Personalitypage.com suggests that most people tend to rely too heavily on their Dominant function, and that they can get a fairly quick improvement in quality of life and interaction with the world simply by working on their Auxiliary function.
Just from my own experience, I tend to agree with them. IOW, it's fun to develop inferior functions at random, but you'll get the most bang for your buck (and the most alleviation of personality-related problems in life) by identifying and working specifically on your Auxiliary function.
So I would suggest that people click on the following link, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click on the link for their personality type. The info presented under their personality type will identify their Dominant function, identify what problems crop up when they overuse their Dominant function, identify their Auxiliary function, and suggest ways to develop their Auxiliary function.
Personal Growth
For example, I can talk about INFPs and ENFPs since they have the same functions as their Dominant and Auxiliary functions (just switched around).
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For example in another thread I talked about how ENFPs (Dominant Ne) can end up strung out and exhausted from paying too much attention to external stimuli. They need to develop their Auxiliary function (Fi) as a filter. That is, they need to sort through external stimuli and decide what's worthy of their attention and what's not (as opposed to noticing
everything occurring around them and getting burnt out from being bombarded by stimuli).
It's kind of hard to describe how to develop one's Fi. But here is a rough picture of Fi taken to its greatest extreme:
Imagine that your body and thoughts are big and heavy and colorful and real and palpable. Meanwhile, everything else in the world around you is filmy and semi-transparent and grey and dreary and unreal and barely noticed. You walk through the city and chew on your personal thoughts (say, irritation at something happening at work), and meantime you don't even notice the people or buildings around you. They're nearly invisible. You only notice them enough not to bump into them. Then you go home, and you walk through the house still playing with your thoughts, and the contents of the rooms are practically invisible to you. You don't even see the clutter or the crying kids or the wife trying to talk to you. All you care about is whatever is happening in your head.
That's an extreme case, of course. In real life, it would work out this way: I'm walking down the street and I hear the screech of a car slamming on its brakes. But I'm up on the sidewalk out of harm's way, and there's no sound of a crash. So that stimulus is uninteresting to me and I don't even bother looking around. The only thing that would interest me about that particular stimulus is if it were followed by a crash.
Then it might be halfway interesting and I would probably turn around and take a look to see what happened.
Or I'm walking down the hallway at work, and I pass a coworker, and the coworker glares at me strangely as we pass. I don't really care what the coworker is thinking because my job and status at the organization don't depend on his opinion of me. So I pay no attention to his glare--I'm not even curious. Maybe I check my zipper, just in case the cause of his glare is something obvious like fly being open. Maybe I even make a mental note to visit the bathroom eventually to check my appearance in the mirror and see if anything is wildly out of place about my appearance (though I probably end up forgetting about it five minutes later). Of course, if it was my
boss glaring at me in the hallway,
then I would perk up and pay attention and ask what's happening. The boss is worthy of my attention, because his decisions and opinions impact me directly. But mere coworkers aren't on my Fi radar screen. Their opinions simply don't have much impact on my life.
That would be a pretty strong Fi. That is, I register what's going on around me but don't much care. I filter things. I see something happening around me and ask, "Does it really affect me?" If not, then I ignore it and forget about it.
So that would be a way to work on Fi. Don't just react to stimuli. Instead, when a stimulus pops up, get in the habit of asking, "Does it really affect me?" If not, tune it out. And use that freed-up attention to play around internally with the concept of what "me" is. To the extent that you split yourself off from stimuli and the world around you, you'll want to increasingly define yourself and what's important to you.
That's when you'll
really get into the essence of Fi: If the world is insubstantial and ghostly and you're the only real thing, then who are you? What do you want from the world? How do you interact with the ghostly, unsubstantial people around you? (These are the questions that INFPs ask themselves when they get up in the morning and sometimes throughout the day.)
IOW, it's a two-step process. First, play with tuning out the world and ignoring stimuli around you that don't have any impact on you. Second, once you've built that wall properly, then you'll tend to need to define yourself and start to enter the INFP world of self-questioning and self-definition.
It may seem like a crazy game to play. But at least you'll finally get past the ENFP trap of being held hostage to any and all passing stimuli.
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Naturally, an INFP would completely reverse the process.
INFPs (Dominant Fi) can end up trapped inside their own head, oblivious to the world around them, and poor at personal interactions. They need to develop their Auxiliary function (Ne) as a way of climbing out of their head. That is, they need to start paying attention to external stimuli, give "weight" and "realness" to the world around them, and eventually develop sophisticated tools for dealing with the complexity of the outside world.
Personalitypage.com offers suggestions, so I won't go into it in detail. But basically it's a two step process:
First, notice the world. Do data collection. Notice how people are dressed, what they're wearing, etc. Memorize those things. Pay attention to stimuli (sounds, smells, colors) in the world around you. It will interfere with the INFP's constant thinking, but that's exactly what's needed: To shut down the endless questioning and exit one's head and go out into the world of stimuli and sensation.
From there, the second step will follow of itself. As the INFP learns to differentiate among people and stimuli, he or she will get more competent at reacting to them. The INFP should watch other people interact and then mimic that interaction. The INFP should practice greeting people, paying compliments, and engaging in small chatter. The INFP should read the paper and pay attention to local news. The INFP should try to live out in the world to the point where it overwhelms and shuts down the internal dialog.
That may sound painful to an INFP, but that's the purpose of developing Ne: to make the world real and tangible and interesting enough that the INFP will learn to live "in the moment" and develop competency at dealing with the environment around them.
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Other personality types would similarly follow suit with their own Auxiliaries.
Naturally, everyone's mileage is going to vary. People will have different levels of need for developing their Auxiliary. The tendency is: As you get older, you have more need for your Auxiliary to balance you out and help you deal with an increasingly complex work and living environment. For younger folks, it may just be a fun game to play around with.
To reiterate on the subject of developing inferior (non-Auxiliary) functions: It's fun to develop other functions beyond the Auxiliary. For instance I've had fun developing Si through sports and ballroom dance (trying to "sense" whether I'm doing a move or a step correctly just from the memory of how it should feel in my muscles and body). But it's the Auxiliary that will really create some progress in life and address the big problems that inevitably arise from over-reliance on one's Dominant function as we get older.
Just my two cents (and also my own experience as an older INFP who has managed to get pretty good at dealing with the outer world).