Why Your Strengths Are Holding You Back
Sticking to what you’re best at feels safe — but Carl Jung warned it can stunt your growth. The secret? Develop your “inferior function” and learn to love the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding
We all have stuff that we’re good at and stuff that we’re bad at. Typically we lean into what comes easier to us and avoid what’s more difficult (see my previous post on how AI makes makes this worse for personal growth and development). While this is entirely natural (Freud called it “the pleasure principle”), over time it can make us pretty lopsided.
Superior and inferior functions in Jungian psychology
While it’s deeply satisfying to work in the comfort zone of our best traits, things can go amiss if we don’t pay attention to our lesser ones too. For Carl Jung, these traits aren’t seen as “good” and “bad”, but rather the “superior” and “inferior” ways in which we prefer to function. This is an important distinction because it’s less judgemental; your inferior functions aren’t “bad” — they’re just not as well developed as your superior ones.
Even with the best will and devoted practice, because they are part of your character, your inferior traits will never become as good as your superior ones — but developing our inferior capacities pays dividends far beyond just getting better at stuff. When we lean on our superior functions we tend to feel skilled and confident, while having to engage in our inferior ones can dissolve our confidence and make us feel de-skilled. Think of it as the psychological version writing with your dominant or less dominant hand.
In Jungian psychology, the way we function is better understood as an aspect of your personality, not about specific skills like verbal or numerical proficiency (though this matters too), rather your preferred way of perceiving, understanding, and being in the world: it’s about how you organise your experience.
In short, your superior functions are those that are most developed and that you are most conscious of, while your inferior ones are less developed and, at least according to Jung, closer to the unconscious. The way we function is related to our “attitude” or “personality orientation.”
Introversion vs. extraversion: What Jung really meant:
Most readers will be familiar with the two main Jungian orientations: introversion and extraversion. These attitudes will deeply influence how each of us engage in the functions that sit underneath them. You can think of attitude or orientation as a higher category under which the functions sit.
The fact that “introvert” and “extravert” have become identity categories is the antithesis of what Jung intended. He encouraged us to develop our inferior functions, not identify with our superior ones.
It’s really important to keep in mind (and this is the whole point of this article!) that we are comprised of all orientations and all functions, we just tend to have preferences for some over the others. To consider yourself as “an introvert” or “an extravert” is just wrong — it’s more about a preference for each attitude, and even that is dependent on context.
You can find more snappy videos like this on my Instagram by searching for @DrAaronB.
Contrary to popular understanding, nobody is purely an introvert or an extravert, we all have elements of both. It’s also not true that extroverted people are gregarious and introverted ones are shy (though, there’s correlations). These functions are better seen on a spectrum of personality preferences that everybody has access to by a matter of degree.
A simple way to understand what your dominant preference is has to do with whether what most energises you is inside or outside your own head.
Extraverts tend to be oriented towards the outer world of events, people, and activities. They tend to get energy from, and give energy to, the world outside themselves, particularly other people.
Introverts are more inwardly oriented, getting energy from their thoughts, feelings and ideas: this is where they tend to get and give most of their energy.
How introverted and extraverted you may be in any given moment is dependent a lot on context. For example, I tend to lean introverted at parties, preferring to speak to one person at a time on a deep level instead of being a social butterfly. However, when I am teaching or speaking, I lean very extravert and love to be stimulated by a room full of people. Those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) will be familiar with the situation-dependant aspect of this.
The four psychological functions: Sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition
It’s helpful to think of superior functioning as your “super power” and inferior functioning as your “secret door.”
Sitting under the general attitude of extraversion and introversion we have a set of preferred ways of functioning in the world. Here it starts to get kind of complicated, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple. For Carl Jung there are four main functions that we all draw upon to get information about the world around us and then organise that information — the names of them can be quite misleading, so I will define them here:
Sensation: Using of the five senses to obtain information about the world around us.
Thinking: Using logical analysis and rational thought telling us what’s happening.
Feeling: Using emotions, feelings, and values to understand the world around us.
Intuition: Using patterns to draw meaning out of the world, finding the “gestalt” from the pieces.
Hopefully you can see why we need all of these ways of perceiving the world in order to function properly — too much reliance on any one of them can leave blindspots in the way your perceive the world — and the larger those blind spots become, the more you can miss. By looking at these you can probably get a pretty good idea what you’re good at and what you are less good at. Again, those who know the MBTI, which is based on Jung’s thinking, will be familiar with this.
Your superior function is your “superpower”, your inferior function is your “secret door.”
When you’re in working within your superior function, you are like a super hero. You feel like you are in flow and that you can accomplish anything. This is why you tend to lean into those superior qualities — you feel competent, secure, and good! Sometimes, however, you are forced to lean into your inferior ones, and when that happens, it has the opposite effect on you — we feel incompetent, deskilled, and out of sorts.
Check out my recent article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Develop your inner masochist in GQ Magazine about how the dangers that AI poses by offering you easy ways to avoid developing your functions.
Superior functioning is your super power because it’s where you feel most at home, it’s where you rock. Because it is so deeply linked to how your perceive the world you inhabit, it has the power to make you feel secure and confident in your body and in your preferred context. According to Jung your superior function is “always an expression of the conscious personality, of its aims, will, and general performance.”
The Shadow: Why Jung said you should love what you’re bad at
Why you should appreciate your inferior function is less obvious; why should you love what you’re bad at and makes you feel de-skilled? Jung suggests that our inferior functions offer an opportunity for us to grow because they are “closer to the unconscious.” Contrary to feeling at home and in control like we do in superior functioning, when in inferior function we may feel out of control and even afraid. This darker less familiar part of our psyche is what Jung called “the shadow”, a central concept in what would become known as “shadow work.”
Because we’re unpracticed in the shadow, it feels alien to us when we are forced to engage with it. If we continue to avoid engaging with it across the life span, we deny ourselves access to the “secret door” of personal growth. It is by pushing through discomfort and the less familiar that the greatest opportunity for personal growth lies.
“The essence of the inferior function is autonomy: it is independent, it attacks, it fascinates and so spins us about that we are no longer masters of ourselves and can no longer rightly distinguish between ourselves and others”. - G.G. Jung
Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, it can be if it remains unrecognised and repressed, when this happens, it gets stuck in our “shadow” — and anything that gets stuck there is liable to sneak up on us and wreak havoc when it can.
“… it is necessary for the development of character that we should allow the other side, the inferior function, to find expression. We cannot in the long run allow one part of our personality to be cared for symbiotically by another; for the moment when we might have need of the other function may come at any time and find us unprepared.” - C.G. Jung
Developing our inferior function isn’t only a sensible thing to do so we become more well rounded or to logically have a Plan B when we can’t draw on our superior one. Developing the inferior function helps us to gain access to our shadow; it throws light into our unconscious; and it helps us to grow more securely into our greatest potential. It also helps us to better understand and relate to those who have functions that differ from ours, thereby making us more compassionate human beings.
Functions in couples and teams: Functions that complement each other
As it happens we tend to find ways to deal with our inferior functioning quite unconsciously. For example, many of us find partners that complement our functioning, and in doing so we outsource some of that functioning to them. While this might strike some kind of balance, if both partners don’t also develop those inferior capacities it can be a recipe for disaster later. The same thing happens in the workplace. Great teams are comprised of personality types and functions that complement each other. However, they shouldn’t be altogether compartmentalised as that can damage interpersonal relations and miss opportunities for synergies.
How to love your inferior function: a self development guide
While you should definitely surround yourself with others who have different typologies from you, try and do so while developing your own inferior ones!
Here are some suggestions:
Self-awareness is key: Look inside, you know yourself pretty well, so you probably have a pretty good idea of what needs developing. Identify those traits you want to develop and set an intention to do so. Getting a good therapist is a good start if you want to go at it seriously.
Get feedback: Though you’ll have a pretty good idea yourself, the nature of inferior functions is that they tend to hide from you. So reach out to trusted others at home or at work and get a second-hand evaluation of the areas you may need to be looking at. The aim is to get this information from trusted and caring others, so it should be done with sensitivity and compassion.
Don’t avoid situations that require your inferior functioning: Avoidance is our favourite way of letting inferior functions languish. Subject yourself to uncomfortable experiences that will develop that function and strengthen it. Just like working out weaker muscles at the gym, you don’t want to go full throttle all at once, but start a little at a time to build in the skills.
Allow yourself to feel de-skilled: I’m a words-guy so I recently joined a life drawing class. This was really challenging for me and I was not happy with the results. However, it’s not about results, it’s about confronting that discomfort and opening that door to your less developed, more unconscious parts of yourself.
Hang with others who have skills in the areas in which you are inferior: Let them be guides to you, learn from them. Try to see the world through their eyes. Challenge yourself.
Play: Building your inferior capacities is challenging but it can be fun. See it as an opportunity to grow into who you really are, “individuation” which is the essence of Jungian personal development. The great irony is that while in your inferior function you may not feel yourself your are in fact growing more and more into yourself each time — expanding yourself — individuating.
This is a fully revised and updated version of an original blog post from 2023.
Aaron Balick, PhD is an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.
All Jung quotes came from Volume 7 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung