The View From Here

Inscrutable. It's a word that I would use for the fact that some people find me hard to read. I don't usually wear my emotions on my sleeve and my facial expressions can be, um, inexpressive.

Granted, this trait can be annoying. I've had enough people comment on this and I have put some effort into modifying this behaviour. Back at AV-Base, Susan used to mock me whenever she saw me in a meeting, crossing her arms and furrowing her brow mightily behind my back. I tend to stare into space while I'm thinking, chomping on a pen and then jotting notes on my clipboard. It can be a little "intense," as people have said. Lindsay got a kick out of comparing me to Christopher Walken.

The positive side is that there are many times when it serves me very well to not express an instant opinion with my body language. During emotional and angry confrontations, I am very likely to remain calm and try to work through the issues. During emergency situations, like getting cut off while driving, it allows me to deal with the situation at hand. During the work day when someone challenges one of my cherished ideas, it allows me to consider the pros and cons before responding. And when I'm hanging out with someone that likes to sing off-key for hours at a time, I don't get easily frustrated.

That's the outer side of me. Inside my head, I act like a big data collector. I just suck in all of the information that I can get. I let it wander through this software matrix in my head and I eventually provide my response. I weigh the positives and negatives, I consider the source of the information, I let the emotional factors mix things up, I parse it all and I came out with a result.

Not that everyone likes the result, as we saw with this post. I can seem to be a little too formulaic, a little too controlling, a little too calculated. (I prefer the terms "self controlled" and "teachable.") I mean, how can I so callously break all of my friends up into little groups with nice labels and then somehow decide who gets to use up most of my spare time?

Allow me to shed some light on that. As I have mentioned here recently, I have done a few personality tests on this blog before. I did the Jung typology test and came out as an ISTJ, as described here in detail (or maybe on INTJ).

To quote the above description, "ISTJs often give the initial impression of being aloof and perhaps somewhat cold." We just want the facts, ma'am. The world is logical and there are patterns everywhere. Everything should fit into some big picture.

So my "circles of friends" post was an excellent glimpse into how I process life. To go back further, I had this post in which I dissected my top priorities in life. The way I do this and the reasons that I work this way are all related to my personality type. This permits me to excel in my chosen career and design great software. It's one of the main reasons that I have been able write so many blog posts over the past few years.

Even so, many other people do not think about life in the same way. They do not share my value system or my personality traits, nor should they since we are all different. The danger is that we then declare someone else's personality type as "wrong" and ours as "right." We judge the way that other people judge and we ironically make a judgment against ourselves in the process. The key is that we need to learn how to understand and even appreciate the way that other people approach life.

(Heh. You could say that I have judged the ones that judge the other judges. Oy vey. That's definitely not where I was heading with that.)

My point is this: I look at the world through my own unique eyes. My perspective is different from yours and everything looks a little different to me. That's the view from here.