Embracing Solitude: INTJ's Journey Towards Retirement

[zbigi]

Most important thing is actually having something valuable to contribute. Believing what you want to say is important will give you the strength to overcome shyness. (Also, that's why deluded people can be pushy - they genuinely believe they deserve to be heard).

[Western Red Cedar]

I have two questions for INTJs. How would you handle this situation? My common sense tells me to focus on work and not let others’ attitudes affect me… Honestly, I wish nobody knew that I got promoted.

On the other hand, the director said I should be more vocal in meetings. I’m engaged, but I give the impression that I’m not. As time goes by, it’s getting increasingly harder for me to speak up. I feel small around higher-ups and think that what I have to say isn’t important. I’ve tried to prepare in advance what to say, but I don’t find the moment to say it (I always find an excuse not to talk). How can I improve?

I'd encourage you to pay attention to your coworkers, and take the opportunity to recognize and highlight some of the good work they completed recently in your meetings. This is a great way to end a meeting on a positive note, and the fact that you are genuinely quiet during meetings will carry more weight.

Great managers and coworkers support their colleagues and team. Recognizing the contributions of others demonstrates leadership and builds rapport.

Anytime you find a lull in a meeting is a good time to praise one of your coworkers for their hard work. Make it about them, not yourself.

*Also, congratulations on the promotion!

[theanimal]

Feedback from people tells me that I speak very softly. I’m reading loudly 20 mins per day to improve, and recording my voice. I obviously don’t sound like a radio presenter, but I don’t feel that I sound that bad. Maybe at meetings, I get so nervous that my voice becomes incomprehensible. Then I choose to stay silent.

In the US Navy's Officer Candidate School, the candidates have to yell for the early portion of the course when communicating with anyone else. This helps make sure that everyone is communicating at appropriate volume levels and also builds confidence. I don't suggest that you start yelling at the workplace, but I would suggest that you start doing so around the house. Narrate your actions. Read even louder than you currently are doing. If your girlfriend is willing, perhaps you can communicate loudly with her for a set period of time. At work, make a point when engaging with others to focus on your volume. Err on the side of too loud, in your case it's probably just enough.

[Scott 2]

The director knew you were quiet before the promotion. I'd be surprised if it's a deal breaker.

Within a group, you have informal and formal authority. Think reputation vs. title. I'd guess the director wanted to highlight your increased formal authority. Give more weight to your perspective, encouraging both sharing and seeking.

Do you want to be loud? I don't. Stresses me out.

I'd rather seek support for my ideas outside of the meeting. Arrive confident I know what others think. Even better, solve my topic via an alternate avenue. The rise of IM and wiki's is awesome. Document the thing. You have an excuse to learn from all the most experienced people, and now you're the expert on record.

Barring that, I like leaning into meeting structure. Create the agenda. Run the conversation. Document and share the action items. Agree to demo the new feature. Filling a role removes much uncertainty over when and how to participate. Most avoid these tasks, finding them tedious. If you're already stuck in the room though...

Another option is to focus on clarifying questions. Either add weight to the opinions of those you agree with, or make a point non confrontationally. Throw colleagues softballs so they can stand out. They'll likely reciprocate.

It's much better to have people ask "what do you think" than force your opinion on them. The time where the loudest person wins is passing, especially in tech. If that's not your nature, I don't think leaning into it will work well.


I do love the idea of yelling everything though. That's hilarious.

[Lemur]

Think my advice is still much the same...
viewtopic.php?p=276935#p276935

Though I think it is important for you to lean into your strengths. Introverted experts are highly valued in the workplace. Your director just wants you to show that a bit more. You don't have to be a great orator or pretend to be someone you aren't - meetings / public speaking is a skill that improves with exposure...and more exposure. Eventually the more you do it, the more comfortable you will get, and you'll find your own style after a while.

Also want to add that I've noticed a general theme of your posts over the years. A lot of it may seem like you see yourself as this square peg trying to fit in a round hole (the round hole being at your employer or perhaps even society at large) but to me it sounds like classic glossophobia / social anxiety that can be treated (but perhaps not necessarily cured) with the right form of therapy (CBT / Exposure training is what I did and it was awesome) and the right medications (like beta blockers which I've never done but have read a lot of accounts of them being very useful and you can wean off them once you're ready). Personality typing has some correlation with this but its not causative - plenty of introverts / or more specifically INTJs do not have trouble with public speaking - many just don't prefer it.

I have realized that you might not be so responsive to my second paragraph based on a past post:
viewtopic.php?p=289392#p289392

But I do think the general advice of more exposure is still solid...its pretty rooted in the general science of overcoming some anxieties. Have you considered taking a public speaking course?

[okumurahata]

Thanks for all the responses. I’ll reread them several times and combine the advice into a cocktail that works for me. Apologies for the recurring theme – it’s just my brain trying to find solutions. I checked my phone’s Health app, and today my heart rate went from 40 to 120 bpm, with the highest point during that meeting, so yeah about social anxiety and glossophobia (didn’t know that word before). I was sitting down, but it felt like light training at the gym. Something isn’t right. When I’m calm and confident, I feel like the most talkative person. This happens with certain folks in some meetings, but in others, it feels like I can’t say a word. I also feel really stupid at the same time. Public speaking feels like a kind of shock therapy that feels terrifying. I wish I could take baby steps. I feel blocked.

Reading the forum over the past few days, I’m also wondering if I’d be here trying to escape the 9-to-5 life if I were a ‘normal’ person who could connect with others like everyone else. Maybe ERE is, for me, a form of escapism from deeper mental health issues.

[ertyu]

Maybe ERE is, for me, a form of escapism from deeper mental health issues.

I started that way too. It was a fantasy of being able to leave a job that was making me batshit, terrified all the time, stressed, and unhappy. "Freedom from." But it's a motivation to keep doing the right things, and ultimately, doing the right things over time will get results.

[AxelHeyst]

I intentionally developed speaking louder, speaking up, speaking more confidently, etc in professional settings/meetings. I struggled with social anxiety in professional settings in meetings and making phone calls. I got direct feedback from my boss to talk up more.

I tried a lot of things to improve. I'm not sure which actions contributed the most or not at all, but to my memory, things that helped:
-affirmations/psyching myself up. I had some lines I said to myself as I was walking to work in the morning.
-preparing things to say ahead of time. I'm pretty bad at coming up with things to say on the fly, so I'd pre-script things to say or patterns of things to say, and look for opportunities to say them in meetings. If you know a meeting is coming up on topic X, do some thinking ahead of time. Develop some opinions and write them down. Don't have an opinion on X? Too bad, get one.
-working out. In particular working out over lunch break. Endorphins are your friend.
-Riding my bike to work fast. The rush of riding in Oakland traffic on a single speed is a great way to get endorphins *and* some perspective. The TLDR here is to make sure you're moving your body, getting the blood pumping, every day.
-Every time I came back to work from a climbing trip, it was like the gain on my social anxiety and professional stresses was turned way down. Being in a situation your body perceives as life or death (even though what I was doing was very safe) is a great way to develop a relaxed attitude about it all.
-Get laid
-Get really good/very knowledgeable about a topic. Ideally, be 'the' expert on the topic. It's a lot easier to be confident talking about something you know inside and out.
-Giving professional talks. They key for INTJs is to 'over'prepare. I had a stack of books on giving live presentations and re-read them every time I had a talk to give. I practiced every talk multiple multiple times, in the clothes I was planning on wearing, while visualizing being in front of a room of 30 of my bosses. I aimed for familiarity with my talk to the point of memorization, but I had notes in my pocket anyways just in case. I believe giving highly prepared talks helps with being more assertive in realtime events like meetings.
-Find someone who has a professional demeanor you like and try to mimic them (not so much people can tell you're acting like Steve from Marketing, but pay attention to them and try to mimic).

ETA: How to handle good things happening to you in front of coworkers: smile, say thank you, nod your head once, and then go back to your standard body language as best you can, like you're more interested in getting on with being productive and have already forgotten about it. Just focus on the work. If people bring it up in conversation, same thing: smile, thanks, and then turn the conversation to project work or etc. You're not here for the popularity contest, you're here to work. Put off that vibe and people will respect it.

[Mousse]

Public speaking feels like a kind of shock therapy that feels terrifying. I wish I could take baby steps. I feel blocked.

Apologies if this has come up before, but personally I found the Toastmasters format to work well for baby steps, if there happens to be a club near you. It's not so much the prepared speeches aspect that helped me the most, but the "topics" section of the meeting where you're given an absolutely random topic and have to talk about it for 1-3 minutes with zero prep. The first few times, I froze, my sight went dark and I literally couldn't see or hear anything, and barely recalled anything I'd said after. After a few weeks/months of this happening and realising I did not actually die, it got easier. I didn't stay long enough in the club to get really good at speaking off the cuff, but the stress reactions got way more manageable. I remember noticing it in work when I was doing a training, the kind with exercises like discussions in a smaller group where someone has to present the group's "findings" back to the rest of the class after. Everybody started sweating and avoiding each other's eyes, but having two whole minutes to prepare felt like absolute luxury to me. I'm a lot more comfortable just stepping up for these things than I used to be since then. In my opinion, this is thanks to having spent time in a "safe" environment where I could stumble and people remained encouraging and supportive the whole way. They may help with learning how to project your voice better, too. (If I have a chance to go back myself, it will be to work on this!) Good luck.

[guitarplayer]

Take a few slow breathing in and out just to get yourself in a good place. Then find a comfortable spot and do view from above for a few minutes.

That is, centre attention on yourself and then start zooming out either in time (today, this week, year, lifetime, Millenium, … beginning of time), space (this chair, room, building, district, city, country, continent, planet, solar system, … all physical space) or significance (giving a presentation, learning something or losing ability to learn, being born or dying, famine or new discoveries, so on).

Then stuff generally tends to lose on significance so at least you will not be preoccupied with performance and in effect might just improve performance, or unlock or unblock.

Also, I am occasionally reminded of this cartoon where there’s bunch of children that are holding up facades of adults.

[zbigi]

If your physical reactions are severe, there are drugs you can take before the meeting to dull them. Xanax and similar will make your care less, while beta-blockers will temporarily disable some physical reactions to stress, like racing heart. They could be used temporarily, as stepping stones for building skills and confidence.

[jacob]

Reading the forum over the past few days, I’m also wondering if I’d be here trying to escape the 9-to-5 life if I were a ‘normal’ person who could connect with others like everyone else. Maybe ERE is, for me, a form of escapism from deeper mental health issues.

Filling the day with the predictable humdrum of ticking check boxes occasionally interspersed with small talk around the water cooler and getting paid regularly for a job that doesn't really matter is considered by most people to be a feature rather than a bug. Most jobs are designed around the notion that individual effort shouldn't and doesn't make much a difference (it just takes the more ambitious humans a bit longer to figure that out!) Replaceable cogs in a machine and all that. Imagine the risk to the machine as an ongoing concern if it was otherwise.

Plato's Cave is still designed around a one-size-fits-all mass-industry concept, where all workers and all customers are ideally the same. It stands to reason that those who fall more than, say, one standard deviation outside that norm aren't a "good fit" for the economy as it is currently designed. It is not easy to avoid being a cog or at least take on some cog like behavior because of the obligation to interface with parts of the economy that are cog like. E.g. even if you "work for yourself" you still have clients and customers who expect a cog-like product from you.

All ERE or FIRE does is to offer an alternative to that.

Methinks mental health issues can be externally or internally generated (or both of course). External mental issues come from the environment where someone is in a bad place and where removing that person from the bad place will instantly "cure" them. Internal mental issues come from the person himself. Obviously removing that person from the environment is not going to cure anything. It's just going to create a new kind of problems relative to the new environment.

The problem is that often people can't tell the difference between whether an issue is internal (is it me?) or external (is it them?). A lot of this is due to lack of experience (with different environment) or lack of self-knowledge (little introspection has been done---cog-like society even seem to actively discourage any useful approaches in favor of selling a service or a product). Thus an unhappy person in a workplace can't tell if those happy people who have left the workplace are happy because they're not-unhappy or because they're not-working.

As such it stands to reason that an unhappy worker should look at both possible root causes.

(In nerd-speak: The modern workplace has been optimized for MHC(concrete) to MHC(formal). As such people at a higher stage find most jobs boring. The modern workplace also hires pretty much all stages from "hell" to "heaven". In the two-dimensional space this creates, the modern workplace is best for people of median MHC and median stage. People outside the median need different solutions though.)

[okumurahata]

October 2024 update:

Code: Select all

// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
// Assets
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stocks: 49.062,87 EUR
Cash: 20.829,02 EUR
+----------------------------------+
TOTAL = 69.891,89 EUR
+----------------------------------+

// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
// Liabilities
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Debt: 0 EUR
+----------------------------------+
TOTAL = 0 EUR
+----------------------------------+

// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
// Monthly income
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Job: 1.599 EUR
GF contribution: 700 EUR
+----------------------------------+
TOTAL = 2.299 EUR
+----------------------------------+

// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
// Monthly expenses
// ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rent: 500 EUR
Electricity: ~40 EUR
Water: ~20 EUR
Internet: 40 EUR
Food: ~400 EUR
Gym: ~50 EUR
+----------------------------------+
TOTAL = 1.050 EUR
+----------------------------------+

Progress until retirement (considering 25x yearly expenses):

Code: Select all

⬛⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 22,19%

I keep moving forward. The market is doing well; I’m approaching 70k EUR. The biggest expense of last month was travel tickets to Thailand for my girlfriend and me. It’s been almost two years since we last went to the Land of Smiles. We’ll be there for two weeks, visiting my girlfriend’s family and doing some travelling. Her contribution will be higher in the upcoming months due to sharing the ticket expenses.

The ticket price isn’t optimal in terms of ERE. Ideally, you’d want to spend the most time in SEA to make the ticket worth it. But we’re both working now, and it is what it is.

Regarding the previous discussion, I’ve been looking into Toastmasters events here in Barcelona; I want to give it a go, even if it’s painfully uncomfortable. It’s for the sake of experimenting with social anxiety. I’m anti-pills; Xanax would be my last resort. Perhaps it would help to walk baby steps, but it might create addiction when I hit a wall in life. @oku, if you need pills, consider quitting. Don’t mess with your mind to try to fit in. If you’re quiet like a mute, perhaps a monastery would be a better fit for you. Your mind is the most valuable thing in your body. Better homeless with a strong mind, than having a fake stability thanks to medication.

@jacob, I believe that internal circumstances and personality type set a resonant frequency. External circumstances bring me close to that frequency, and it’s only a matter of time until the bridge collapses. So both (me and them) contribute to some extent.

Anyway, what I know for sure is that if I achieved FIRE, I would never naturally attend a meeting. That’s the real @oku. Just as you’d never see me socialising with strangers in a bar.

[Henry]

Better homeless with a strong mind, than having a fake stability thanks to medication.

With powerful words like that and a few Toastmasters under your belt, you'll be the Martin Luther King Jr. of the homeless community.

[okumurahata]

With powerful words like that and a few Toastmasters under your belt, you'll be the Martin Luther King Jr. of the homeless community.

What offends me is that you forgot to mention my potential portable projector as the most important tool for street propaganda. Isn’t that closing loops? I might be at WL8…

[Henry]

There's no one more than me who would love to see you retire on the proceeds of the 18-22 pseudo militant demographic bouncing to reggae, donning t-shirts emblazoned with your likeness. Che, Malcolm, Oku...

But if that doesn't happen, maybe best man, mediocrity is achievable.

[okumurahata]

In two weeks, @oku, also known as the aspiring mediocre man, has a presentation. Not Toastmasters, but still a presentation. Yesterday, I recorded myself during a meeting. ‘Ridiculous’ is the most reasonable word I can find. I couldn’t listen to myself for more than two minutes.

[guitarplayer]

This is very normal because sound waves from our vocal apparatus transmit to ears through skull on a day to day so when you record your voice and listen to it from outside it is sounds very unnatural, I wouldn’t worry about it.

[Henry]

I don't think the possibility that Oku is an abhorrent public speaker who would be the primary benificiary of a universally imposed vow of silence should be discarded. Actually, I would bet he's as bad if not worse than he thinks he is. I think Oku should watch/re-watch the King's Speech in order that he's given an example of how even those rightfully possessing a debilitating fear of of public speaking can rise to functional mediocrity.

[Scott 2]

Audience count? Live or remote? Duration? Venue? Slide deck?