanced approach.
Everyone Resists
The greatest lesson Michael learned was realising he's not the voice inside his head. He's the one who listens to it.
Letting go of the false identification with that incessant, neurotic voice, and surrendering to the flow of life was the path to his external accomplishments and internal happiness.
That’s the general lesson, independent of Michael’s particular personality type. You are not your mind, whatever type of mind you got. You are not your thoughts and feelings.
You might perceive life differently from him or me, but you do not see reality as it is. Maybe your mind doesn’t resist change as much as Michael’s, but it is resisting something, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Whatever your mind resists is what you have to let go of if you want to be free and happy.
Along his journey, Michael never stopped doing his saviours. So much of his success depended on them. I don’t believe he could’ve stopped, even if he had tried. But he learned to balance them out with his demons.
When change came to his doorstep, he didn’t resist it, although is mind rebelled. He let go of his mind’s resistance to change, and embraced it.
It’s the resistance to your demons that keeps you stuck in a prison of your own creation.
Doing your demons is scary. It involves discomfort and pain. You’ve been avoiding the pain for so long that you’re too scared to leave your comfort zone. You’ve become overly sensitive.
But freedom lies on the other side of your comfort zone—and this is where Michael allowed himself to go.
By letting go of the resistance to his demons, he made his saviours all the more powerful. His openness and willingness to update and adapt made his business that much more successful and future-proof. Without the balance of his demons, his software company would’ve failed because they couldn’t have kept up with new developments in technology.
Your saviours assign you the role you’re meant to play in the tribe and for the tribe. It’s what you do by default, it’s what you cannot stop doing.
But if you want to make them shine, stop resisting and balance them out with your demons when life asks you to.
That’s what Michael Singer did. He was better off for it, and so was everyone else around him.
My Surrender
If I'd tried emulating the specifics of Michael's life, I'd end up miserable. But leaning into the general principles behind his lessons may end up enriching my life tremendously.
Just as he surrendered to the flow of life and embraced the inevitable change, I can open myself to the tribe, welcoming its influence and connection.
If you look at it the right way, he and I do have one important part in common: we both lead with an introverted function, while having an extroverted function as our last demon.
All introverted functions are controlling. The observer functions, Si and Ni, are controlling about observations, life paths, and information. The decider functions, Ti and Fi, are controlling about decisions, relationships, and perspectives.
Both IxxJs and IxxPs struggle with a lack of openness.
You could even claim I'm more controlling than Michael because my first function is masculine and double-activated. Where Michael is afraid of change in his physical circumstances, I'm afraid of perspectives that contradict mine.
However, that doesn't mean I should stop using Ti for my individual discernment. It rather means I should continuously stretch the edges of my comfort zone by communicating more and facilitating an active ongoing exchange with the tribe.
For me, leading with Ti is the way to go. Being self-driven, with confident opinions and clear preferences, is how I operate best.
But if I want the results of my thinking to fully shine, if I want to create work that is of actual value to others, I must open myself up to the tribe, and allow them to be my collaborators and corrective voice. I must embrace them and all the messiness that comes with that.
I can’t clutch my opinions too tightly, but must surrender to the perspectives of others—just as Michael surrendered to the flow of life.
What is your fear?
What are you resisting?
Where is the edge of your comfort zone?
Pain and fear are only signals. They are not you. Let go of the resistance, surrender, and walk past the edge.