On the surface, it may seem like the right move for INFPs to approach decision-making with analysis and logic (like many other types do), but these things can actually take INFPs off track and leave us second-guessing ourselves.
A much better approach for INFPs is to use their intuition for decision-making, as this is one of our strengths and has a couple of distinct advantages.
Intuition is a great decision-making tool. Often when you hear intuition discussed, it tends to be not in terms of its practical applications, but a little bit more in terms of the mystical. For instance, receiving intuitive information about people or events.
We like to talk about it a little bit more magically, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
I like to think about intuition and discuss it in terms of its practical day-to-day uses and one of the big ones is for decision-making.
The reasons why INFPs should use intuition to make decisions is twofold. Number one, it’s fast, and number two, it’s accurate. Granted, both of those things do require that you practice with your intuition. It also requires that your intuition is calibrated to the particular area that you’re making decisions in.
Practicing with your intuition is simply getting used to the idea of making decisions with intuition through experience.
This could be as simple as, “what am I going to eat for lunch?” Instead of trying to make a logical decision, you allow your intuition to tell you what you’re going to eat for lunch.
It’s getting comfortable with letting the information come to you intuitively rather than trying to think it through with your mind first.
Intuition also needs to be calibrated. Calibration is essentially that you’ve practiced with it in the area in which you’re trying to make decisions.
For instance, if you are a writer or a content creator, you can use your intuition to decide what you will create next and what you think will be the most needed or engaging for your audience. If you’re just starting out, your intuition will not be calibrated and your predictions won’t be as accurate. You need more experience. You’ve got to feed your intuition more experiences so that it can become very accurate.
Using your intuition for decision making is in contrast to trying to use your thinking to make decisions, which makes a lot of sense on the surface. It’s also what you will hear people talk about more often than not.
INFPs get tripped up with that because we’re not fantastic with our thinking function. But the other thing there is that our intuition will actually give us more information.
Because thinking relies on what we can see, what is known, what is certain. If we’re trying to use our thinking to make decisions, we may not actually be getting all the information that we need.
Our intuition can give it to us, though it remains somewhat subconscious.
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Amanda Linehan is the author of Productivity For INFPs. She is an independent author, coach, and INFP, who has published six full-length books and has been read in 113 countries. Amanda was a speaker at the INF Summit in February 2020. Learn more about her Productivity For INFPs Online Course on the course page.
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