Sometimes referred to as the “Advocate” or the “Idealist,” people with this personality type often feel misunderstood. Perhaps it’s because INFJ is the rarest MBTI personality type, making up only 1% to 3% of the U.S. population. Or maybe it’s because they’re walking, talking contradictions.
Known as “the advocate” or “the idealist” type, the acronym “INFJ” stands for “introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging.” INFJ types are compassionate, idealistic, and likely to form close bonds with people.
An affirmation is usually a sentence, a sentence of powerful words put together, like a positive statement, and this sentence is aimed to tap into your conscious and unconscious mind to motivate you, to challenge you, to push you to reach your full potential in life.
Affirmations encourage you to visualize and believe a statement to make positive changes in your life. Affirmations are phrases that you repeat to yourself to change your subconscious thoughts. Over time, they replace any negative beliefs or thoughts with positive thoughts. This instils confidence, positivity, and ambition.
Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Molly
The Gift of Unconditional Love
Pets accept you as you are. While humans tend to withhold love and trust in their relationships, animals are a shining example of loyalty. Unconditional love between humans isn’t common, but with pets it certainly is! They inspire gratitude by meeting us with an unwavering love every day.
Unconditional love
Unconditional Love, the selfless act of loving someone with full acceptance and without expecting anything in return. You might equate this type of love with the love you have for your parents or your children.
Grandson17 months
People who regularly practice gratitude by taking time to notice and reflect upon the things they’re thankful for experience more positive emotions, feel more alive, sleep better, express more compassion and kindness, and even have stronger immune systems.
Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.
Molly
The Gift of Unconditional Love
Pets accept you as you are. While humans tend to withhold love and trust in their relationships, animals are a shining example of loyalty. Unconditional love between humans isn’t common, but with pets it certainly is! They inspire gratitude by meeting us with an unwavering love every day.
Unconditional love
Unconditional Love, the selfless act of loving someone with full acceptance and without expecting anything in return. You might equate this type of love with the love you have for your parents or your children.
Grandson17 months
People who regularly practice gratitude by taking time to notice and reflect upon the things they’re thankful for experience more positive emotions, feel more alive, sleep better, express more compassion and kindness, and even have stronger immune systems.
“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?”
Rabbi Harold S Kushner
10 ways to reduce pain
Get some gentle exercise. …
Breathe right to ease pain. …
Read books and leaflets on pain. …
Talking therapies can help with pain. …
Distract yourself. …
Share your story about pain. …
The sleep cure for pain. …
Take a course.
MeditateDo not make the same mistake that causes you pain
Relaxation of the deep muscles. Distraction or moving attention away from the pain signals. Concentration and focus on images, sounds or other thoughts that provide a pleasant and relaxing experience.
Implementing the suggestions below won’t make all your days zen perfect, but they’re sure to be a huge improvement on your previous status quo.
1. Figure Out Your #1 Self-Care Habit
When life gets busy, taking care of yourself is often the first thing to suffer.
sleep, exercise, meditation
What’s your one thing? Whatever it is, make it a non-negotiable priority in your life. Schedule it into your calendar, and stick to it no matter what. Remember, you can’t take care of those around you if you don’t first take care of yourself.
Imagine that your life is represented by a stove with four burners on it. Each burner symbolizes one major quadrant of your life.
1. The first burner represents your family
2. The second burner is your friends.
3. The third burner is your health.
4. The fourth burner is your work.
The Four Burners Theory says that “in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two.
As James points out, that leaves you with two options.
The first is to choose a more balanced life and accept that you’ll never reach your full potential in any one of the quadrants. The second is to go all out in one area at the expense of one the others.
If you dream of going to the Olympics or creating the next Google, turning off two burners is how you’ll get there. If not, turning off one is plenty.
But how do you decide which one to turn off?
You need to get clear on what’s most important to you. Six months or a year from now it might be different, but focus on what matters most to you in this moment. Once you know what that is, you’ll know which burner to turn off.
If work is most important, health and family might come next, which means friends are out of the picture for now. Turning a burner off might be hard, but you’ll know in your gut which one has to cool for a while.
3. Create Foolproof Systems
Instead of setting goals, you need to focus on creating systems.
You don’t have to think, you just do. How is this helpful? Surely operating on autopilot kills creativity?
It’s actually the opposite. When you avoid decision fatigue, you free your brain up to focus on the important stuff. Whatever that is for you.
These systems also act as insurance. I won’t say you’ll never forget something, but the chances are a lot slimmer than they are when you’re in Whack-a-Mole mode.
Write down all the things you need (and would like) to get done on a daily basis. Some, like brushing your teeth and driving to work, are already ingrained. It’s the things you keep forgetting that you need to install systems for.
Those systems can be simple. I kept forgetting to write in my gratitude journal before going to bed, so I started placing my journal on my pillow after making the bed in the morning. Problem solved.
Think about how you can use this tactic in your own life. For example, do mornings always run late because the kids can’t find their stuff? Have them pack their bags and leave them in the hall before bed.
Are you always misplacing things? Give everything in your house a place. When you get home you hang up your car keys on the hook behind the door.
The idea is that eventually, all these things will become rote activities. When you reach that point, your brain is on autopilot. The chance of you forgetting something is close to zero.
4. Get Help When You Need It
Help can be anything from employing a cleaning service to hiring a babysitter to paying someone to do your taxes for you. It doesn’t matter.
The important thing is that you ask for help when you need it.
5. Breathe, Let It Go, and Enjoy
Regardless of how well you plan or how many systems you have in place, things will sometimes go awry. It could be a blocked drain, a fender bender, a bout of flu, or whatever.
What’s important is how you respond to these situations. You can either argue with reality (and lose) or you can breathe and let it go. Accept that you’re behind on your day, and make the best of it.
When you’re so focused on balancing everything, it’s easy to take life a little too seriously. Remember to give yourself free time to relax and regroup.
Downtime is as much a part of getting a balanced life as being productive is. Take a trip, get a massage, or go to a movie, whatever appeals to you. You’ll come back more balanced than you left.
Final Thoughts on Re-Centering Yourself
You need to extricate yourself from the old way of doing things. You need to put systems in place and retrain yourself to operate more efficiently. But, get it right and you’ll have freed up not only the time, but the mental bandwidth to focus more fully.
Even better, you’ll find that life is more balanced.
Understanding your seven chakras — and how you can work with them — is the key to enhancing how you feel as you move through your day.
The 7 major chakras in the body are:
Root Chakra (Muladhara)
Sacral Chakra (Svadhishthana)
Solar Plexus Chakra (Manipura)
Heart Chakra (Anahata)
Throat Chakra (Vishuddha)
Third Eye Chakra (Ajna)
Crown Chakra (Sahasrara)
#1: The Root Chakra (Muladhara)
Chakra Color: Red
Where It’s Located: The base of the spine/pelvic floor
What It Represents: The root chakra is all about our physical body, material needs, and security. Since it encompasses our roots, family of origin. This is your action center!
How to Work With It: To get into alignment, ask yourself — either mentally or via journaling — What actions are working for me? What actions need to be different? How safe and financially secure in the world do I feel?
What Aligning Your Root Chakra Does: You’ll take effective, inspired actions without overdoing things, and you’ll feel more confident, safe, and financially secure.
#2: The Sacral Chakra (Svadhishthana)
Chakra Color: Orange
Where It’s Located: The abdomen
What It Represents: “We now know that this area determines your emotions and feelings,” so it’s not surprising that this center holds the microbiome — or the gut. It also represents creativity, sensuality, the fertility of ideas, and sexual flow.
How to Work With It: Ask yourself, How is my emotional health? Am I overly emotional — or not emotional enough? How’s my sense of creativity? Am I experiencing any addictive tendencies or jealousy?
What Aligning Your Sacral Chakra Does: You’ll develop a healthier self-image and be able to accept change with more ease.
#3: The Solar Plexus Chakra (Manipura)
Chakra Color: Yellow
Where It’s Located: Above the naval, but below the ribs
What It Represents: “Here’s where all your digestion is happening — of food and ideas,” It’s about ideas, belief systems, inner chatter, [and] how you pick up on information and how you perceive it. It organizes ideas, and so it’s the center that indicates work success. It’s also about manifestation, transformation, personal power, motivation, and resilience.
How to Work With It: Ask yourself, What thoughts do I have — and which ones am I putting in charge? Do I feel clarity, courage, and confidence?
What Aligning Your Solar Plexus Chakra Does: You’ll experience more clarity and courage, as well as a feeling of confident humility.
#4: The Heart Chakra (Manipura)
Chakra Color: Green
Where It’s Located: The physical heart space
What It Represents: The heart has been shown as an endocrine gland because it makes hormones like oxytocin. It’s the center of connection, love, bonding, and relationships.
How to Work With It: If you’re experiencing an issue related to a relationship, take a closer look. Ask yourself, Is there a particular pattern of behavior here? Journal about any sadness, stress, resentment, loneliness, perfectionism, and disagreement between your head and heart.
What Aligning Your Heart Chakra Does: Your relationships will flow with ease, your capacity for forgiveness and compassion will increase, and you’ll feel more self-love and more facility in listening to your heart.
#5: The Throat Chakra (Vishuddha)
Chakra Color: Blue
Where It’s Located: The throat/neck area and upper shoulders
What It Represents: The center of communication, this is where we speak, sing, and think. It’s considered the center of clairaudience, which is the psychic ability to hear information.
How to Work With It: The theme here is expression. Ask yourself, Do I feel comfortable expressing what I’m thinking and asking for what I need — or not? Am I overly communicative, too impulsive with my expression, or highly critical? Do I make decisions easily?
What Aligning Your Throat Chakra Does: You’ll be able to express yourself freely and authentically.
#6: The Third Eye Chakra (Ajna)
Chakra Color: Violet
Where It’s Located: The brow area
What It Represents: It connects into the pituitary gland, which is your master hormone, the gland dictating what your hormones are doing. This energy center is going to involve a lot of brain activity and is primarily about self-perception.
How to Work With It: Ask yourself, How do I see myself? “If you have comparison issues or see yourself as less than, that locks into the sixth chakra and affects your hormones.” Examine your self-awareness, any obsessive thinking, and/or whether you experience brain fog.
What Aligning Your Third Eye Chakra Does: You’ll feel tapped into your intuition, experiencing it with clarity.
#7: The Crown Chakra (Sahasrara)
Chakra Color: White
Where It’s Located: The pineal gland, a neuroendocrine organ in the center of the brain, that’s implicated in mystical experiences
What It Represents: “It produces a lot of hormones necessary for balanced moods and sleep, essentially it’s considered the center of our spirit and our connection to the divine spirit.” Because the crown is considered the entry point for human life force, that it influences the major body systems, including the muscular system, the skeleton, and the skin.
How to Work With It: Ask yourself, Can I sense my oneness, which is the feeling of being connected to everything in the universe? Or am I depressed, anxious, flat, or questioning my spiritual purpose or the meaning of life?
What Aligning Your Crown Chakra Does: It leads to greater attunement to self as well as a greater sense of humanitarianism and the development of transcendent ideas.
Grateful 