Personality

Intention and Production

Ron Johnson communication, Personality, political, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

It is important to produce. It is equally important to intend to produce. But these two ways of engaging the world are profoundly different, a difference we might call spiritual. I conceive of these elements of psychological life on a spectrum with purpose in the center of the spectrum, something like this:

Intention…………..……….……Purpose…………………………..Production

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This might seem unduly abstract and theoretical, but all ow me to suggest how this paradigm might be helpful in understanding how you engage the world, and perhaps better understand how other people engage the world. In fact, unless you are one of the rare people who reside somewhere in the middle, you are probably largely on one side of this spectrum. Furthermore, you probably have some trouble with people who are on the other side of the spectrum. Roughly, people who favor intention need to have a direction to where they go compared to people who favor production who just go. Both “intenders” and “producers” have a purpose in what they are doing and where they are going, but their perspectives of how to get to this purpose are quite different.

Deb and I are on different sides of this spectrum, Deb being distinctly on the intention side whereas I am distinctly on the productive side of the spectrum. We share many elements of psychology and agree on most things that have to do with thinking and feeling, but where we differ is in the third element of life: how we go about engaging life with a purpose. I am sure this is yet too abstract for many of you, perhaps especially people who tend to be “producers.” Furthermore, even the terminology that I am using is less than distinct and less easily useful. Deb has brought this matter of “intention” to me recently as we look into this year and the days or years that we might have yet to live. We have found ourselves frequently musing, often talking, sometimes reading, and sometimes writing about what the future might bring. Talk about intension has intensified with Deb recently as she has made some changes in her work schedule and work place. Let me first discuss the nature of the American world in specific and the world at large in general in regards to the intention-production phenomenon. Then I will suggest ways in which you might understand how you go about life, and hopefully do a bit better engaging the other people in your life who might share your perspective or have a different perspective.

America is primarily productive

This is an important place to start because the very basic flavor of America is and has always been production, much more than intention, this despite the fact that the founders of the United States were actually people of intention. A careful look at the Constitution, but much more so, the Declaration of Independence, will show you that it was the intention of the founders to establish a democratic republic much more than their having an idea of how that intention would work out in producing a democratic republic. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (both of them), Hamilton, and Franklin were certainly intenders more than producers. Many later Presidents, particularly Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant were more producers. In between we find Lincoln, who most certainly was an intender but eventually became perhaps the most important producer President we have ever had. I will leave this thought for your reading and musing and turn to the functional nature of America as it unfolded.

Despite the fact that the founders were largely intenders, almost to the person, the country was young, incredibly capable of expansion with resources beyond comprehension, became a country dominated by production and all that goes with it. I will not belabor the point, but the very fabric of America is doing, producing, and having things.  It is not why we do, produce and have. It is not much about how we might effectively use such things. Look at what is said from most of our political leaders, and you will hear of doing, producing and having. You will not hear of intention except by inference. It seems to me that our current President is thoroughly a producer, not an intender. We will discuss the challenges that Trump has and other people like him have later.

Compare America to any other developed country in the world, particularly China and Japan in the East and most of Europe in the West. We could also look at native cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but we must delay that discussion. It is likely that the relative youth of America and the relative longer life of China, Japan, and Europe might be part of the reason America is so production oriented compared to the philosophies of China, Japan, and Europe to say nothing of the philosophies of the Middle East (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

So, if you’re more of a producer, like I am, life has probably been easier for you in America than your spouse, friend, daughter, or father who might be intenders. In my own family my brother was very significantly an intender, as was my mother while my father was almost completely a producer with my sister somewhere in between. My brother struggled heartily in this family dominated by my father’s production-orientation, and truly never recovered from the debates he had with our father, nor did he succeed in the world of work that is heavily production-based. It was much easier for me. I just did things. Bill considered doing things. This made life more challenging for Bill than it was for me, but we producers also have our challenges

The challenges of intention and production

Part of the challenge of understanding this intention-production paradigm is in the very words that we use. Words, at least normally used words, tend to fall into the producing side of the spectrum of paradigm of purpose. In fact, a case could be made for suggesting that words themselves are more inclined to value production over intention. This is one of the challenges that intenders have when they engage the (American) world: there isn’t a (normal English) vocabulary for intenders Consider what you might hear from someone you talk to someone:

  • What’s happening?
  • What’s going on in your life?
  • What are you doing?
  • What’s new in your life?
  • How has the problem being solved?

The operative words here are how and what. These are not particularly words of intention. They are words of doing or producing. You would rarely hear from your friend questions that are more of intention, like:

  • What have you been thinking lately?
  • What have you been feeling lately?
  • What have you been musing about lately?
  • What is your intention for the day?
  • Much less:
    • What is your intention for life?
    • What is your purpose in life?
    • What is important to you?
    • Why did you do this or that?

People just don’t talk this way for the most part. Note the difference between the “what” questions for intenders compared to the “what” questions for the producers. What questions for intenders are those of thought or feeling, not so much of actual doing.

Challenges are not so basic for producers living in America, but there are challenges nevertheless. Their challenges have to do with the result of being tired of all the things they do, doing something in a hurry to just get it done, doing something so perfectly that it never seems to get done, and other difficulties that come with a person who is always doing. The value system here is ultimately the same for intenders and producers, namely purpose, but the ways of getting there are substantially different. When I go about a purpose, like writing this blog, I “just start” with no particular intention other than to write something that might be of value to one or two people who might read this blog. I don’t sit back and see how I might go about writing, consider it more, write a bit, muse about it, correct it, and then perhaps set it aside until my passion builds to go back to writing. I just write. You might see the occasional unfortunate results of my “just writing,” namely in the spelling errors that I so often make. People who write from an intentional persuasion often think ten times more than they write, and many fine writers never finish anything because they get lost in the intention but fail to produce. I have a cousin who has been writing a screenplay for 10 or 15 years, and he seems quite satisfied with this way of going about writing, but his sister, much the producers of the family, can’t see the value of his intending to write the screenplay of the century. I think that it doesn’t matter to him whether he will every finish the screenplay because his intention is to write it, not to produce it.

I will leave you to consider that President Trump is very much the doer/producer. You simply don’t hear anything about intention. It bemuses me to read commentators trying to understand what his intention is in what he says or does. I would suggest that he has no intention. He just does things. Much different is President Obama who was clearly much more the intender than the doer. Admitting to the extreme nature of the following, I might say that Obama had great intention but didn’t really do much. Trump has done all kinds of things, most of them wrong. Choose your poison. I think, but I’m not sure, that Biden might be somewhere in between.

So, roughly, the challenge of the intenders of the world is to actually do something, produce something, create something, whereas the challenge for producers is to stand back and see what might be the intention of what they want to do and then move slowly towards accomplishing it. Doing is good, but not good enough; you need to do something of value, perhaps lasting value. Dreaming is good but also not good enough; you need to do something that might also have lasting value. Good luck intending and producing.

Wordiness, Wordlessness, and Wordness

Ron Johnson communication, Feelings, Personality, relationships

Many people have trouble with words. In fact, it is my belief that every human being has trouble with words despite the fact that words are so central in human functioning and seemingly essential in interpersonal relations of any kind. We might say that the (scientific) difference between animals and humans is that humans have speech, whereas animals don’t (while we might suggest that the existence of self, soul, or spirit might also differentiate us from animals.)

I had a conversation this morning with a man who speaks easily and freely, so much so that he sometimes stumbles and tumbles over his own words as he is desperately trying to communicate what he feels and thinks. Several times during this morning’s conversation, “Jim” (as I will call him) said, “I just don’t know how to say what I feel” or “I just don’t know how to say what I think” and then follow up with some kind of self-criticism because of his difficulty of finding the right words. Jim is by far not the only person who I see that has trouble with finding words for his thoughts or feelings. Many were the times when someone said, “I just don’t know what to say” when they heard of our daughter’s death a year ago. What could they say at such an event? No words would do justice to the feelings that people often had although the best words were always, “I am so sorry.” But there were people who said all kinds of things, people who said nothing, and people who just looked at us with faces full of feelings but no spoken words.

The matter of words is more than the phenomenon of not knowing what to say. There are many instances where words are insufficient to express one’s feelings or thoughts. The title of this blog, “wordiness, wordless, and word-ness” is a reflection of some of the problems with words, and they all have to do with inadequate communication:

  • Wordiness: People have too many words and fail adequately communicate
  • Wordlessness: people have too few words and fail to adequately communicate
  • Wordness: people make up words but fail to adequately communicate

Wordiness

The “Jim” noted above had too many words for what he was feeling. He spoke over and over again about how he was feeling but he was having but was never satisfied with his words. So, he did what wordy people tend to do: he spoke more, he spoke louder, and he repeated himself. Jim’s situation was quite simple: his wife said that she wanted a divorce, and “it came as a complete surprise” although he admitted that he knew that “something was wrong” in the marriage for some time. I tried my best to help him say what he really felt but with only a modicum of success because he was so inclined to repeat himself over and over again, usually with intermittent statements of “I just don’t know how to communicate.” I tried, largely in vain, to help him feel the real emotion that he felt, which was simple sadness, but he was so inclined to rattle on, mostly about his wife and her alleged “problems” that I didn’t succeed in this endeavor. Of course, complaining and diagnosing his wife wouldn’t help him, but he didn’t know any other way to express his feelings. This is so often the case with wordy people: they don’t know when to stop talking, when to start thinking, and when to speak again when they have found words that adequately communicate their feelings. Wordy people rarely feel, then think, and then speak. Rather, they speak furiously because they depend on a flurry of words to communicate their feelings. Sadly, they often fail in this endeavor, which makes life even harder for them because they have done all that they know to do. Jim was largely covering the feeling of sadness with his wordiness. The more he said, the worse he felt and found himself in this downward cycle.

Wordy people tend to be extraverted but wordiness is not entirely in the realm of extraversion as we might expect. In fact, Jim is quite introverted by nature. You may know some introverted people who, when they have a kept audience, tend to rattle on about something. I recall a good introverted friend who, when we entered her house, would immediately meet us with a flurry of words, so much so that we were quite overwhelmed by the words, if not entirely by the content. Yes, extraverts can also dominate a conversation, but they tend to need a larger audience. Introverts dominate the conversation when they have you alone. I recall an incident with my younger daughter, who is by nature quite introverted, a time that Deb and I were taking her to some church event. Deb and I both remember how Jenny seemed to rattle on about one thing or another, then at one time said, “Listen to me; I’m just rattling on, aren’t I?” and then just as quickly went back to rattling. We enjoyed the moment.

Wordy people also tend to be feeling-based, which is a reference to the Jungian concept of how people make judgments. “Feeling-based” people “feel through” things, including their thoughts, emotions, and actions. Feeling-based people tend to have good intuition, especially if their intuition is not dominated by emotion. Often, however, feeling-based people have many more feelings than they have words for, so they can be found to say words over and over again with the hope of communicating the feeling they have. But wordiness is not only in the realm of feeling-based people. The individual I just noted who would typically greet me at her door was also thinking-based. Thinking-based people are always looking for someone to talk to about what they have read, experienced, or thought.

Whether introverted, extraverted, feeling-based, or thinking-based, wordy people tend to push into the conversation as many words as possible. I suspect they know that they have but little time before the audience will lose interest so they cram as many words as possible into the space where there should actually be fewer words.

Wordlessness

Wordless people have fewer words. Sometimes they have no words at all. There is a great place to say nothing. We would all do well to consider that there are important times to say nothing because there are times when nothing needs to be said. These are times when simple presence with a friend is important and simple quietude alone is important. There is certainly nothing wrong with being silent as Desiderata begins with “go placidly among the noise and haste of the world and remember what peace there may be in silence.” But let’s look a bit deeper into the wordlessness that troubles so many people.

Many people have suffered in school because of their lack of words. Most of the men I see in my office have suffered because they were not “word people.” Their lack of words may have been a genuine dyslexia but more often than not they were not “auditory learners,” which is learning based on words shown in reading, writing, and speaking. There are even people who were good at reading and speaking but couldn’t seem to put two words together on paper or people who could read and write but were terrified of speaking in class. School does no service to people who are not word-based. I didn’t like reading until well into college but I was good at writing and speaking, so I got along pretty well. Furthermore, my “learning style” is predominantly “auditory” (word-based). Equally good, but substantially different, are people whose learning styles are kinesthetic or visual. These would be the musicians, artists, and athletes in school who “go to school for their friends and activities” but abhor the reading and writing that dominates school. School was good for me because I am primarily word-based but I see kids in my office all the time who are good with art, music, sports, dance, and social life but hate reading. Oops, school is reading (and writing and speaking).

Wordless people might also be introverted or thinking-based. These folks work diligently to find the right words so often that they have large gaps in what they say in a conversation. This gap-ness is not the sole domain of introverts and thinkers, but it is most common among them. My brother used to look at his wife, who was both introverted and thinking, and say, “I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t hear what you said” when she had not actually “said” anything. She would say, “Oh, that’s right. You can’t read my mind.” This looking at someone intently, perhaps with mouth agape, arms swinging in the air, or grimacing is a time of wordlessness that usually fails to communicate. I recall many instances when someone has looked at me when we are in a conversation, opened his mouth as if to say something but not with any words, then came closer to me and was right in my face, yet without any words. Such a person is attempting furiously to communicate without using words. Rarely do they succeed in that endeavor. “There is a time to keep silent, and there is a time to speak” as Solomon said in the Jewish Scriptures’ book of Ecclesiastes.

Wordness

What I call “wordness” is the creating of words for the purpose of communicating something that standard dictionary-based words are insufficient. We have many words that are added to Webster every year, like “texting” a few years ago. While every language adds words to the usable vocabulary every year, there are also times when people create words that will never be a part of Webster, much less common use. I recently read an article that was based on Buber’s I and Thou book and the concept under the concepts of I and Thou. This author talked about “I-ness” and “Thou-ness” in her discussion of Buber’s concept of I and Thou. (For what it’s worth, Buber’s simple, yet profound suggestion is that we need to understand how we relate to one another, and the way we need to do that is understand how we think and feel followed by understanding how other people think and feel. This theologian found it necessary to talk about “I-ness” and “Thou-ness” in her dissertation. Yet I found it difficult to understand what she was talking about and sometimes found myself wondering if what she was saying was even important. Perhaps other readers have been fascinated by her use of these created words. Readers of theology, and somewhat in psychology, will be more familiar with these hyphenated words, like God-ness, Satan-ness, sin-ness, and creation-ness words.

Created words are not the sole property of theologians. Note that I used the word “gap-ness” above. I created this word. Many people will create words that have even less meaning than the likes of “I-ness” and “Thou-ness.” These are times when people may actually use some vocalism, like a grunt in an attempt to communicate. Or they may find some combination of words that seems to make no sense at all, something like babies do when they are trying to communicate their feelings but don’t yet have a vocabulary. Similarly, adults can yell, scream, grunt, murmur, or cry when they want to say something but can’t find the words to adequately communicate their feelings. While wordiness can be irritating or boring, and wordlessness can be frustrating, wordness can be awkward at the best and dangerous at the worst. Many physical fights have come about due to the wordness that has miscommunicated.

The danger that can come about due to wordiness, wordlessness, or wordness sometimes leads to undue cursing. Cursing has always been a part of this culture, and seemingly of every culture, the increase in the frequency of cursing, now beginning as early as age 5 or 6, seems to be a symptom of people increasingly unable to communicate themselves adequately. We know, for instance, that while speech is largely a “left-brain” phenomenon, cursing is a right-brain phenomenon, the right side of the brain being the housing for emotion as well as much of what we perceive in our five senses. Cursing can be conceived as wordness and created words. It is interesting that the “f word” can be almost any part of speech.

What’s it all about: wordiness, wordlessness, and wordness?

It’s about insecurity, namely feeling inadequate in expressing what I want to communicate. Thus, people talk too much, talk too little, or make up words in attempts to communicate. But what are they trying to communicate? Feelings. Deb and I finally published our most recent work, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, which should be back from the publisher in a week as well as being available for download soon. In this book we first admit that we will “never successfully communicate our feelings” while proposing that we can improve in communication if we realize that it is impossible to communicate perfectly. Nevertheless, this task of feeling something, trying to communicate it, and finding some modicum of success is something that few people master. I encourage you to continue to work at it.

You Value What You See

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Personality, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

I don’t see much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but there’s lots of truth in it. An important part of this “not seeing much” is related to the fact that I am colorblind. Not seriously so, like people who actually don’t see colors at all and live in a kind of black-and-white world, as I have a red/green colorblindness, which is the most common. So when Deb asks me to look at the (red) tulips in the yard, I can see them only if they are pretty close to me, but when far away, I can’t distinguish the red tulips from the green foliage. There are lots of other times when I mix colors or fail to distinguish colors. I have failed to distinguish red, green, brown, and gray depending on the depth of the color and what might be the background confusing the “cones” in my eyes. I recall the first time everyone realized that I was colorblind because my paternal grandfather asked me to plug the meter in his green Nash standing right in front of his office building where he could watch me from 6 stories up. Mom and he watched as I plugged the meter of the brown Nash right next to his green one. Colorblindness comes through the mother’s side of the family and rarely affects girls, so my maternal uncle was colorblind, my daughter not, but her son is. It is funny to play Sorry with Gavin when we struggle to distinguish the green movers from the red ones. Enough about the colorblindness, already. What does this have to do with anything important in life? It’s not terribly important if you or I are colorblind, but it is dreadfully important to know what we see and what we don’t see because we actually see different things.

First, let’s enlarge upon the word see for a moment. We can use this word “see” to include at least all five senses and possibly the “sixth sense” of intuition. Intuition is very close to the feelings that I have disused at length in previous blogs, but for our current purposes, we shall use the word intuition as a kind of sixth sense. Then we can use the word “see” to include all the ways people gather information: seeing (physically), hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and by intuition. I mention this 6-part way of “seeing” as a way of dealing with several important factors in one’s psychological makeup, not the least of which is that there are great differences among people in the way they see things. Some people are particularly good at seeing through one of their six senses, and some people are good at using all of their senses. Furthermore, there are people called synesthetic, who actually integrate their senses so much that they do such things as “taste the color blue,” smell the green grass, feel “touched” the thing that they hear, and many other combinations. There is at least one good book on the phenomenon of synesthesia and many articles, some of them in the popular genre. Blind people often have developed a particularly sense of hearing, and deaf people are often particularly good at seeing with their eyes. Beyond the fact that many people have a preference for one or two senses, there are people who aren’t particularly good at using any of their senses.

Beyond the use of the physical five senses plus intuition, there are some very interesting things about what we see that are very close to many other psychological factors, not the least of which is what we value. Think of it this way: if you don’t really care much about colors, as is largely true for me, you won’t really see colors, or if you do, you won’t care much about colors. Thankfully, Deb chooses my ties every day and often chooses my suits, jackets, pants, and shirts. I care about how I look but I don’t care about colors particularly as Deb has learned over our 40 some years together.

Having briefly presented some information about what we see with our eyes, what we see with the other physical senses, what we see with intuition, and also what we value, allow me to tell you a bit about a very important understanding that was made a century ago. Carl Jung, psychoanalyst and psychologist was a student of Sigmund Freud around the turn of the last century but came to believe that Freud’s understanding of the human condition was not sufficient to help people grapple with the difficulties in their lives. He proposed. Among many other things, that people had substantially different personality structures, one of which was the way that people see things. He referred to this structure as the perceptive function. Jung observed that people seemed to attend to very different things, perhaps see different things, and certainly value different things. Simply stated, Jung suggested that there is a spectrum of these differences representing how, what, and why people saw, attended to, and valued different things. He called these two different ways of seeing “intuitive” and “sensing,” terms that have continued to be used for the past century. I have found it more valuable to use the terms “objective” and “subjective” in explaining these differences of seeing. Thus the spectrum of perception is:

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Objective (Sensing)                                                                                     Subjective (intuition)

 

There have been scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of pages written on Jung’s understanding of personality, so permit me to simply indicate how people with these different perspectives see the world.

Objective (sensing) people tend to:

  • See what is real
  • See what is factual
  • Value the physical world
  • Engage the physical world
  • Produce something
  • Examine things (and people) individually

Subjective (intuitive) people tend to:

  • See what is unreal
  • See what is possible
  • Regard the nonphysical world
  • Engage the nonphysical world
  • Create something
  • Examine things (and people) relationally

There are many more things that can be said of these important ways of looking at the world, and nay interested reader will have no difficulty finding relevant material on this subject. My point in presenting this difference in seeing is to highlight the strengths of both of these ways of seeing, and to shed some light on some of the difficulties people have engaging these different worlds (physical and nonphysical), as well as the difficulties people have relating to one another.

For purposes of personal revelation I should note that I am particularly on the objective side of this spectrum, namely being a person who sees the real world and engages the real world. However, I am married to someone who sees the unreal world and engages quite well with this world. Furthermore, I have had the opportunity of living with my 14-year old grandson for the past three months who is distinctly on the subjective side of the spectrum of perception. The interesting thing about living with these two people who share this subjective way of seeing the world is in their seminaries in how and what they see and ultimately what they value. Additionally, as would be expected, they display differences in maturity that come with being either 14 or 65. Deb grew up in a very objective family and learned how to deal with the objective elements of the world, so from her earliest years she knew how to engage the physical world, reflected to some degree in the way she cared for property. My grandson did not grow up in such an environment largely because his mother took undue care for all the property in her household leaving my grandson to be able to continue undisturbed in engaging the “unreal” world, more accurately described as the “possible world”. It has been remarkable for me to see Gavin who is truly “subjective” in what he sees compared to my wife who also sees the subjective but also engages the objective world. This has given me an opportunity of seeing a bit clearer what subjective people “see” and hence what they do with what they see, and what they value because of what they see. This can be simply summarized in the matter of socks.

Socks? Yes. Some weeks ago, before I had truly grasped the differences in how my grandson and I “see” the world, I noticed that he had left his socks on the bathroom floor when we were visiting our cabin up north. I noticed the socks after he showered for the day. I noticed them at noon, again at 5 PM, and at 8. I noticed the socks because I notice such things. At 8 o’clock I asked Gavin to look in the bathroom and see what might be “wrong,” which was an interesting word I chose for what he saw. He immediately said that he saw the socks on the floor. I then asked him if he had seen the socks on the floor during the several times he had gone into the bathroom during the day. He said that he hadn’t seen the socks. While hard for me to believe, I came to the immediate realization that he hadn’t actually seen the socks. I thought, “How can someone walk into a (relatively small) bathroom and not see the socks that are on the floor?” But this wasn’t so much a question as it was a rhetorical question, something that I restrained myself from asking because such questions only stir shame rather than instruct.

Since the incident with the socks there have been perhaps several hundred such incidents over these past 12 weeks that Gavin has been with us, many of which I ignored, many of which I attended to by picking things up, and many of which I asked Gavin to attend to. This experience of “socks” and all that the socks represent has stirred a new understanding of people who have the subjective way of looking at the world.

I know this: it is the subjective people of the world who have made the most important discovering and improvements in the world, not the objective people like me. This very blog is a testament to this fact: nothing that I have written is “new” because Jung and his predecessors “discovered” this difference in perception long ago. Theologian Soren Kierkegaard predated Jung by nearly a hundred years and said the following about how people perceive. He called objective folks “people of possibility” and subjective folks “people of reality.” Then he went on to note the difficulties that both kinds of people have:

  • People of reality do everything but nothing (or very little) is of value
  • People of possibility do nothing (or very little), and everything they dream about is valuable

There are many more musings on this matter, not the least of which is what we value. Thus, Gavin values what he might do rather than what he does, whereas I value what I have done more than what I might do. I’m sure it’s been a challenge for Gavin to live with me for these past months and it certainly has been a challenge to live with him. More importantly, this is not about Gavin and me. It is about what we see and what we value, and ultimately how we can understand and value one another.

Further Reading

Jung, C. (1921/1974). Psychological types. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen

Myers. I.B. (1980). Gifts differing. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press

Johnson, R. (1993). Watch your temperament. Madison, WI: Midlands Psychological Press