I’m Going On An Adventure!

6 March, 20195 March, 2019Marissa

So … I’m going to France this fall.

If you’re reading that and staring at the screen like this 😮 you’re not alone; I’m pretty shocked, too.

My family has always traveled for Sukkot/Feast of Tabernacles. It’s an 8-day festival and there are groups meeting to celebrate it all over the world, so that’s a perfect time to travel. This year, though, my parents are meeting with a local group and my sister suggested we take off with our brother for a more distant location than usual.

Considering the farthest from home I’ve been up until this point is Rapid City, South Dakota the Mediterranean coast of France is quite a bit more adventurous. Both my siblings will have visited Europe before by the time we leave for France, but this will be my first trip overseas and only my second trip in an airplane.

On a side note, I now want to re-read The Hobbit after picking Bilbo’s words for the title of this post title. Not planning on facing any dragons while in France, but a girl can always dream.

I’m really excited about this trip. Truly I am. I’m fascinated by European history and French is one of the very few languages I’ve put any effort into learning. We’ll get to do things like visit a museum housed in a 12-century church and go horseback riding along the Mediterranean coast. It’s a dream come true! Several, in fact.

But I’m also experiencing some mild panic. It’s not the most prudent financial decision I’ve ever made. I don’t like committing to things this far in advance, even though I do like to plan ahead. And the wide variety of first experiences and unknowns provide plenty of fuel to power my anxious imagination.

So one of my main goals in prepping for this trip over the next several months is to not panic. There’s no reason my imagination has to get stuck on all the terrifying “what if?” questions. I’ve used my mind to come up with whole fantasy worlds and people who exist nowhere else but my imagination the printed page. Surely I can use it to imagine all the good things that can (and will) happen on a trip to France with my brother and sister.

Do any of my readers who deal with anxiety have travel tips you’d like to share?

How To Communicate More Comfortably As An Introvert

11 September, 201810 September, 2018Marissa

Talking can be hard for introverts. Get us in just the right setting and you might have trouble making us shut up, but in most everyday conversations we struggle to come up with anything to talk about. As I wrote about last week, many introverts struggle to talk about personal things. Beyond that, we struggle with knowing what to talk about at all.

We often assume most people don’t want to hear about the things we care about. We think it sounds boring to answer, “What did you do last weekend?” by saying “Stayed home with my cat and watched Netflix.” Or we worry that we sound uninteresting if we answer, “What do you like to do?” with “Read, contemplate life, hide in a blanket fort … you know, exciting stuff like that.”

The Kind Of Talking We Don’t Like

About 50% of the population is introverted so there’s actually a good chance of you finding other people who think what you enjoy is perfectly normal because they also enjoy similar things. But for those of us in the United States, and other cultures that tend to have more “extroverted” values, we might still feel pressure to not be “weird” and stick with “normal” topics of conversation. Read more →

Why It’s So Hard To Talk About Personal Things As An Introvert

4 September, 20189 September, 2018Marissa

If you’re an introvert, do you enjoy talking about yourself? Many of us don’t. We don’t want to share personal details. We’re also hesitant to ask other people personal questions. If they want to share that’s okay, but asking them feels like prying. We don’t particularly want to be pried into so we assume other people don’t either.

But whether we like to admit it or not, sharing personal details and stories is key to building connections with people. Whether we want to have a good business relationship, keep in touch with acquaintances, develop a friendship, or enter a relationship with someone we have to be able to talk about ourselves and ask questions about the other person.

Learning to talk about ourselves and engaging with others on a personal level can be a challenge for introverts. This also means it’s a wonderful opportunity for personal growth. I don’t know about you, but I would love to be a better conversationalist. I don’t want to become “more extroverted” per se, but I do want to learn to communicate well as an introvert. Read more →

The Tale of An Ice Skating INFJ

8 January, 20188 January, 2018Marissa

I love ice skating. The graceful sweep of a skater’s arms and legs as they glide along the ice. The crunching swish as ice flies up when they come to a stop. The romance of sweeping over a frozen lake with glittering stars overhead.

But I only liked skating from a distance. Figure skating is the only winter sport I ever follow or watch, even during the Olympics. I’ve even been to see the Smucker’s Stars On Ice Tour (just once — my grandmother had tickets. I loved it). I’ll watch YouTube videos of figure skating much the same way I watch Dancing With The Stars routines. And I didn’t try it myself.

This past Saturday evening, though, I actually strapped on skates went out on the ice. I spent the weekend visiting my boyfriend and when he learned I’d never actually been ice skating he pulled out his phone and found out when the rinks were open. Which is something I never really thought about trying. I haven’t even looked for local ice skating rinks or thought about signing up for lessons or tried to find out if friends with frozen ponds had skates I could borrow.

The Tale of An Ice Skating INFJ | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo credit: Benson Kua, CC BY-SA via Flickr

Many INFJs struggle with translating what’s in our heads into the outer world. We have a hard time turning our dreams into reality. And that’s only if we get to the point where we think about making them real at all. Often, we don’t get past the daydreaming phase before getting distracted by yet another idea that’s probably going to stay in our heads as well.

Another thing many (though not all) INFJs deal with is a lack of affinity for sports. Many of us don’t watch them and we certainly don’t play them. It requires far too much coordination and balance and teamwork.

But even though I don’t think of myself as balanced or coordinated, I’m on a dance team at church and I’ve even started teaching dance. I love it. And I’m pretty good at it. So there’s no reason those skills shouldn’t translate into similar activities like ice skating.

I wonder if perhaps we INFJs might be missing out on things we’d actually enjoy because we assume we won’t be good at it. Just because Extroverted Sensing is our weak spot doesn’t mean we can’t work on befriending that function and give ourselves a chance to enjoy physical activities.

Even though many INFJs struggle with outer-world activities, it’s good for us to actually try the things we’ve been daydreaming about. When I tried ice skating, I was sure I’d fall over before I even made it to the ice. But I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t fall at all. It turns out I like skating even though I was nervous and cautious and wobbly. It was so much fun. There were even moments (brief ones) where I felt like I was starting to figure out what I was doing and could just skate instead of thinking about how to stay upright. And I’m planing to try it again, hopefully fairly soon.

The Problem of Being Too Agreeable

5 December, 20164 December, 2016Marissa

INFJs place a high value on interpersonal harmony. Often, that manifests (especially in less mature/confident INFJs) as an unwillingness to just flat-out turn someone down. We’d much rather use “maybe,” “someday,” and “that might be nice” rather than “no,” “never,” and “I don’t think so.”

But that can back-fire on us and create discord in friendships. Other types can interpret our “maybes” as commitments, then get upset at us for breaking our word. Or they might recognize that we’re brushing them off and become frustrated by our refusal to give them a direct answer. Our attempts to avoid conflict can actually make things worse.

click to read article, "The Problem of Being Too Agreeable" | marissabaker.wordpress.com — Photo credit: “Smile Harder” by Kevin Galens, CC BY-SA via Flickr

Last week, we talked about one problem that can plague INFJ friendships — the fact that we have a tendency drop out of contact with our friends. It’s fairly easily explained from the INFJ’s perspective, but it can have an unintentional affect of hurting the people around us. Another similar (and in some ways related) problem is our temptation to noncommittally agree with what we think people want to hear, then ignore them and hope they forget about it. Read more →

It All Started With Dancing

The Kind Of Talking We Don’t Like