Personality analysis

I've been forcing myself to go to social events and meeting lots of kinds of people, some of which are really friendly and welcoming, which was a nice change. It's a good thing that in my new job I get to interact with a lot more people than during grad school, but at the same time, it's also a big challenge for me to work with people with very different personalities than me. I know that as a professional, one needs to set aside one's preference and dislikes for personality types and work with others' professional abilities, but I'm finding I'm horrible at it. It's a big wake up call I guess.

I have always thought I was an INTP, but recently, redoing the Myer-Briggs test and reading more into it, turns out I'm actually an INFJ, with dominant introverted intuition, extraverted feelings, introverted thinking, and extraverted sensing. I have always thought that I suck at reading people's intentions and feelings, but turns out I've been ignoring my intuition all these years. In reality, other people's energy affect me hugely, to the point that I can't hold my own state of centeredness when someone else is exhibiting different energies. For example, if I meet someone who is grumpy, it totally brings me down as well, no matter how hard I try to stay neutral and cheerful. Meeting super cheery people can bring me to a totally cheerful state as well. By this logic, I should always hang out with super cheerful people, but people like that are not super common around here. Also, I don't mean fake cheerful. I mean genuine happiness. My logical brain cannot tell the difference (and I've always relied on my rational brain without monitoring my own reaction to places and situations), but my happiness only lights up sometimes, for example at this Indian wedding I attended where I didn't know the bride and groom but my Indian friends' friends were all super excited to meet me (I was the only foreigner at the wedding... super exotic to them LOL). I think it was one of the happiest days I've experienced in a very long time. It wasn't because I was the center of attention, but because I could feel that everybody was grinning from ear to ear they could hardly contain their excitements. At work my colleagues also crack jokes  and break into loud laughters every single day at coffee breaks, but somehow it just doesn't feel like real happiness to me. I can't explain it and I could be wrong, but to me their laughters feel more like life-coping strategy than genuine contentment with life. These are definitely signs of extraverted feeling and sensing.

According to Wikipedia, only 1-3% of the US population of INFJs, the rarest personality type of all (compared to 20-28% ISTJs/ISFJs and 17-25% ESFJ/ESTJs). This means I belong to the most misunderstood loner crowd and I also think differently from most of the populations in the US and probably in the world.

INFJ weaknesses, according to the Internet, include being unaware (and sometimes uncaring) of how they come across to others, applying their judgment more often towards others, rather than towards themselves, having unrealistic and/or unreasonable expectations of others, having an intense and quick temper, can hold grudges, can have difficulty forgiving people, can be wishy-washy and unsure how to act in situations that require quick decision making, having difficulty communicating their thoughts and feelings to others, and can see so many tangents everywhere that they can't stay focused on the bottom line or the big picture.

Yikes.. how horrible it is to be born as an INFJ! I think the judgmental part of me prevents me from seeing the positive aspect of issues and focusing on working with colleagues' professional sides and take in their advice (because I've already decided that I don't like them as a person). But it doesn't matter why I am the way I am... I must come across as a difficult to deal with person as well. The website offers suggestions on personal development. Some of these I have already been attempting for years. As for the "do not express anger" advice, I usually try to suppress my anger by staying silent, but most of the time people can sense that I'm upset anyways. So then I get frustrated that the situation remains tense even though I think I haven't expressed my anger... perhaps my facial expression gives things away.. I don't know exactly.

I don't like to have a personality that only accounts for 1-3% of the world's population, and I don't like to be difficult. But being among this personality group means that I naturally think differently than most people and that it is hard for me to understand how others think and figure out most people's preferences.

I think I need to majorly relax, try really hard not to take things personality, try really hard to be less judgmental of others (the website suggests that I be as least as critical about myself as I do with others but I think I already do a lot of that), and assume the best - this one is quite important and useful for me. I think sometimes I dislike a person because they act as a mirror or even a magnifying glass of an aspect of myself that I don't like. I try so hard to eliminate that characteristic in myself, but how dare this person blatantly express this characteristic and seem to be so comfortable with it? I guess instead I should shift my thinking and be grateful to that person for demonstrating to me that one can exhibit these characteristics that I consider as "flaws" yet still live (somewhat) happily and have lots of friends.

It's a major challenge to be interacting with so many different kinds of personality types, especially ones that clash with mine. I guess it's a necessary part of life that I've managed to avoid until now. I hope I get through this and become a less judgmental, more accommodating and a more easy-going person.  If I cannot get through the challenge, I should perhaps seek out jobs with less human interactions maybe, LOL. Anyways, self-awareness is supposed to be a good thing, right? I genuinely want to be less of an asshole to the people around me. I'm also supposed to draw on my strengths, which I have trouble to  identify confidently. That'll be my task for the next little while - focus on the positives and figure out what exactly am I good at besides assimilating broad range of information obsessively but not be able to coherently organize them into useful thought systems.

First Mysore room practice in over a year

I finally dragged my lazy ass to a Mysore room for practice on the weekend. Being in a roomful of strangers must have made my adrenaline shoot through the roof. Endorphin levels were probably saturated as well. Every posture felt easy. I still can't jump back but it seemed like I could kind of jump through to seated dandasana. My drop backs were amazing. It felt like I could almost grab my ankles from the air ( I can't... can't even see my ankles). The legs were on fire but it was controlled almost all the way down, except the last 3 inches where I had to plop my hands down. The teacher said I did a great job. I was happy. Then I found out I couldn't do utplutih at all. Normally I could hold them for 10 speedy breaths, but for this practice I held for one breath and then my arms gave out.

Today my whole body aches like I had participated in some iron man training. Like I said, it must have been all the hormones that got me through the practice. I guess I need someone to watch me (or at least walk around me) to be able to "perform". But hopefully as I go more often this effect will normalize. It's not exactly the point to go through the primary series without actually feeling the asanas while doing them. That's like taking a drug before heading to class.

Great work out though.

The Tai Chi of dealing with people

Last week I observed my boss and his more senior/established/famed collaborator undergo the "Tai Chi" of negotiation. On the surface it appeared that the two of them were joking around a lot during the meeting, but in reality it was a power struggle, where the collaborator was trying to entice the junior professor to take up a whole bunch of technical work by painting a verbal picture of the medical importance of these projects and how doing these work could put us in the forefront of the research field in terms of those specific subject areas. My boss was indeed intrigued by the medical potentials; however he was also aware that the senior guy wants to dump a huge amount of workload on him, so he made plenty of stupid jokes while trying to assert that these technical tasks are more time-consuming than people seem to think. The senior guy jokes that there are 24 hours a day and that should be enough time to work on multiple projects. He did this because my boss was over-claiming the amount of time required to perform some of the tasks. 

To me this discussion could have been 1000 times more straightforward. The senior guy could have just described all the interesting research ideas he has which our group could potentially work on. My boss could have just made a conservative estimate of how many of these ideas he can get his staff to put into implementation and make a rough estimate of the amount of time required. But I guess that would be too boring. For them it made more sense to just joke around to keep the atmosphere "light". My super boring linear mind was confused: why all these jokes and dance and over-exaggeration of potentials and difficulty level of the work? I thought this kind of stuff are reserved for politicians and are "beneath" science? 

Sadly I think this type of negotiation is not restricted to the world of business and politics. If we are too straightforward, the "truth" can hurt our relationship with others and our career potentials. To get ahead in the world we must all have the skill to sell ourselves, to joke around to establish friendliness, but also to work in our assertions and basic values without offending the other party.

Unfortunately I am totally unequipped with this type of skills to be witty and funny and manipulate/maneuver my way out of sticky situations. I don't know how to keep the people I am obliged to deal with happy even if I don't like the situation (or the people); I take everything people tell me at the face value and rarely ponder about the meanings in between the lines. To me it seems like it doesn't matter what field they're in (even if it's NGO or social or charity work), successful people in the world are people who are masters at playing the diplomacy game - people who can convince other people to do what they want them to do wins, which means diplomacy, persuasion, manipulation,  ie. marketing and sales skills trump all other technical skills. Even if I want to quit my job and go volunteer the the poorest village in the world or something, I still need to possess the above-mentioned skill set, or at the very least recognized others are manipulating me or selling me ideas that are not as straightforwards as they sound; otherwise I will be taken advantage of, being stepped all over, and become frustrated no matter what I choose to do with my life.

Another thing: I'm used to jokes back home that are light hearted and to some degree politically correct. I'm really tired of jokes being made around my social/work circles here that sound potentially offensive in a personal way, overly sarcastic, sometimes racist/discriminatory, and then they are like "oh I'm just  joking".  Back home people most likely wouldn't laugh at these jokes. But here I feel like I've been bombarded by this kind of "jokes" (you could argue that some of these are "socially awkward people"). I need to figure out some way to deal with this; otherwise I feel like I'm going crazy. 

Bad day

I had a really bad day yesterday. I've been struggling for months to be competent at my job. In my mind, I had this idea of a set of technical skills someone competent in my position should be able to do. Unfortunately, a task that would take a competent person in my field 10 minutes to accomplish takes me a full day to do a half-assed job. I've been very frustrated with that, and I've been staying at work late almost every day, so I can accomplish at least that one single tiny task.

And then I had a meeting with my boss. He asked me what is my vision of the project. I flustered and stammered that I'm trying really hard to acquire enough technical skills to handle the analysis of the  dataset given to me. He kept insisting that the technical skills are not the important part, that it's more important that my "vision" and plans are clear and spelled out. I almost snapped right there, or maybe I actually snapped; I'm not even exactly sure what happened to me.

You'd think that with 6 years of grad school training under my belt, I'd be an expert of some specific set of skills. It feels very crushing that I am back in the exact same position I was 10 years ago at my first science job, where my only skill is that I know how to use Google to look up information. I have some rough ideas on people typically do to this kind of dataset, so I search for available software and online tutorials / online discussion forums on how to use these software tools to perform these analyses. It takes frigging forever and it makes me feel like I don't know how to do anything. I stay late every night struggling to learn my job and now he says that's not important; it's more important to write up what you plan to do and how you envision you will succeed?

And then I realized that one of the skills that every employee should have, no matter what field you're in, is to be able to try to understand what the boss wants and offer it to him, even if it makes no sense or is completely impractical. I obviously lack this particular skill. Of course bosses don't care how you accomplish the tasks as long as they get accomplished. For research, since the set of tasks is not so clearly defined, the only thing the manager can do is to ask you to provide him a list of action items you plan to do, and then periodically poke you to see if you have completed the tasks yet. The concept is kind of sad for me. I almost kind of want a supervisor who will tell me exactly what I need to do and then I'll just do them. Then I go home and not worry about work any more.

I hope to eventually reach a point where I can become more competent at my job. Then I would feel better about giving my future plans, my "visions", and other BS. I also hope to be less exhausted when I go home every day. Right now I feel like all my life energy is exhausted by my work. I am also very tempted to give up science and take up a less cognitively demanding job. If only I knew what other kind of jobs I would qualify for.

Life shouldn't be all about work, especially in a field I have lost confidence in. I feel like I've worked so hard all of my life, but going in the wrong direction the whole time. Not sure what is the right path for me. How do I search for it and get on that road instead? Where is the Google search engine of real life?

Approaching life with blinders on

Have you heard of the famous marshmallow test, where researchers left a kid alone in a room with a marshmallow and told him/her that if he or she were willing to wait for 5 minutes, he/she could have a second marshmallow (also see video)? Well, I feel like the kid who not only waited the 5 minutes, but even when the adult came back and told me that there was no second marshmallow, that I should just eat the one I had in front of me, I insisted that if I keep waiting, something better would come along. And when it never comes after many years, I blame that adult for lying to me about the second marshmallow.

Am I "successful"? Well, by conventional definition, I guess achieving a PhD and holding a high tech job in a foreign country counts as success. But truth is, I feel totally lost. I had wanted to do my graduate degree here 8 years ago, but my mother said no, so I didn't come. In reality, the grad schools here pay grad students so well that I could have come anyways without my parents' approval. But it seems like I never got the concept of what constitutes independence from parents. When I got my first job out of university, my whole family laughed at how little money I made. My sister and brother-in-law did it because they've been both berated by their parents for not working harder in school and not achieving university degrees. Even when my sister was making quite a good living as a salesperson for health supplement products, mother still made her feel like she would always be an unworthy human being because of her low education level. I on the other hand, got the impression that Bachelor degree jobs are just child's play (even though my lowly salary was enough for me to be financially independent). Also my first job was meant to be a stepping stone or testing ground, rather than what I was going to do for the rest of my life. but my family didn't understand that and made me feel insecure about my state of being. So I quit, moved back home, and applied for grad school.

Instead of 3 years, as my supervisor said to lure me into doing a PhD program, it took me 6 years to complete the degree, with the last 3 years being extremely frustrating and unproductive. However, all my attention was still focused on completing the graduate degree. While other people my age were finding secure jobs, getting married, buying houses, having children, etc., I had one fixed goal of "completing school", and simply didn't think much about anything else. I actually knew that you can't get a good job straight away after completing a PhD, that postdocs are the highest educated cheap labors in the world, I still didn't reconsider. I mean, 3 years into my graduate program - if I quit, I would have nothing to show for what I worked on for 3 years. I would be considered as a slacker who failed in her degree program. At some point even my parents were saying that school's not so important; I should try to get married and settle down - not my plan in life at the time, but the point was, I should have downgraded the goal of "completing my degree" and gave my future more serious thoughts. But I didn't.

So here I am, working in a beautiful city, getting paid more than my first job out of college, but all my friends have jobs that pay better. But does pay even matter? I can survive pretty well on my own with my salary. I can't afford a car or a house with my salary, but these things have ever been very big on my list of desires anyways. My colleagues were asking the other day if I wanted to stay here. I answered that my contract ends in 1.5 years. They didn't think it would be too difficult for me to find another position or some extend my contract some other way. That's very nice of them to think so, but I've been anxious the whole time I've been here that I haven't demonstrated that I am worthy of my salary. So do I want to be here for longer given this piece of information? I have no idea! I'm so used to not being allowed to get I want that I just assume the world is against me so why bother thinking about it... Just go along with the flow and be okay with what I can get... Except I'm never fully okay with just that either.

I don't know if I've gotten across how confused I am. Right now I cannot disentangle what are things personally want vs. what are things my parents want, and why I want those things. Have I always wanted to do so much schooling, or was getting a higher degree simply a way to earn more respect in the family? I am not a materialistic person, so the reason I want to make a lot of money is solely because I want to gain respect from my family and I want to feel financially secure/independent. Deep down I am still anxious my mother is still laughing at me for making so little money with a PhD degree. She used to put a lot of money in my joint account with them, and sometimes take the money out unannounced. It is very unnerving to see your bank account values fluctuate like that and you have no control over it. It also makes you feel like what's the point of working if you parents can just hand you a year's worth of salary and tell you to do something else. I was a total puppet under my mom's financial games. If my parents hadn't made me feel this way, I could have tried a little harder to try different jobs after my B.Sc. and gotten a better sense of what I wanted to do with my life. I was so anxious about being disapproved that I jumped into grad school because it meant at least 3 years of not having to think about the future.

As for work, I've accidentally gotten myself into a country that is hard to get in, but once you are in (esp. With an advanced degree), they don't just kick you out either. I got the impression that if I want to stay here long term, I just need to get along with the people and they will help me work something out. Here's another major concept that I got wrong all along: I thought getting a job is all about your basket of hoarded skill sets, and how amazing you are at accomplishing everything that's asked of you. Turns out you only need to be "good enough" for the job, rather than "totally amazing". So it is more important that an employee's personality fits with the culture of the company. So that's what I should focus on rather than keeping my blinders on focusing only on my job tasks, although at the moment I am totally unhappy with my own performance so it's a juggling act for me to balance socializing and learning the skill set to complete my project.

They say that one feels happy at his/her job if position provides a good challenge but is not overly difficult. There's no such thing as a non-challenging research job. I feel like I am barely competent enough to do my job and there are soooooo many people out there who are much better than me. I will have to try to calm my nerves and put my energy into learning rather than beating myself up on how much I suck even after all these years (or because of too many years) in school. I'm destined to not lead the "standard" life, given how my overly idealistic thinking is all over the place and totally non-conventional. I should give further thoughts to exactly what I want and can accomplish in life given my IQ, EQ, social intelligence and (in)ability to handle stress, not just accept what others say I could/should accomplish given my grades in school, which says nothing about my competence level in real jobs anyways.

The world looks so confusing now that I've taken my "focus on school" blinders off. The strategies that would make sense in a Taiwanese culture are unnecessary or do not apply in a Scandinavian culture. The economy is changing, company structures are changing; I just have to stopping being anxious about not being prepared enough and take the challenges as they come. Easier said than done though.

Cravings and obsessions since previous life times

Serene Flavor asked an interesting question on her blog today: How many of you naturally believed the saying that if you came across yoga during this existence, you probably had done yoga in a previous life? 

I don't know the answer to this, but then I haven't been practicing yoga regularly and don't have a particular strong yearning to practice it that much. I am currently only craving regular exercise. Also, because of my long ligaments, it's really tough for me to get a good stretch in my muscles. I feel like most poses I have to be careful I'm not just stretching my joints, which don't need stretching, and try to move the stretch into the muscles, which is quite difficult. 

I do, however, feel like I've been interested about how the world works since forever. It's like I've accumulated a million questions in me since my previous lives and am dying to answer them ever since I could form language of thoughts in my head. Why is the sky blue? Why do people get sick? How does the airplane fly in the air? How many different kinds of animals are there in the world? What kind of creatures live in the ocean? What's in outer space? Are there aliens in the universe? Will we be able to travel to the moon one day? 

On the other hand, it seems like my mother has only worried about getting me to grow up healthily, get good grades, get into a good school, find a stable job, marry a trustworthy man, and live the smoothest/most stable life she can imagine. Curiosity about the world is just child's play - totally unimportant for real life. Other kids at school seem to mostly care about playing, making the maximum number of friends, enjoying life, while I was the weirdo who was obsessed about getting perfect on my exams since grade 1. Some girls have talked about wanting to be a mother since they were 2 years old (I've never thought about wanting to be a mother even when I was a small kid). It seems like some deep desires that people have must have carried over from a previous life rather than established in this life time. I must have been a scientist or a philosopher for several life times... probably pretty unsuccessful back then, and still unsuccessful this life time. 

Maybe I need to relax and enjoy this life; just take the world for what it is instead of trying to understand every single aspect of this world. Stop being an obsessive compulsive knowledge hoarder and end up accumulating a lot of knowledge that aren't that correct anyways. I feel like I've been stressing myself out for thousands of years and it's time to chill and take it easy.

How about you? Have you been wanting something ever since the earliest childhood memory and it feels like you've been wanting it since before you even had a concept of self? Are there things you strive for that other people around you never really cared for that much (Ashtanga yoga counts)? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this.

Energy management

I lose energy so easily it's pathetic. At work I can only truly focus for a few hours of productiveness. When I come home I am usually feel drained and exhausted. On Saturdays I sleep in, but sometimes even when I get up I don't feel fully awake. Coffee does not wake me up. Deep breathing helps a bit but I feel like I need more. I can't practice breath of fire when I'm at work because it looks to weird. The cold also really gets to me. I eat fatty food and drink a ton of warm drinks to try to warm myself up from the inside. If I could manage my energy, time and mood better I think I would try to exercise every day, practice pranayama, and socialize more. Instead I struggle to get out of bed every morning, end up being late for work, struggle to focus at work, get distracted and check other websites instead of concentrating on figuring out how to solve my project problems. It's so difficult to get "into the zone". When I succeed, my colleagues call for coffee break and the concentration is broken. I check email 50 times a day, complain about everything, feel anxious about my troubled relationship with my family back home, worry about not forming close friendships in this foreign city, doubt about my abilities to succeed in my job, worry about my career outcome in the future, and go home exhausted. This is for sure not the ideal way to live life.

But right now I feel good though. It's 11pm; I just had a glass of wine , I am breathing deeply and regularly. Actually, 11pm is always one of the more alert hours of the day. I treasure my rare moments of alertness which is why I don't want to go to bed, which is why I am so tired the next day. I really should be an artist instead and work during my alert hours instead of following this 9-5 work hour patterns which does not work for me.

I gotta make more changes in life to find something that works for me.