Harnessing Your Auxiliary Personality Trait – Everyday Fulfillment
No Vacation Required
Most of us spend years trying to "make it work" with personality traits we picked up just to survive. We hide our real strengths, or we try to process the world in a way that looks right on paper but feels completely wrong in practice. (Trust us, Caanan spent years doing exactly this before realizing he had it all backward).
This week, we are talking about the auxiliary personality trait. It’s the balancing force of your personality stack, and it might just be the missing piece you’ve been looking for.
Onward and Inward,
COMMON QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS EPISODE
❓What is the auxiliary personality trait? Your auxiliary trait is your secondary personality strength. It typically develops in adolescence or your early 20s and serves as a crucial balance to your dominant trait. If your dominant trait is introverted, your auxiliary trait will be extroverted (and vice versa).
❓Why is the auxiliary trait so important for balance? If you only operated out of your dominant trait, you would become completely internal or completely external. Your auxiliary trait acts as a bridge, allowing you to bring your internal superpowers out into the world, or helping you internalize and process your external experiences.
❓How does it feel when you are operating in your authentic auxiliary type? It feels like a "flow state." While it might take some practice to unlearn old habits, operating in your true auxiliary type feels natural, relieving, and energizing.
❓What happens if I try to force a personality trait that isn't mine? You will likely feel stilted, frustrated, and misunderstood. Many people spend years trying to "make it work" in a personality box that doesn't fit, only to feel a massive sense of relief when they finally discover their true type.
❓Do opposites really attract in relationships? While opposites can create a lot of initial excitement, relationships where partners share at least some personality traits tend to have an easier time. However, any pairing can work if both partners understand their own personality types and don't take their partner's natural traits as a personal affront.
CHAPTERS
(00:00) Mind Share: Carbone Spicy Vodka Pasta Sauce at Costco! (Unsponsored)
(02:20) Understanding your auxiliary (i.e. secondary) trait
(07:13) What it feels like to live outside of your authentic type
(12:44) The palpable relief of stepping into your true personality
(14:46) Why your top two personality traits are such a satisfying combo
(19:35) Mailbag: Do opposites really attract, or do you need to be the same to make it work?
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TRANSCRIPT
Caanan (00:02)
This week, we're focusing on your secondary personality strength. An important part of your personality that brings instant clarity, grounds your decisions, and fuels true personal growth.
Caanan (00:16)
Okay, Kent, I'm gonna jump in with a mind share because I've got something really important to talk about.
Kent (00:22)
Okay.
Caanan (00:23)
Okay.
Caanan (00:25)
We tried the Carbone spicy penny ala vodka sauce. No you did it. That you can get at Costco. And we've
Kent (00:31)
You Yes he did.
Caanan (00:35)
been to Carbone and we've had a wonderful meal at Carbone, a great experience. But I gotta say, and this is why this is so important, I want you to hear me out there.
Caanan (00:47)
Doing this at home was so much less expensive. ⁓ And in many ways, it was better. Yeah. Than what we had at actual Carbone. So if your feed has been full for three years of people showing you the spicy penne ala vodka sauce at Carbone.
Kent (01:06)
Date night pasta. Yeah.
Caanan (01:08)
Date night pasta and you're thinking, my god, I've got to go to New York or Miami or Las Vegas Seriously, just go to Costco and get this and make it at home because it is spot on.
Kent (01:22)
And good call because we do a lot of dupes and we love to cook and we love to eat out and we've eaten out all over the world and you know, oftentimes it's like, Well, this is this is pretty good for home or whatever, but this particular one, we were very much in the camp of okay, they themselves must use their own bottled sauce because this tastes exactly like
Kent (01:46)
And I think you say better because I think you're
Caanan (01:48)
Better.
Kent (01:48)
yeah, you're able to control the temperature a little bit more. We were able to have it a little bit warmer, so good mind share and it shows the foodies we are. Yeah, go get the what's it called?
Caanan (01:59)
spicy. Carbone spicy vodka sauce. Yeah. And you know what? It's even better at home because you can eat it in your pajamas and you don't have to try to look cool eating a plate of pasta, which we all know is impossible to do.
Kent (02:19)
Okay, so we're talking about the auxiliary position. And this one's a little strange because last week you remember we talked about the dominant personality position. Please go and listen to that before you listen to this one. So the auxiliary is something that most people will
Kent (02:39)
become aware of and exercise at some point in their life. I'm saying become aware of like assuming people never know their personality type or never do an examination of it, which again we feel is so important to quote unquote live your best life.
Kent (02:56)
Last week we talked about how your dominant lives in your preferred state of introversion or extroversion. So the dominant carries that power of
Kent (03:11)
For instance, as I said last week, my dominant strength is intuition and it lives in my introverted world. So it comes out as a a knowingness, a quiet awareness, a possibilities orientation.
Caanan (03:28)
Just to be
Caanan (03:28)
clear, because this can get so confusing, what you're saying is you have introverted intuition, which means your intuition is happening ⁓ internally, correct? I just wanted to make that clear.
Kent (03:38)
Yes. Okay.
Kent (03:41)
And not to confuse you even further, this is just a recap. I don't want to lean too much into what we talked about last week, but it becomes important for this week as we switch to the auxiliary, which then will move in to your lesser preferred position. So in both our cases.
Kent (04:04)
We prefer introversion, so both of our auxiliaries ⁓ are ⁓ in ⁓ extroversion. ⁓ So we know ⁓ just by ⁓ studying personality
Kent (04:18)
And knowing our own, which is such a big part of it that
Kent (04:23)
Our auxiliaries sit in
Kent (04:26)
extroversion and yeah, I know Caanan and you've got strong feelings about your ⁓ auxiliary and the knowledge of that ⁓ and ⁓ what it's done for your life.
Caanan (04:38)
Yeah. Cause I'm an extroverted feeler. My auxiliary, otherwise known as secondary, is feeling and because I have a preference for introversion, that means my secondary is extroverted. So I'm an extroverted feeler, which means when I'm in type, when I'm operating in type, I like to talk through
Caanan (05:08)
my feelings. I like to extrovert what I'm feeling. Yeah. this is a big deal for me because I haven't always done that. I used to believe I was an introverted feeler. So I would try to I would try to process all of my feelings internally before saying anything. And it didn't feel very natural. It felt like what I had to do at the time, but it didn't feel very natural to me.
Caanan (05:38)
And now as I've grown into my authentic personality type ⁓ and I know my authentic personality type and I can lean into it, ⁓ I've practiced more and more ⁓ extroverting my feelings. And I can tell you I know this is my authentic personality type because when I start talking about my feelings and just riffing,
Caanan (06:01)
it feels ⁓ like a complete flow state. ⁓ I ⁓ love talking about my feelings. And Kent you and I have amazing conversations where we can just go for miles and miles ⁓ where I'll just riff on my feelings. And that just that can just happen easily for me now.
Caanan (06:26)
But that wasn't always the case.
Kent (06:29)
In everything we've done, in our personal lives and as sought after business and career development consultants, we've learned one consistent thing. Most people just don't know themselves. NoVacationRequired.com is where we talk about how you too can build a life that you don't need a break from and how it all starts with knowing yourself. There you'll find all of our podcast episodes, information on services, and the scoop on us. And to really raise the bar, we model this as a couple.
Kent (06:58)
To show that a relationship doesn't have to be a compromise or a counterproductive union. When two people are each doing their own work, the heightened connection becomes a shortcut to building a no vacation required life.
Kent (07:13)
You're such a perfect like learning moment. You kept saying what I used to think, what I used to think you mean in the absence of personality information. So because feeling is one of the big four that shapes your personality. Again, the things are intuition, sensing, feeling, thinking. You just know by living life that somehow you're feeling and in this case this means
Kent (07:44)
your sense of right and wrong, how you make decisions, what's important to you in decision making. It doesn't necessarily mean feeling like emotions, if that makes sense. But you had somehow conjured up this idea that you were more of an internal feeler. And you had built a life and a way of being based on what turned out to be false information.
Kent (08:14)
That you kind of make feel right, but it never feels natural. And I love that in the last segment you talked about flow state. And that's what I witness in you. And this is what we witness in clients all the time when these personality connections are made. Yes. Like that feels natural. And I've got to stop here and say something I've said before, and I'll say it a million times in the future, and I will die on this hill.
Kent (08:40)
we spent a couple decades doing this work. if I say rarely, like what, five times or less, and we're talking a few thousand clients, people are never like, this doesn't sound right.
Caanan (08:58)
No.
Kent (08:59)
Once they have this personality exploration or discovery moment, discovery and then exploration. Yeah. It is
Kent (09:09)
Not only usually, that makes sense. Okay, nope, I understand. This is good. It is a boosted level of that. Like that makes sense of everything. I always knew it. that feels so right. I mean
Caanan (09:25)
So much better.
Kent (09:26)
Yes, and I felt that from you, as you've done many times before in the work we've done, etc. Kind of talking about that flow state.
Kent (09:36)
And what I think is really intriguing about this, we get into one of those sort of confusing things because remember, your dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, and inferior all kind of work together. Right. And although you have something massively dominant that we talked about last week, and something insanely inferior that we're gonna talk about in a couple weeks.
Kent (10:06)
If you know your personality and you can see how these things work together, it can produce a kind of magic. Now, auxiliary, which we're talking about this week, usually doesn't really develop until adolescence or even the early 20s in people. So here we are only at auxiliary.
Kent (10:31)
And this is at a huge disadvantage. And we're already we're only at the second of four. Right. And it's at a huge disadvantage to the point where, back to what you so beautifully said, you had kind of decided in your own sort of like
Kent (10:50)
contemplative youth that you kept your feelings inside and you built your whole personality on that and then realized wait I'm built ⁓ as an external ⁓ feeler
Caanan (11:03)
Yeah.
Kent (11:04)
so talking about or thinking about that difference between what that feels like ⁓ when it's not a flow state thing versus what it feels like as it does for you now, when it feels in flow.
Caanan (11:20)
Well, you almost have to experience the in-flow part. Boy, is this a sales pitch or what? But here you go. You have to figure out your personality and you have to have the moment where you're having either your dominant confirmed, and you've been living in your dominant and or your personality confirmed. Your personality confirmed. And you've been living in type, and now you have it confirmed, and you can sort of
Caanan (11:47)
sit in it, yeah, comfortably, or you're having you're being disabused of some ideas you have about your personality, like I was, and start trying on some new things only to find out that they feel really, really in the pocket to learn that in fact you were a little wrong, or you had to make some decisions about your personality to keep yourself safe or whatever the reason yeah you were operating
Caanan (12:17)
Out of your authentic personality type.
Kent (12:20)
Just for the say you used the phrase trying on. That was not your experience at all. Like the minute you put on your auxiliary, which is extroverted feeling, there was no talk of trying on or alternatives, or how about that one? Or let me see, it was an exuberant, wow, this feels good.
Caanan (12:41)
Yeah.
Kent (12:42)
Yeah. Yeah. And tell me about that from your perspective as we close out this segment. Like
Kent (12:50)
What did that aha of flow ⁓ feel like? ⁓ we're using the word feel. What did that feel like ⁓ as opposed to the ⁓ well I I ca I can make this work. Isn't this how it is for everybody? ⁓ Well when you thought you were an internal feeler.
Caanan (13:07)
Yeah,
Caanan (13:08)
for me, and this is very specific to my experience as a external feeler External feeling to me it really does feel very natural. It doesn't always feel easy to start, especially because I'm
Caanan (13:30)
stepping into my authentic personality type. So I'm kind of retraining myself to do some things that in the past didn't feel safe, talking about my feelings, right? But as I practice it and get more comfortable with it, it's very clear that I'm an external feeler. It's like I just learned to swim and now I'm in the pool and I'm a natural athlete. I'm a natural swimmer. It just happens. But
Caanan (13:58)
As we talked about with Dominant, you can almost understand this more from the opposite feeling, which was when I was trying to be an internal feeler, that never felt quite right. I always felt stilted and frustrated and like I wasn't able to say what I wanted to say. And Kent, you could feel this as my partner. You were like, God, you seem kind of bothered. And that's exactly right. I was
Caanan (14:26)
bothered because I couldn't express myself in the way that was authentic to me because I believed I was supposed to do all of this feeling work internally.
Caanan (14:39)
Thanks for listening. We'd be honored if you'd subscribe, like, and share. It means the world to us.
Kent (14:47)
So here we are. We've talked about dominant last week and auxiliary personality function this week. And the this is so basic, but this is such a nice two pack. We are experts in personality. We know all the ins and outs. But there's something about this two pack, just this two pack that is so nice because
Kent (15:13)
Between your dominant and your auxiliary, we have an introverted function and an extroverted function, and we also have
Kent (15:28)
A perceiving function and a judging function. So we have
Kent (15:32)
everything represented in this two pack and
Kent (15:39)
Just that amount of knowledge, ⁓ the knowing that you don't have to be ⁓ all extroverted or all introverted, that you've got these ways that you can express ⁓ your less dominant pairing – ⁓
Kent (15:56)
The E or the I, the P or the J, you put those together and you can really see how you've got these levers to play with via your actual personality stack, which is you know your dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, inferior, and they're the sensing, intuition, feeling, thinking.
Kent (16:27)
You know which of those characteristics is in the right slot via having your personality assessed, then you know how to throttle and modulate your extroversion, where to throttle and modulate, and same with your introversion. You know, you know where you're best to express your introversion, and we all have introversion, whether it's your dominant or your preferred or not.
Caanan (16:56)
⁓ You know, can I jump in here real quick and just say that this this is so important because what you're talking about is something we brought up before, which is balance. ⁓ And in these two, your dominant and your auxiliary, you're already seeing a critical component of balance in your personality. ⁓ So just from my experience, if I have internal intuition
Caanan (17:19)
as my dominant position, which is what I have. That's great. I have this superpower of internal intuition. But what the hell good does it do if I never extrovert that? Right? And so through extroverted feeling,
Kent (17:35)
Yeah.
Caanan (17:36)
I can bring that out into the world in this safe way, in this in this way that sort of keeps my internal intuition in check.
Caanan (17:47)
And that's really what that auxiliary position does. It it kind of balances out your dominant position. Is that a correct way of saying that, right? That's well put like
Kent (17:57)
And this is what we do a lot when we when we help people uncover who they are, what their personality is when we work with work groups. It's like people have this instinct because they either don't know their personality, they've never been encouraged to figure out who they are, or they have, but they
Kent (18:17)
have only done it through the lens of work and they don't have a clear picture of it, you kind of think you need to be extroverted in all ways because you kinda know you're an extrovert or an introvert. You've figured that out. You've done enough cosmo or esquire quizzes to figure that out. Right. So you're trying to figure out how to strong arm like your extroversion into intuition, into sensing, into feeling, into thinking. Like it's all of me. And
Kent (18:45)
This balance, Caanan, that you talk about, yes, it's like, okay, wait, ⁓ yeah, extroversion is ⁓ your preferred pairing, ⁓ Sue. ⁓ This is how you most effectively express ⁓ your extroversion. But this is actually an introverted ⁓ quality of yours, Sue. ⁓ So this is how you toggle those two. ⁓
Caanan (19:11)
Yeah, like you have this little check and balance in your auxiliary position to keep your dominant trait from being b essentially maladaptive, right?
Kent (19:25)
Yeah.
Caanan (19:33)
You ready for mailbag, Kent? I'm so ready. Okay, I'm gonna have you answer this one. I like it. It's kind of basic, but you know, these need to be at times. this question is, do opposites really attract or do you need to be basically the same person to actually make a relationship work?
Kent (19:50)
I wanna do a whole episode on this. We have to. Yeah, I know. Cause it's so important, it's really tough to give a ⁓ quick answer to it. Feels almost ⁓ like Yeah. I'm breaking some little ⁓ ethical law, but I will. ⁓ I talked about this, we talked about this a bit in the last four pack on personality, and we will talk about it going forward. ⁓ But ⁓ basically just through our own experience
Kent (20:18)
And through that brushing against loved ones and and clients, either being alike in personality or mostly alike, or kind of partially, half and half, are definitely the optimal situations. Being opposite can create a lot of excitement and there's a lot of great things there, but being opposite
Kent (20:45)
literally opposite and it happens. I mean, you know, there's there's only four pairings.
Caanan (20:53)
Yeah.
Kent (20:54)
IE, SN, FT, JP... It's easy to be quote unquote opposite. ⁓ It can be ⁓
Kent (21:04)
incredibly challenging. So you can go back and listen to the last four pack of episodes on personality and we talk a little bit about the process pairs in which being opposite gets real sticky, real tough. I know this that's where this question came from somebody listening to that four pack. but in our professional opinion
Kent (21:29)
Which is not guidance or advice at all. yeah, people who are alike or partially alike, half and half, probably see the greatest success.
Caanan (21:44)
and have an easier time of it. But it really doesn't matter as long as you know your personality type and you know your partner's personality type ⁓ so that you don't start taking ⁓ their natural strengths or weaknesses as a personal affront to you. Yeah. You can make practically any relationship pairing work. Yeah. It really just comes down to knowing
Caanan (22:10)
who you're with
Kent (22:12)
Yeah.
Caanan (22:12)
so that you can understand each other better.
Kent (22:14)
And if you are truly opposites and you've made it work and I mean, this is out there big time. It happens all the time. Like you truly deserve the biggest applause because it is not easy beyond the fun and fire that can happen, the good kind of fire, in that kind of cinematic opposites attract way, the real
Kent (22:40)
behind the scenes work that that takes is admirable.
Caanan (22:44)
And if you are in that kind of relationship and you're making it work, reach out and tell us because we're dying to hear about it.
Kent (22:52)
Yes.