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What's it like being ni dom?

Lady_X

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would you say that you do tend to be more focused on potential negatives rather than positives?

do you assume things will turn out well? or do you usually feel that something will go wrong?

also...thank you so much for taking the time to write all this out. i find it fascinating. i like what you said about why you like history...that's cool i can understand that.

i'll have to come back to the other stuff.
 

Fidelia

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When deciding on a course of action I am certainly focussed on potential negatives. I think I am much more geared towards prevention rather than reaction to negative situations. However, once I've chosen a course of action, I am generally pretty optimistic. By ruling out some people or choices at the beginning, I feel like it leaves me more open to not becoming jaded or cynical or afraid down the road.

When observing or advising other people, I think I probably also focus on the potential risk/negatives more than what they might miss out on if they don't try something. Mostly when I do that though, it is based on solid examples of past observations with a large control group, so I feel relatively sure that things are likely to go in the negative way that I envision they could.

In small things, that doesn't matter. However if it's a major life decision like marrying or raising kids a certain way or participating in a particular activity, I find it difficult to be 98% sure that something isn't going to work out well for someone, and yet see them only focussing on how it might go well or saying that they'll deal with it if they encounter a problem after the fact.

Sometimes though I am overly risk avoidant. For example, I like to observe people interact a lot before I jump in. I find that I rarely get involved with people in any way except very superficially before I know what to expect from them. I am okay with dealing with people's negative responses as long as I am not blindsided by them. I don't generally tell people about something important to me until I feel fairly confident that the person will react in a particular way.

As I've gotten older I've gotten better at judging when I should take more risks. I've gotten much better at initiating interaction and in jumping in sooner rather than waiting to be approached all the time. I think I've also gotten better at not filtering and filtering and filtering my responses before ever saying anything. I've probably learned better what social situations I will be more effective in and accepted that about myself rather than wishing I was someone else.

I really do value people though that make me want to try new things because I am embarrassed easily and I tend to stick with what I know (not scared of change in routine so much as hating to spend my time or money on something if it doesn't turn out as well as the other thing that I am more used to and there's no way of knowing ahead of time). My food tastes have expanded tremendously as I've grown older, but if given a choice being trying something new and doing something I already know that I love, I probably will choose what is familiar. At the same time, I am curious about people and about the things around me and I do appreciate having a wider range of experiences.

Sometimes I can rule out potential courses of action that I haven't had time enough to think about or that are very unexpected/foreign. I also rule things out when people can't account for the potential problems associated in a satisfactory way. Therefore it works better for the people around me if they don't rush me into taking a course of action I'm not sure about until they've given me more discussion time to get my head around it and change my internal framework. I have sometimes decided that something someone has suggested is a bad idea, but it turns out okay once it is implemented.

I derive a certain sense of security in decision making by arriving at a particular framework or philosophy by which decisions can then be clearly and objectively made. By developing a hypothesis for how I believe things work and testing it, I then can start incorporating it into my personal philosophy. Usually new information is added a bit at a time and a lot of thought, discussion, observation and time have been put into it. That's why it frustrates me when I have to be under leadership that seemingly has not subjected itself to the same kind of process or who seemingly have no way of making decisions that are compatible and consistent within a larger framework.

Don't know if any of this is linked to Ni/focussing on potential negatives, or if it is just a personal quirk of mine, but I've heard other INFJs express some of the same sentiments in varying degrees.
 

Reverie

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also...what kind of art do you like?
do you feel compelled to create?
do you feel like you live deep within your inner world?
I like the kind of work that to me has multiple levels of interpretations. The types of artists, moviemakers and songwriters that leave you a trail of cookie crumbs to follow into their own universe. I like there to be a possibility for discovery. I like strong intense personalities and some gunpowder in the work itself. Things that are a little subversive perhaps and that question the way we see things. My favorite visual artists are e.g Frida Kahlo, Yoko Ono, Edvard Munch. I do also like Mucha.
In artschool my style was described as evocative of german expressionism. I love doing portraits. I think I enjoy capturing the kind of a spirit or essence of a person. I do painting sporadically and as a way to unwind mostly.
I was a semi-pro musician for a decade, though in a kind of a subcultural context. I have been told I have an "Unusual" take on things. A little bit of reminiscient of magical realism in literature for a point of comparison. But to be honest I don't think there's anything very peculiar about my songs. I actually thought at first that they were pretty straightforward and polemic. It was a shock to realize that people thought they were cryptic and that they usually had a vastly different interpretation of what I was trying to say. ... I just kind of gave up on the idea of being "understood" a long long time ago. I kind of see them as a type of a Rorschach test. When someone interprets one to me I interpret them from their interpretation. ;)
I love music though and performance. At first I was terrified but it's like learning to ride a bike. You do it enough times and you forget why it ever seemed difficult. I find it satisfying because unlike elsewhere in life where I constantly have to censor myself to a degree on stage I can let loose. It's like a safe place for that.

As for living in an inner world. I do think I do quite alot. Just judging by the amount of times I accidentally throw the leftovers in the sink and the plate in the trash. ;) Obviously you absolutely have to get real and focused just living on this planet. To get things done. The tax forms don't fill themselves. I can at times look like someone who's really got their act together and efficient. It's a temporary illusion though.
I kind of see it like I hang out in my mind when I can and then surface with all these things I've thought about and *crosses fingers* put that info into something concrete. a song, a poem or something everyday and practical. Advice to a friend. It's like fishing.

When I have something I want to express it doggedly haunts me until I get it done.
would you say that you do tend to be more focused on potential negatives rather than positives?

do you assume things will turn out well? or do you usually feel that something will go wrong?
I can get quite negative at times. It irks me but I can be the "All the things that can go wrong" guy. That said when I have one of my stronger intuitions I've learned to just go with it and trust it with the confidence that things will pan out in X amount of time.
 
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SilkRoad

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I think my Ni-ness is also quite heavily influenced by being a type 6. But here are a few of the things I'd cite:

-Buzzing mind
-Constantly seeing connections; it's meaningful if I see a few people over a few days reading the same book on public transport (especially a book meaningful to me); or if I have a convo with a friend and immediately after see something that seems directly related; etc.
-A lot of things emerge fully formed. If I've had to write an essay, or something like that, I just kind of stash the info in my head and when I come to write it, it's pretty much written itself mentally; including the way I'm going to phrase it, the connections involved, etc.
-I need to be patient sometimes or I can make mistakes. If I've had an emotional shock, I may need to be patient for days, weeks or months to see how I truly feel about it. I feel like it's a picture coming gradually into focus, maybe like the way a Polaroid develops.
-I feel like everything in my life is a response to, or a catalyst for, everything else. Everything is interrelated, nothing is unconnected. If I have a passion in my life of some sort, a really important one (and I've had a number of those), it will affect me forever and perhaps lead me down paths I never expected.
 

highlander

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Sometimes I make up conversations (even out loud) to process things happening between me and someone else and to envision how it might go or give vent to certain feelings at the time. I find though that after awhile on my own, I need the opportunity to interact with other people for the things I thought about to be useful to me or to be put into action in some way. I get kind of wilty after awhile without people, even though I can't deal with constant stimulation either. Not sure how much of that stuff has to do with so/sx enneagram stacking though.

:laugh: On bolded - I do exactly the same thing. I wonder if it has anything to do with Ni. I don't think it's typical. I have read somewhere that Ni doms can "carry on internal conversations to an extreme."

Y
I never thought about how I create before, but that's exactly it - practical creativity. For me, I think it has a lot to do with solving problems. I thought it was interesting how you explained about testing something by shooting holes in it. I realized that I may sound negative sometimes to people, but my first focus is on improving the places where there are problems. If I am around people I don't know well, I stifle the compulsion to discuss what I see, but it is difficult to do. From personal experience, I've found that others often don't think in those terms and so can be annoyed or misunderstand me if I give voice to my observations.

Maybe we have learned to stifle some of those thoughts because we are surrounded by SJs and SPs, who think very differently as you say. I still run into situations where I will interject something and people will just kind of look at me confused - where did that come from? what do you mean? how does that relate to what we are discussing? It's like they are missing the whole point - the broader implications - I can't easily explain it within the context of the current dialogue. It just gets blurted out.

would you say that you do tend to be more focused on potential negatives rather than positives?

do you assume things will turn out well? or do you usually feel that something will go wrong?

I'm much more focused on seeing things that can go wrong in the future. Realize I'm also an Enneagram 6. This doesn't conflict with the fact that I'm a pretty optimistic person. You want to shape the future towards a positive result and the way you do that is to recognize problems in advance and take actions to prevent them from occurring or produce a more positive result moving forward. People sometimes view this as being overly critical. They don't see any immediate problem. It's something I bring to projects at work. I'm very good at seeing what can go wrong before it goes wrong and take actions to prevent the bad things from occurring.

I derive a certain sense of security in decision making by arriving at a particular framework or philosophy by which decisions can then be clearly and objectively made. By developing a hypothesis for how I believe things work and testing it, I then can start incorporating it into my personal philosophy. Usually new information is added a bit at a time and a lot of thought, discussion, observation and time have been put into it. That's why it frustrates me when I have to be under leadership that seemingly has not subjected itself to the same kind of process or who seemingly have no way of making decisions that are compatible and consistent within a larger framework.

Don't know if any of this is linked to Ni/focussing on potential negatives, or if it is just a personal quirk of mine, but I've heard other INFJs express some of the same sentiments in varying degrees.

That first sentence sounds like Ti to me.
 

highlander

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do you have an affinity for classical music?

Music means a lot to me though I've never been a musician or hardly played an instrument at all. I regret not taking up piano because I think I would have been good at it. I don't much like country, jazz or rap but outside of that, my musical tastes are pretty broad. I enjoy a lot of classical music but don't go out of my way to listen to it. There is a lot of classical music that is delicate, soft and nuanced. I like stuff that's bigger and more in your face.
 

RaptorWizard

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Ni dominants are such strange, unusual, and mystical people who are many leagues beyond my feeble comprehension. Their Ni makes them psychic!
 

SilkRoad

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Ni dominants are such strange, unusual, and mystical people who are many leagues beyond my feeble comprehension. Their Ni makes them psychic!

:huh:
 

uumlau

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i'm curious. i can sort of grasp it as a support function...but it's hard to comprehend it as a driving force.

It's a worldview. Everything is understood in terms of cause and effect, as opposed to what things are and what kind of thing is something (archetypes, Si). Implied in "cause and effect" are all the dynamics to which everything is subject. It ends up being classified as "intuition" and "mystical" because it isn't concrete the way archetypes of things are concrete. One is stuck waving one's hands and saying, "isn't it obvious that it works that way?" and wondering why it isn't obvious to everyone else.

The intuition can seem even more mystical and magical because thinking in terms of "cause and effect" makes it obvious when cause and effect are inconsistent: think of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, where the protagonist simply knows that something is true or untrue because the supposed causes are missing effects, or effects are present that imply unmentioned causes.

For an ENFP, Ne is the leading function. It deals more with out-of-context thinking - finding relationships between ideas in different contexts/situations. Ni necessarily explores within a single context at a time: it discerns which causes/effect belong in a context. Ni isn't concerned with the "things" in the context: a shop isn't identified by its name, but rather by what it sells, and more specifically, in terms of what the Ni dom would consider buying from it.

So if you think of "cause and effect" as worldlines, as strings, Ni sees these flows naturally, without having to think hard. Ni memorizes how these flows flow. Then in spite of having a "bad memory for details" (in Si terms), if you give an Ni dom a few pieces of information, Ni immediately starts seeing how the pieces of information flow and fit (or don't fit) with each other. If Ni already has a lot of stored information (of flows and a few specific details), new pieces of information immediately fit or don't fit, producing the intuitive insight. The new information has to align with the current flows: if it doesn't fit, it's wrong (obviously so, to Ni, which can make for difficult arguments and accusations of stubbornness), and if it does fit, it immediately points to new truths that aren't at all obvious to those who aren't thinking of the world in terms of these flows.

Also, because they are flows, cause and effect, many of the insights of Ni tend to be remarkably accurate predictions about what will happen in the future. Just as often, like in the Sherlock Holmes example, they are remarkably accurate troubleshooting, seeing the cause that must have occurred (where to Ti, the logic for such a conclusion is rather incomplete).

Anyway, that's pretty much it. All of the mystery of Ni just has to do with its wordlessness. We have no words for the flows we see, and those flows are so obvious to Ni, it doesn't occur to Ni doms that no one else sees them, thus Ni self-descriptions of thought processes tend to be, um, rather poor and not very useful descriptions.
 

SilkRoad

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[MENTION=9310]uumlau[/MENTION]'s description of "the flows" is great. Also, I don't know if this is Ni-dom specific, but I tend to find myself resorting repeatedly to certain metaphors or archetypal images and I gradually start to realise what they stand for or what they are telling me. The Antarctic ice fields, or a boat drifting from the shore. When they recur again and again I know I need to pay attention because something is trying to get out (perhaps an artistic insight), or I have some unfinished business or something that's troubling me.

I tend to "know" when two different authors who might not even have read each other are working from the same...collective unconscious, to take the Jungian route, I guess. I can see that they are using parallel or almost identical metaphors and how their works reveal things about each other's work and how the human mind acts and reacts.
 

Salomé

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-A lot of things emerge fully formed. If I've had to write an essay, or something like that, I just kind of stash the info in my head and when I come to write it, it's pretty much written itself mentally; including the way I'm going to phrase it, the connections involved, etc
Definitely sounds like magic to me too!
No fair.
 

SilkRoad

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Definitely sounds like magic to me too!
No fair.

I think Ni-doms are supposed to be good writers generally, but I think for me writing works like that not just because I'm Ni-dom but because that's where any of my talents lie... I imagine that for an Ni-dom visual artist (though they're perhaps more often Ne-dom?) it would be a similar process?
 

Usehername

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It's a worldview. Everything is understood in terms of cause and effect, as opposed to what things are and what kind of thing is something (archetypes, Si).

How can people really think in terms of anything else than cause and effect though? The only thing constant is change, so giving something a permanent meaning isn't going to remain that way in the future. Surely everyone has experienced change.
 

uumlau

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How can people really think in terms of anything else than cause and effect though? The only thing constant is change, so giving something a permanent meaning isn't going to remain that way in the future. Surely everyone has experienced change.

I'm not sure what analogy would work best for you. For those who understand databases, the analogy is that the Ni database has the "cause and effect" field(s) indexed, while the Si database has the "names, kinds and archetypes" fields indexed.

Other types don't think of "change" as naturally and intuitively as Ni doms do, and when they do, they make a static picture of it. A classic example is Einstein's (INTP, tertiary Si) general theory of relativity. Instead of the Newtonian (Ni) picture of a process evolving over time, time is instead relative, is a "4th dimension", and in the 4-d manifold, everything is static. Motion is a result of projecting along a particular choice of direction of time (the 3+1 formulation of GR).

And it isn't as if Ni doms don't understand classifications and archetypes and so on - they just don't happen to be the building blocks upon which our thought patterns are based.
 

Nicodemus

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It is almost obscene how carelessly you people expose your innermost habits of thought.
 

Usehername

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I'm not sure what analogy would work best for you. For those who understand databases, the analogy is that the Ni database has the "cause and effect" field(s) indexed, while the Si database has the "names, kinds and archetypes" fields indexed.

Other types don't think of "change" as naturally and intuitively as Ni doms do, and when they do, they make a static picture of it. A classic example is Einstein's (INTP, tertiary Si) general theory of relativity. Instead of the Newtonian (Ni) picture of a process evolving over time, time is instead relative, is a "4th dimension", and in the 4-d manifold, everything is static. Motion is a result of projecting along a particular choice of direction of time (the 3+1 formulation of GR).

And it isn't as if Ni doms don't understand classifications and archetypes and so on - they just don't happen to be the building blocks upon which our thought patterns are based.

So in the way that [MENTION=7111]fidelia[/MENTION] and I struggle to impose order upon our files with "names, kinds, archetypes," even though we understand the concept quite well and just struggle to implement it, other people struggle to work with our system. I guess I get that. Except we seem to be aware that we're sucking to implement their system, and other people are so damn cocky that they're right when they're not even seeing that 4th motion dimension.

If I leave out a dimension of data, I can claim with authority that the earth the center of the universe. From this perspective it seems like they enjoy leaving out data so that they feel confident and in control. Just because they can't see it doesn't mean they're not feeling the ripple effects. I can't see the wind but I feel that it's there and it's moving and affecting me and my environment.
 

Lady_X

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okay so i'm reading it and hearing you all but i'm not getting it.

i get now why i always score high on ni tho because if asked i would say i do these things...but i shouldn't if i'm ne so i'm guessing i just not getting it.
[MENTION=9310]uumlau[/MENTION] please if you will...can you give me an example. maybe a personal one where you would think something through one way and your enfp would do it another way

also [MENTION=7595]INTP[/MENTION] can you explain to me again how certain combinations of function can look like something else? pretty please?
 

highlander

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Ni converges. Ne diverges.
 

sulfit

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For what Ni feels like take a look at Fiona Apple's video posted in this thread. That explained it very well for me (even though it is not my natural function).
 
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