Ep. 8 - Effie, The Blind Spot Bot

In this episode I learn about my blind spot and how to respond to it.

Music Credit: 

Reflection Flow by Doxent Zsigmond (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/doxent/58328 Ft: Javolenus, Rocavaco, Siobhan Dakay

 

Links mentioned in this episode:

Personality Hacker

INFP Personality Type

Blind Spots

 

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the Creative Shoofly Podcast. I'm Thomas Beutel. This podcast is about my creative process, and one thing I've found is that I really get in my way a lot when it comes to making art and being creative. I want to do this podcast because I know it will force me to think more deeply about creativity. I'm hoping that doing this will push me and challenge me to create better art.    

I stay pretty busy. I have a great client base that keeps sending me interesting projects. I also have a bunch of my own creative projects, things I've started, things I've planned, things that I still dream about.  As I mentioned in a previous podcast, I carve out two hours each weekday morning to work on my own stuff and I've been sticking to it.

So why does it feel like I'm not accomplishing much? Why do I have a nagging feeling that I'm just spinning my wheels?

I recently read up on my Myers Briggs type. INFPs like me are said to have vibrant, passionate inner lives. They're said to be creative and imaginative and introspective to the core. That all resonates with me pretty well.

INFPs are also said to be unrealistic self-critical and often unfocused. Yep. That pretty much nails it too. 

I was looking over my 15-month goal calendar recently and an inner voice showed up. "Why aren't you finished yet?" It's like a bot, no feelings, no compassion. Just nagging. "Look at all these goals you need to hurry up and do them all now."

I gritted my teeth. As someone who is introspective, I needed to understand where this voice is coming from and respond to it somehow.

Maybe I can appease it, satisfy it, make a compromise, something so that it would just shut up.

My first thought was, I'll speak to this voice daily. Last year I started a daily completion journal. This is where I write down what I work on creatively that day. It feels great to look at that journal and see all the things I've worked on since I started it. But writing down what I've been completing didn't seem to be satisfying that bot-like voice. "You have so many goals," it kept saying, "how are you going to do those?"

I also do a daily check-in and reflection. It's part of my scrum-for-one process that I've mentioned before.

The scrum or huddle is just me. It's a solo huddle where I check in with myself and ask, "How are things going? What's working well? what's getting in the way?"

So I tried adding a short conversation with that bot voice, a sort of dialogue with Mr. Hurry-Up-and-Finish.

But I found that I was not very effective in arguing on my behalf. No matter what I said, pointing out how much I was doing every day, every week, explaining how much progress I was making, and learning new techniques, the bot voice would just say it wasn't enough. "Hurry up!" it always said.

I work with a wonderful coach on these very issues, and she pointed me to a resource on INFPs that I hadn't seen before. 

It's called Personality Hacker. They have an interesting approach to Myers-Briggs. Instead of being focused on behaviors, they focus on how the mind works and how each personality type learns information and makes decisions.

One of the things they propose is that each personality type has a blind spot. My blind spot is called Effectiveness.

For INFPs, it's the voice of unrealistic expectations. It asks things like, "How can I make this work?" and "What will it take to get the job done, regardless of feelings?"

Effectiveness is a type of extroverted thinking. And for certain Myers-Briggs types, it's actually the primary way of thinking and decision-making. It's their strength.

But for an introverted-fe