In season 3 of the reality show Beauty and the Geek, Mario and his partner were sent home because of this question:

“What is the term that refers to your date duplicating your body language or adopting your speaking rhythm?”

Mario answered “mimicking,” but the official answer was “mirroring.” I’m not sure that Mario’s answer was technically wrong, but mimicking usually refers to imitation for the purpose of making fun of someone, while mirroring is imitation for the purpose of building rapport.

A good example of mirroring is shown in this scene from Hot Shots!, where Charlie Sheen on his motorcycle mirrors Valeria Golino on her horse (until he can’t keep up).

Mirroring can be done in many ways, because there are so many aspects to our behavior. You might see that someone is leaning against a wall, with their hands in their pockets, looking relaxed, speaking slowly and softly, and sometimes glancing at the floor. You can pick any of these behaviors to mirror.

To some extent, you naturally mirror people you like. If you think about it, you’ll probably see that you act slightly differently depending on who you’re talking to, because it just seems right to blend in a little. People also mirror because they look to others to determine acceptable behavior. Some people say the best way to silence a drunk is to speak softly, which encourages them to do the same.

People like being mirrored because they like people who are similar to them, even if they’re not aware of it. They might not realize that you’re mirroring them, but they’ll have a good feeling about you. You might even be able to pick up on their feelings by copying their movements. And keep an eye out for when someone is mirroring you, because it means they like you.

Obviously, you don’t want to overdo it. If you match someone’s movements perfectly, imitate their accent, and parrot back everything they say, they’ll think you’re making fun of them. Then they’ll ask “Why are you doing that?” and you’ll repeat “Why are you doing that?” They’ll say “Stop that!” so you’ll say “Stop that!” and they’ll think you’re in third grade.

Have you ever tried mirroring someone deliberately?

Four weeks ago, I started a wacky experiment of working against my personality type, deliberately acting out my non-preferences on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

This involved acting as an ESFJ instead of my natural type of INTP, one letter at a time.

• extraversion instead of introversion
• sensing instead of intuition
• feeling instead of thinking
• judging instead of perceiving

I consider myself to have passed the trials, because I said I would judge myself by effort and not results. But it was very hard to make significant changes on any of the four dimensions. Even my least clear preference, perceiving, was hard to budge.

Michael J Pastor (no link because his blog is only open to invited readers) suggested that I was trying to do too much at once, and that just like with weights, you want to increase the stress gradually. This is absolutely true. If it was really my goal to change, I would have started by making a plan to slowly ease into each trial, instead of jumping in headfirst.

But my intention wasn’t to change, at least not permanently. The point was just to do it to see what it was like. I was curious how hard it would be (very), and whether I would want to continue doing anything differently after it was over (not really). It was entertaining to try it, but I’m happy to go back to normal.

I said in The Personality Puzzle that while we can upgrade our abilities, our preferences are pretty much fixed. And for that reason, I think it makes a lot more sense to go with what you are than trying to change things about yourself that you really don’t want to change. Not that we can’t get better at things with practice, but you’ll always be better at what you like to do. And since all types are equal, why change?

However, we’re all surrounded by people of different types, and I think it’s helpful to be able to understand where they’re coming from. Now whenever I meet a new person, I’ll know that we have something in common, because I tried on their personality for a while.

I’ve just finished week 4 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on judging.

I had mentioned before that I don’t have a strong preference for perceiving, so using some judging wasn’t too hard, and this was definitely the easiest of the four trials. However, it was still hard to deviate much from my natural preferences.

I tried to concentrate on the best aspects of judging: being organized and checking items off my todo list. Perceivers, particularly intuitive perceivers, tend to think up a lot of ideas that don’t get done. And I do suffer from out of control todo lists.

I have a day planner that I write some things down on, in case I get an idea when I’m not with my computer. But I mainly work from a todo list on my computer, which is 537 lines. That doesn’t mean 537 separate tasks, because some tasks have details that take more than one line, and I also have some blank lines between groups of tasks, but it’s still a lot. I have a separate todo list just for my blog, which is 1,098 lines. I also play with various todoodlists.

Anyway, with this many different tasks to choose from, it’s sometimes hard to just pick one thing and do it. This week I got into the habit of starting each day by working on a big project, and saving other stuff for later. I’m not really a morning person, so it’s not that I have more energy earlier in the day, but whatever I work on first will definitely get done.

I try to check email and read blogs later in the day, since that kind of stuff tends to expand to fill the time available. I also try to add items to the end of my todo lists rather than the beginning whenever possible. I have a hard time with that because I like to do stuff while it’s fresh in my mind, but there’s just not time to do everything.

I still find perceiving more fun because I’d rather be spontaneous than scheduled, but it’s hard to argue with the results you get from being organized.

I read Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back? to get some productivity tips. I really liked it, and I’ll write a review soon. I’ll also write another post to recap this whole experiment.

In the fourth and final week of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on judging.

Judging and perceiving are kind of hard to explain, and they can be looked at in a few different ways, but one way is that judgers are more like type A personalities, while perceivers are more like type B. The type A/B theory has been heavily criticized and is considered obsolete, but at least you have an idea of what I mean. As with all the other preferences, neither judging nor perceiving is better than the other. (The words unfortunately sound like judgmental and perceptive, but that’s not what they’re about.)

I expect this to be the easiest one because I’m a “split P.” I didn’t get numerical results when I took the MBTI, but they underlined my P to indicate a not-so-clear preference. I was also the only one in the P group at the workshop who insisted on using the right color M&Ms when making a blueprint of a house (like using brown for a table, instead of mixed random colors). Apparently, judgers always pay attention to M&M color, while perceivers usually don’t.

I also got a head start on this because I’ve been trying to make better use of my time in my mini-retirement. I find that even though I’m not working, I don’t have that much more free time. For one thing, I’m now getting 8 hours of sleep a night instead of 4.

So I’ve been trying to be more careful with managing my time instead of just doing whatever. I thought I had unsubscribed from a bunch of blogs, but I just checked and I’m still subscribed to 92, so I don’t know what happened. While reading blogs is fun, it’s easy to spend more time online than you’d like to.

I figure now is a great time for me to read Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back? Beat The Seven Success Killers That Everyone Struggles With. I bought it in June but haven’t read it yet, which I think is pretty ironic considering the subject matter.

Productivity is not strictly a hallmark of judgers, and in fact someone with a sensing/perceiving combination is usually very action-oriented (though perhaps not that organized). But for me, an intuitive/perceiving thinker and daydreamer, I think paying attention to productivity is bound to make me use my judging side. At the very least, putting this ebook in my schedule is showing judging already.

Looking forward to a week of organization, structure, and responsibility. Go judgers!

I’ve just finished week 3 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on feeling.

I didn’t think this trial would be especially difficult, but it turned out to be the hardest one by far of the three I’ve done.

While I’m definitely a thinker overall, I answer some of the MBTI questions as a feeler would, so I didn’t think I was that one-sided. On the other hand, thinking is the dominant function of an INTP (also of an ISTP, ESTJ, and ENTJ), so maybe that’s why it was so hard to act differently.

I tried to practice empathy by looking at people and imagining how they felt. At one point I was even talking to some trees, saying that they probably don’t like having lights wrapped around them during the day when they’re not being used. I even apologized for not knowing their names and having to call each one of them “Mr. Tree.” This all felt a bit silly to me.

I had meant to re-read the oneness chapter from Personal Development for Smart People, but I didn’t get around to it. I had also meant to spend some time around art and focus on how it made me feel (a suggestion from RL David), but the art gallery near me must be under renovation or something, because there’s currently no art in it.

I guess it didn’t help that I’m working on a particular section of my next ebook that demands all the logic I can muster. However, I didn’t want to let this experiment be too disruptive, so I decided not to stop working on that.

I guess my main stumbling block is that I don’t have enough patience. I tried to slow down when reading feeling-oriented blog posts so I could absorb the feeling vibes, but I kept wanting to finish them quickly and move on to something else. I tried to listen to a feeling-oriented audio, but I kept having to switch over to Firefox and do something else because I couldn’t concentrate on the audio. I also got into an argument with someone because I wasn’t patient enough.

I think I might be able to work on this by practicing meditation. I’ve tried it a few times, and only once have I been able to make it through the full 20 minutes that I had planned. I keep thinking about things I have to do, and it becomes too hard to just sit there, so I sometimes can’t even make it 5 minutes before giving up. I figure that in addition to the usual benefits of meditation, I could also use it as a tool to measure my progress in developing enough patience to sit there for 20 minutes and feel instead of think.

Yet another week of realizing how attached I am to my personality. I think the worst must be over, but I’m looking forward to the end. That’s the good thing about your non-preferences: there are only four of them.

Just when I thought there are no stupid questions, someone proved me wrong.

My friend was having lunch with someone yesterday. The waitress came over to take their order, and my friend ordered a Chinese Chicken Salad, with the dressing on the side. Her friend ordered a Turkey Club sandwich, with no cheese or mayo.

This is where the waitress should think, “These people are trying to make healthy food choices.”

Instead, she asked, “Would you like to start with our 4 layer, deep dish Macaroni and Cheese?”

After writing yesterday’s post, I remembered a teacher who said that the only stupid question is one you already know the answer to. If we modify that to say “one you should already know the answer to,” then this was a stupid question.

I’m sure the waitress was supposed to ask it because the 4 layer deep dish Macaroni and Cheese is a new appetizer the restaurant is featuring, and they want people to be aware of it. Fine, but tweak the question when you know it doesn’t make sense for the customer. “Would you like to start with an appetizer?” would have been much more reasonable.

If you sell cars, and someone wants to buy a Ford Taurus with anti-lock brakes and a baby car seat, it’s reasonable to ask, “Do you want side-impact airbags?” It’s not reasonable to ask, “Do you want neon underbody lighting and a direct port nitrous system?”

Asking inappropriate questions just shows that you’re not paying attention.

In week 3 of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on feeling. Thinking and feeling refer to the way we prefer to make decisions.

• Thinkers make decisions in an objective, detached way. They determine the right thing to do through logical reasoning.
• Feelers make decisions in a subjective, attached way. They determine the right thing to do by putting themselves in other people’s shoes, seeking to maintain harmony.

A good way to think of the difference is to consider justice versus mercy. Thinkers think justice is more important, while feelers think mercy is more important.

I expect that this trial will be a lot easier now than it would have been a few years ago. I used to not have much patience with people who did things wrong. But now I’m more forgiving of people who say “nucular” and “supposably” and “I could care less.” It still bugs me, but I’m much better at biting my tongue. Since criticizing rarely produces a desirable outcome, I try to pick my battles more carefully.

Beyond just being nice, I plan to make a point of thinking about how other people feel. Not just people I’m talking to, but everyone within range. A good role model for this would be the empath Deanna Troi from Star Trek. I only saw a few episodes, but I remember thinking it would be really creepy to be around her because of the mind reading thing. I guess non-telepathic empathy is fine though.

I can also re-read the section on oneness from Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People. This is all about feeling a connection with everyone and everything. It came across as a foreign concept to me, so I could definitely benefit from reading it again.

We’ll see how good a job I do at being nice. Go feelers!

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Because of your click-throughs, I received free admission to Michael Martine’s blog traffic seminar. Thanks!

It really wasn’t that I did such a great job, just that I was the only one of the seminar attendees who tried. I’ve won a fair number of contests only because there was no competition.

I’ve just finished week 2 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on sensing.

I was really surprised to see how hard this was. I didn’t think it would be nearly as tough as the extraversion trial, but it proved to be much harder. Fortunately though, I said I would judge myself on effort, not results.

Some psychologists consider the sensing/intuitive dichotomy to be the most important of the four. I can see how that could be true. I’m not particularly one-sided here according to my MBTI results, but I found it impossible to turn off my intuition (and remember that intuition here has nothing to do with mystical insight, which I don’t have at all).

Since I wasn’t able to stop using intuition, I tried to simply use more sensing. I tried to notice details by deliberately shouting out what I saw, heard, etc (some people must have thought I was crazy). While this felt kind of weird, it had the pleasant side effect of letting me realize that I had always walked right past this great smoothie place and never noticed it. Yogi Berra was right: “You can observe a lot just by watchin.”

I happened to have a dentist appointment, and of course it was easy to focus on what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling. It was just a cleaning, but if I had gotten the drill, it would have helped the experiment.

I thought the best part of sensing would be the whole “live for the moment” thing, so I tried to make every little thing seem special. When I ate an apple, I thought, “This apple is really sweet and crunchy. I can feel the vitamins and fiber coming into my body. I won’t always be able to eat apples, so for now, this apple is all that matters.” Yes, this got tiring very quickly, because it just didn’t come naturally.

One way to look at it is that sensors are grounded in reality while intuitives have their head in the clouds. But that’s where I want my head. Reality bores me.

Another interesting experiment, but I’m glad it’s over.

In week 2 of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on sensing. Sensing and intuition refer to the way we prefer to take in information.

• Sensors rely on what their five senses tell them. They’re detail-oriented and well grounded in reality and practicality.
• Intuitives pay less attention to the raw data coming from their five senses, and more attention to their interpretation of it. They look at the big picture, patterns, connections, and future possibilities. (While the word intuition is often used to refer to psychic flashes, that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

I thought this would be an easy trial, because I’m not too far on the intuitive side. I don’t consider myself to be impractical or adverse to detail at all.

For years, I did my taxes with pen and paper, not even using a calculator because I liked adding and subtracting by hand. I also did my taxes twice each time: once by rounding amounts off to the nearest dollar (which the IRS encouraged) and once without rounding (which the IRS allowed), to see if it made a difference. That’s about as far to the sensing side as you can get. (I eventually started using a calculator, and then TurboTax as my situation got more complicated.)

I’ve done one day of my sensing trial, and I’m finding it very hard to turn off my intuition. What you see when you look at a sunset is supposed to tell you whether you prefer sensing or intuition. Today I saw a sunset, and I tried to see it like a sensor by thinking about what color the sun was, what time it was, how the days are getting shorter, etc. But whenever I see a sunset, I always hear Will Smith’s watch beeping in I Am Legend, telling him to hide because the monsters are coming out soon. I hear that every single time.

I was working on the sensing vs. intuition section of The Personality Puzzle when I read Brip Blap’s post big picture, little picture. He said:

“One of the most apt criticisms you could make of the writing I do on brip blap would be that I’m awfully big picture. I like to think in terms of grand goals (’achieve perfect work/life integration, have a perfect lifestyle, achieve financial independence’) without attention to the detail to support that (’fix your credit score, maximize your tax credits’, etc.).”

When I read that, I realized that his focus on the big picture is exactly why I like his blog. I’m interested in finance, but I had a hard time finding finance blogs I like because so many of them like to overload you with details, most of which I’ve already known for years. Of course, many people like that kind of stuff, and sensors are in fact the majority.

Since I’m on this topic, let me give you a quick list of the best finance blogs for people who prefer intuition over sensing:

(In alphabetical order)

1. brip blap – personal finance, wealthbuilding and the journey to financial freedom. Not purely about finance, but it’s all good. Steve has written about many interesting things, such as how he lost 100 pounds (meaning weight loss, not a drop in his British stocks).

2. erica.biz – Erica Douglass shows you how to make millions! She’s a number cruncher, but she also has huge aspirations for herself and the world. Selling her web hosting business for $1.1 million was just a start.

3. Sentient Money – Financial intelligence for an ever changing world. Chad is very heavy on details, but he’s really good at seeing what the data means. He’s also an INTP like me, so you know he must be cool.

Jon Morrow’s magnificent blog OnMoneymaking.com would have been on this list, until he sold it.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I’m going to approach this trial by thinking about what new things I should do, not what things I should stop doing. So for example, I’m not going to change the posts I write, because that wouldn’t be good for anyone. I’ll just be adding some sensing on top of my normal activities.

I don’t mean to come off as all anti-sensing, because there are definitely some great sensing role models, such as Tim Ferriss (a pretty clear ISTP in my opinion) and Darren Rowse (probably an ISFJ). I’m just having a hard time keeping the upside of sensing in mind. However, there are plenty of overly intuitive freaks who have absolutely no connection to reality. Still, I find imagination so much more interesting than facts.

I’m not exactly sure what to do in this trial, but today I made a point of describing what my senses were telling me. Just talking to myself and saying “Those leaves are red” or “This apple is crunchy.” Yeah, that’s pretty obvious, but it’s just to get into the habit. By being more grounded in the physical world, I hope to develop more of a “live for the moment” attitude and not think so much about the future.

Today I read two ebooks about SEO, which I’m sure tends to be much more interesting to sensors because of how much it relies on keyword data. One of these ebooks was Fast Track for Blog Success by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd. It was available for free for a short while, and I got it just in time, but unfortunately not in time to tell you about it while it was still free. It’s now $24.95, and it explores the keyword usage of two blogs, showing why one was sold for a much higher price because of its SEO.

The other ebook was the second incarnation of Naomi Dunford’s Ninja SEO School. I had previously read the first version, but not the new one. To be fair, this was no help at all in my sensing trial because Naomi is a super intuitive. However, that’s what makes her ebook so refreshingly entertaining as well as informative.

As before with my extraversion trial, my goal is not to switch completely to sensing, but just to make an honest effort to use far more sensing than usual. Obviously it has its benefits, so I just want to try to experience them. Go sensors!

I’ve just finished week 1 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on extraversion.

The timing of this experiment helped me tremendously. Since I’m on a mini-retirement, I have a lot more free time. That made it much easier to spend more time with other people, because I still had plenty of time to myself. If I was still working, it would have been ten times harder.

Even so, it’s a good thing I decided to judge myself by effort instead of results. Despite my efforts to talk more than any reasonable person should, I still had someone ask me, “Why are you so quiet?” Oh well, I tried. My main difficulty is that I find it so hard to talk when I have nothing to say. I just can’t get random words to come out of my mouth.

While I confirmed that I like introversion a whole lot better (as I expected), there’s one particular aspect of extraversion that I think is worthy of consideration by introverts. Introverts tend to be slow to speak, and then later be mad at themselves for not saying anything. Extraverts tend to be quick to speak, and then later be mad at themselves for saying something they shouldn’t have. Of course, both extremes are bad, but maybe it’s worth trying to err a bit on the other side for a change.

I found it funny that some people didn’t want to let me be an extravert. One night I was having dinner in a bar, and the bartender wouldn’t stay and talk to me, even though he wasn’t busy. I was thinking, “Come back here! I need to make small talk to get extraversion credit!” But I didn’t force it.

Some people say that eating in front of other people makes them nervous. I don’t feel that myself, but I do prefer not to talk much when eating, because it’s just too much going on. Besides, you’re not supposed to talk with your mouth full, right?

I also don’t like loud places. I just don’t get how people can be energized from being around noise. I managed to avoid the peak times at the bars, but one place was still pretty loud. It didn’t kill me, but it’s sure not my preference. I don’t like smoky places either, but fortunately I didn’t find any.

Twitter is a great socialization tool for introverts. Even though it’s online, I think tweeting can be considered extraverted because it’s all about shallow conversations with lots of people. The reason it’s great for introverts is because you only have to follow who you want to follow, you only have to reply when you want to, and you can turn it off whenever you want. In the last week, I spent much more time on Twitter, and tweeted a lot more by relaxing my standards of what was tweet-worthy. I didn’t find this hard at all, but it came with a huge downside of taking up lots of time because of the constant interruptions.

I spent a lot of time on the phone, which was kind of hard to do. I like face-to-face conversations a lot more than phone conversations. I’m not sure why, but they feel completely different. Spending time with someone means something, but a phone call always seems like an interruption to me. Sometimes it’s a necessary interruption, but then I feel like I have to say what I have to say, and then get back to what I was doing. Even when I like the call, I always think that seeing them in person would be a much better use of my time.

One extraverted ritual that I decided not to partake in is the phone face-off. I was talking to someone when another call came through, and I pushed the “ignore” button. I told the person I was talking to that for some reason, my new cell phone keeps beeping even after you push “ignore.” When they heard I had another call, they said it was fine if I wanted to take it. But it never occured to me for a second to do a phone face-off. I think you should just talk to who you’re talking to, and let the other person leave a message. There could be exceptions, but I didn’t even know who the other person was.

Well, extraversion isn’t for me, but your results may differ. I’m glad I did this experiment, but I’m looking forward to returning to normal.