Ashley,

You have not responded to my or Michelle’s questions.

I wonder if you settled on knowing why you have a perception that you are not being accepted.

Mark

Ashley,

your question “am I condescending or are they insecure” leads me to believe that you’re not mindful of your own behavior. The fact that you’re worry to be accepted by this group should lead you to question why you have this need to be accepted. Are you married? Do you have close relationships?

You have been asked by two people serious questions about self reflection, but you’ve dismissed them. If you’re serious about understanding who you are, you need to focus on yourself, not on what others think of you.

I invite you to listen to Ajahn Brahms talk on YT called Changing our attitude to who we think we are.

good luck and I hope you embark on the journey to discover yourself.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by Danny.

Hey Ashley,

So everyone has a tribe, it just takes some people a lot longer to find theirs, especially true when you don’t fit the cultural “norm” around you, whichever particular city/country you may be in. I know, since we have similarities here and in perspectives. You will also find you may find a tribe and then as you grow/change, you have to find a new tribe. So being able to build those kind of connections, meaningful ones, real honest ones that actually matter, that make you think and value the relationship and aren’t just ‘fluff’ ( I think you will know what I mean here? ) is a crucial skill to develop.  And the thing is, once you have gained this skill, you start finding members of your tribe all over the world. I travel a lot these days and so long as I can speak the language it is rare not to form these kind of connections, sometimes only briefly, sometimes for longer. But always a ‘proper’ connection, which is what you are looking for.

And I think perhaps that is the way for you to approach this, as a new skill to be developed, practiced, improved. A different kind of intellectual achievement.  This is not about pretending to be something you are not to be able to make friends, connections – that way doesn’t work, you will also feel inauthentic yourself and so the connection will not feel genuine. But logically you only have three choices as I see it.

–   You can continue as you are, increasing the number of people you try to meet to increase the chances of finding people who are willing to invest time in getting past your initial condescending/aggressive impression and therefore get to know the real you.

–    You change your style enough to practice the listening, the two-way give/take, the genuine interest in the other person’s view point, even if it is entirely illogical and emotion-based. I.e. the things Mark is asking about. Basically temporarily  reducing the Debator personality enough to allow others in and find you.

–    Or it may be worth thinking about why you present a face to the world outside work that is not the real you to start with.  Being very assertive, calling bullshit as you see it, being the ‘badass’ and so on, it’s all a very good way to thrive in the fields you work in but it is not so successful outside the world of work. I get it can be hard to be yourself at work, c-level corporate environments are weird bubbles of the world from my experience and it does take very different skills to negotiate them.  This club may simply be another such environment where you do not feel safe enough to let this mask drop, to let the real you shine through as in your trips to the Casbah.   I.e. you can still be true to your Debator personality without being ( meaning to or not ) arrogant to others.

Dear Ashley,

If you’re going to use the MBTI, it would be best to understand it’s origins (Carl Jung) than use a website that gives you a summarized version of the ENTP. Typology is both simple and complex so it’s easy to misunderstand it.

Also, you believe that there are some things you can’t change because it would mean changing your fundamental genetic, but wouldn’t the better question be whether you can change your perspective on the subject matter? After reading through the many replies in the thread that you’ve started on the simple question of ‘are you condescending or are people insecure’, your many replies have the distinct mark of a perspective in black and white; either they are right or you are wrong. Since the person who made the remark that you were condescending did not have any good example to fall back on, you then went outside of your club to look for clues on whether that person is merely judging you, along with the other people in your club. You then list your credentials and a vague attempt at differentiating how you were perceived in two different situation. Then you listed how other might have perceived you based on first impression, but that eventually went away. Then it was how judgment is made to your background and struggles. The main theme, of course, was YOU. You, you, you. How you struggled and succeeded. How you tried so hard to get where you are now regardless of how much others tried to set you back. And finally, how you are that much better than those whom you deigned to give your time to. There isn’t much in your post on how you could be condescending, not when you’ve achieved so much, other than the fact that others find you condescending. So do YOU think that you’re condescending? Evidently not.

Now, looking at it in another way, either the people who are a part of your club is being ridiculous or they are simply observing something about you that you don’t want to acknowledge. But lets go back to when you talk about the club member that told you that you were condescending. You’ve listed the fact that she had no good examples of your actions, but there are some things to note down. Is she the kind of person to be direct and say what she thinks outright, especially in the instances that denotes you as patronizing? Does she have a good memory or is life a series of impression to her? Memories aren’t that reliable. How close is your relationship seeing as you might be acquaintances than friends so she probably hasn’t seen the good and bad sides of you? Did you follow up with her on her impression of your patronizing first impression? She might have mull on it and remember some examples, but felt it too awkward to bring it up again. But why does she have to help you figure out whether you are patronizing or not? That is not her job and she was telling you her impression of you, just as you are writing about how others judge you based on your appearance and credentials.

Just as she has certain impressions of people, so do you. You judge others on their credentials (education, career and luxury) and see yourself as above them. Then you turn around and judge them for judging you based on that same credentials. You excused your judgment as an observation, but when others judge you, they are being insecure. You even use the analogy of being a Debater, the ENTP is not just a typology that debates; rather if you debated any person on every point about a subject, that just makes you argumentative, not inquisitive. Because being an ENTP might mean being a debater so even if you were to talk down to others about a certain subject, question their view and points, be insensitive about their perspective on the topic, that would be alright since you have the credentials to lend you backup. After all, you don’t want to considered their point of view so much as how you can win the argument. You might be insensitive, but you certainly aren’t insensitive to your need to be right.

Of course, no person ever wants to think or believe themselves to be less than a good human being, but hindsight bias is 20/20 for a reason. And whether you can accept the perspective of another person as a subjective truth is another question. So you can keep asking then keep defending yourself, but all you’re achieving is a loop of ‘they’re probably wrong and I’m the one with the good credentials so they’re just jealous’ etc. You judge them, they judge you, you judge them and it goes round and round.

Also, no one is entitled to anyone’s time. When you were upset at one of the members for turning down your handout of a welcome, your choice of words created the image that you expected the other person to accept your invitation because ‘your’ time is precious, you are knowledgeable about many things and thus would able to provide advice on things he might be struggling with so he should be happy to even be able to meet you. Yet he had the gall to decline your invitation which lead you to question another member on why that was so. Well, you might not have thought those things, but you definitely felt that it was unreasonable for him to ‘politely’ decline to meet you even when it is perfectly reasonable to accept or decline any meeting with any person, regardless of how well educated and possible well lived that person may be.

Humans are irrational, emotional mammals. Humans feel first, then think/act. A person is only logical in that they prefer to make decisions on noted fact than emotional ties.