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New member
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2007
- Messages
- 3,359
- MBTI Type
- INFP
- Enneagram
- 4
INFPs are play before work types because unless something is deemed important, we have no reason to act. Discipline is not a strength - motivation HAS to come from an inner ideal. Homework is failing to connect to an ideal for her. She needs help seeing why this is important, and it cannot come in forms of grades or what someone else says is "important".
Grades are an external measure - INFPs don't value things in this way. Points, grade letters, & other external systems of determining what is good & bad can often seem so flawed to us we don't bother to meet them. They've lost all meaning.
For instance - we all know there are overachievers who do all of their homework & study hard & get good grades despite not being especially naturally smart. So their grades are a reflection of hard work, not grasping the concepts of the teachings necessarily. I know a lot of people who got As through doing tasks, but they had a poor understanding of what things actually mean. INFPs will see the point of homework being to learn the concepts, but if they already grasp them, then why do the homework? Just for some letter label which fails to accurately determine how well someone actually has learned a subject?
Do you see how this line of thinking can go? She may especially be devaluing homework as a way to excuse herself from it - to avoid the anxiety her perfectionist tendencies cause. Of course, now she is reaping the consequences, but the bad habit is formed. To break it, she needs to adjust her perspective on all of these things, and she probably needs some help getting perspective right now. There's no magic trick - INFP have to alter their mindset before their behavior will be affected & that can take time.
Also, positive reinforcement always works better with us than criticism or punishment; express confidence in our ability to do something, and all of a sudden, we see ourselves in that light & we do it.
+4 for me, speaks for itself.
And I would also like to add boredom is huge, when I mean huge, its EPIC!
This means we get distracted without the ability to focus on what we do because its so frigging boring and disengage in what we are learning. Not because its not, not interesting per say but because it leaves not a lot to the imagination, hardly creative and then we are disinterested in learning as effectively as we can. I mean at least for me, I know that I learn best when I'm interested, more importantly when I am emotionally connected to the subject I want to learn I go out of my way to not only learn it, I actively go deeper to the 10th degree and start learning factoids that my friends would call overdoing it.