Better Together: Synergy, Self-Care, Marriage, Personality, and the Power of Positive Connection

Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 – Prerecorded Theme / Program Intro and Outro Voice

The opening and closing lyrical material is separate from the host’s spoken presentation and introduces the program’s central idea of understanding one another, recognizing patterns beneath behavior, and creating greater power through synergy.

Speaker 2 – Host, Gabrielle Cardona

Gabrielle Cardona identifies herself by name at the beginning and end of the program and describes herself as a relationship coach who began as a life coach. She is the sole long-form speaker in this episode. She discusses relationship coaching, synergy, her son’s wedding, managing seizures and stress, communication, marriage, self-care, personality differences, Myers-Briggs functions, and her coaching books and website.

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Speaker 1 – Prerecorded Theme / Program Intro Voice:

We are more than what we see.
Every voice, every story holds a key.
Together we rise in synergy.

We’re trying to find a place to stand,
trying to feel the guiding hand
in what you say and what you mean.
Life’s somewhere in between.

Every action has a cause.
Every heart behind the walls.
We can hear it if we look.
We can see it.

There’s a pattern in the soul.
Every piece can make us whole.

The power,
the power of synergy.
Understanding you and me.
Every difference, every truth
leads us back to something new.

It’s the power we can be
when we see what’s underneath.

Speaker 2 – Host, Gabrielle Cardona:

Welcome to The Power of Synergy on BBS.

I’m Gabrielle Cardona, a relationship coach.

I started out as a life coach, but people said, “You know what? That’s too general. It’s too broad. You’ve got to have a niche, a specialty, an area of expertise.”

After about 15 years of coaching people on how to score in the game of life, I said, “Okay, there are a lot of different things I’ve been teaching people about: time management, money management, career, relationships. What specialty could I really say I have?”

You know what?

I think it was relationships.

I realized that no matter what an individual’s original question was—whatever problem they wanted help solving—it usually involved some problem with the people in their life.

What I had often taught people, almost as a byproduct of whatever they originally came to me for advice about, was how to get together with people: the people they love, the people they hate, and the people they don’t really know.

People are important to our success as humans.

We’ve got to get together and do it in a healthy way.

Synergy—that’s what we create when we come together with the people in our lives.

If you look up the word synergy, whether in Merriam-Webster or through a general search, you’ll find the idea that what we create together is more than the sum of our parts.

We empower people to be more than what they would be if they were alone.

That’s a relatively simple concept.

But what does it mean in practical terms?

It means that we don’t just add to each other.

We don’t even just multiply each other.

We empower each other.

Let’s think about this mathematically.

Power can be a scary thing, but it can also be exciting.

When one number is raised to the power of another number, the result can become exponentially larger.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s take seven and three.

When they come together, they don’t make only 10.

They don’t even make only 21.

Seven to the third power is 343.

What’s three to the seventh power?

That’s 2,187.

Ladies and gentlemen, think about that.

We have that much potential impact on someone else by being with them—synergizing, actually uniting not only in what we do, but in how we do it and why we do it.

That is exciting to contemplate: the potential for what we can do with each other, for each other, and to each other.

As a life coach, I’ve always taught three principles.

Number one: there is no neutral energy.

You are either positive or negative.

Number two: there is no inertia.

You are either moving toward someone, away from them, or with them.

Number three: power comes with accountability.

Now let’s take that one step further.

Do you believe knowledge is power?

If you learn something and know something, that gives you the power to take action.

Do you believe you are accountable not only to the situation, but also to the people in the situation that you have just changed with the knowledge you have?

That is serious.

It can also be tough to examine because sometimes, when we’re in the middle of the forest, we can’t see the trees on the other side because we have so many trees directly in front of us.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the whole forest.

How closely are you looking at what’s right in front of you?

Are you willing to take a step back and really take an inventory of not only what you do, but how you do it, why you do it, what effect it has on other people, and then what impact that creates in the world?

Today, I’m not going to take any breaks during the show.

If you want to call in and ask me for advice, you absolutely can.

The station number is 888-627-6008.

I’m going to talk about the last two weeks.

You may have noticed I haven’t been live on the show for two weeks because my middle son got married last weekend.

I went from Arizona up to Washington State a week early to prepare for the wedding.

It was on a limited budget, so there were a lot of things that needed to get done through volunteer hands and help from friends and family.

When you’re on a limited budget, a wedding is still a very big event.

It takes a lot of time and resources.

First of all, I hate Washington weather.

I would rather be in Phoenix in the summer at 110 degrees than in Washington State because the humidity affects me.

But you know what?

I love my son more.

That’s another thing I tell people: positive is more powerful than negative.

So I went up there in a good mood, ready to celebrate and enjoy the event.

My son and his now-wife, my husband and I, my son and daughter, my friends, and family were all around Marysville, Washington.

Ladies and gentlemen, that can feel like the middle of nowhere if you’re depending on public transportation.

If you don’t have a car, you can be out of luck because public transportation doesn’t run very frequently and the hours can be difficult.

I didn’t have the physical activity or freedom of movement I normally would have had.

But I was with my son, his fiancée, and other people I hadn’t seen in a long time, so I thought we were going to catch up.

No.

There was no time to visit with the people I had hoped to hang out with—my brothers and sisters, friends, and congregation.

That started putting me in a bad mood too.

So I said, “Let’s figure out how to get some good inside me to conquer the bad.”

I ended up having a few seizures.

But I knew that if I took the time to care for myself, I could manage those negative situations and the negative condition I was in.

I arrived Tuesday.

By Saturday, I was determined that I was not going to have a seizure.

I did not know exactly how I was going to do it, but I had absolutely resolved in my mind: don’t ruin your son’s important day.

My gift to him was going to be figuring out how to be a high-quality version of myself during his special event.

Let’s contemplate another reality I love to tell people.

If you’re honest with people and tell them what you genuinely need, more often than not, they are willing to help you help yourself.

They will give you what you’re asking for if they understand that what you’re doing is going to make the situation genuinely better—not necessarily just in quantity, but in quality.

And wait a minute: the quantity may go up too, because then we can synergize.

Again, if your energy is negative, making that influence larger would be a bad thing.

If your energy is positive, making it larger can be a good thing.

How well do you know the situation?

How well do you know the participants?

How well do you know yourself?

That can be tough.

But if you know how to take an inventory, you can tell the people in your life, “Look, I need this break,” or, “I need this particular activity,” or, “I need this resource. Do you have it and can you provide it because I’m all out? Or will you help and support me while I go get what I need from someone or something else?”

People are very willing to help you if you tell them specifically what you need.

Now I’m also in the process of buying a home in Phoenix.

Flying up to Seattle for two weeks put everything on hold, so I had some stress and anxiety about that.

But my husband and I, after 32 years of marriage, are still like boyfriend and girlfriend.

I knew that being around us was going to be helpful to my son and his fiancée while we were trying to figure everything out, manage everything, and get everything put together.

They were going to be in a good mood.

We were going to be in a good mood.

Somehow, some way, it was all going to work out.

By the time the wedding came around, I was in a much better state.

I was in a higher-quality state of mind and body.

My heart and spirit were positive, even though things were going wrong all over the place.

My son’s fiancée’s mother was very controlling, and she was making things difficult for people.

Managing that was probably the biggest challenge for me.

I knew a lot of stuff was going to hit the fan when the reception happened.

Apparently, there was some drama around the wedding ceremony as well.

I didn’t realize my now daughter-in-law felt very strongly about what her father was going to say when he was asked, “Who gives this woman?”

Instead of saying, “I do,” he planned to say, “Her mother and I do.”

My now daughter-in-law did not like that idea.

She wanted her dad simply to say, “I do.”

Apparently, there is a story behind that too.

So we had to manage the negativity and keep things positive.

Everything started to be okay.

Then he still said it.

He still said, “Her mother and I do.”

That was stressful.

I knew I was going to have to manage several situations at the reception.

My husband’s family is very Mexican.

My daughter-in-law’s family is very American.

There was a language barrier, so there were management issues there too.

The way some things were being managed was not effective.

As the mother of the groom, I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, managing people, managing situations, and still having a good time.

Why?

Because I saw my son and his now-wife enjoying the people who were there.

Ladies and gentlemen, I kept two things in mind.

Number one, my positive energy could be more powerful than the negative feelings created by the things happening and the things not happening.

And as long as I was a good communicator with the catering company, the woman who made the cake, and the Opera House staff, we could keep moving.

There were waiters, but they weren’t always doing what needed to be done.

My consuegra—my daughter-in-law’s mother—was still creating turmoil around the group.

My husband and I would look at each other.

My daughter, who was one of the bridesmaids, and I would look at each other.

My other son and I would look at each other.

We were all trying to manage different situations.

Every time we made eye contact, we felt each other’s love, support, and encouragement:

“Keep going. We’re doing a great job.”

Yes, the stuff was hitting the fan.

But we were still together.

Even when we were on opposite sides of the room doing completely different things, the minute we made eye contact, we knew we were together.

We were together with people, not necessarily doing the same thing, but whatever we were doing, we were doing it for the same reason and with the same basic purpose.

That is how you unify.

That is how you synchronize.

That is how you synergize.

All the things that were going wrong did not stop my son and his now-wife from believing the wedding was a success.

Number one, I didn’t have a seizure.

Yes, that is very successful.

Even more importantly, we kept positive energy in spite of all the things that, on paper, might have looked like a disaster.

We knew we were together.

Now ask yourself:

Do you feel like you are truly with the people in your life?

Do you believe they are with you?

That is another element of synergy.

In order to synchronize and synergize, you either have to go into their world, they have to come into your world, or—lo and behold—you can create an entirely different, separate world that the two of you participate in and then invite other people into.

If you understand those principles, you can say to the people you’re with:

“Look, this is what I’m really good at. This is what I think you’re really good at. These are the different things we can do and create together to produce for the world.”

We have different elements as human beings.

There is the mental.

There is the emotional.

There is the physical.

When you understand the personality of the person you’re with, you can say, “I’m really good naturally at physical activities in life, but I’ve noticed emotionally that you have amazing generosity.”

Or you can say, “Mentally, I have a constitution that is impenetrable. I have a really good mind, but physically I can’t perform everything I can imagine.”

Then you can say to the person, “In the world we share together, we have a united purpose. We have a focus. Now we can figure out how to do it in the best possible way.”

Let’s go back to the principles of synergy.

If we think about this mathematically, you can create greater quality and quantity when you unite with people.

Let’s go back to seven and three.

What if the three says, “I want to become a four”?

The seven says, “Great. I’ll go do something productive while I’m waiting for you to become a higher-quality version of yourself.”

What’s the difference between seven to the third power and seven to the fourth?

Seven to the third is 343.

Seven to the fourth is 2,401.

Now what is four to the seventh power instead of three to the seventh?

Three to the seventh is 2,187.

Four to the seventh is 16,384.

Ladies and gentlemen, do you believe that improving the quality of one part of a relationship can make the total situation exponentially better?

That is very exciting to think about.

But how do you do it?

How do you actually become a higher-quality version of whatever you were before?

This is what I tell people:

There is no neutral energy.

You either have a positive or negative impact on people.

You don’t necessarily know how to look at yourself honestly.

Ask yourself: when people are done interacting with you, are they better or worse than they were when you came around?

You are going to have an impact.

Sometimes it is better to step back and say, “I’m going to become a better-quality version of myself because I think I’m becoming negative.”

Even if I’m away from the situation for an hour, when I come back to that person and setting, the quality of my mind, heart, and body may be so much better that I can create far more than I could before I took care of myself.

Let me get on a soapbox for a minute.

My mother was a flight attendant.

Every time we were on an airplane, they would go through the safety instructions.

In the event of a lack of oxygen, oxygen masks come down.

Always put the mask on yourself first if you’re traveling with somebody else who needs your help.

In the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, “put your own mask on first” became a popular philosophy.

Don’t take care of other people at the expense of your own well-being.

But let me qualify that.

When you’ve taken care of yourself, get back to helping people.

Give more than you take.

That is going to be a source of high quality.

Give more than you take.

Do you believe there is more joy in giving than receiving?

When you genuinely pay it forward with quality—not just a large quantity, but a genuinely better product and performance of whatever people need you to do or be with and for them—the experience can be exponentially better.

Unselfish generosity matters.

What goes around comes around.

Call it karma or whatever you want to call it.

It is important to remember that the mood you’re in is going to influence how happy other people are and how good the experience becomes overall.

At the wedding, there wasn’t a whole lot of food.

Apparently, not enough food had been ordered.

But you know what?

It was okay because we were all being social.

Only a few people, yours truly included, didn’t get to eat.

I didn’t eat at the reception.

But every time I looked at my son and his wife, they were smiling and taking pictures.

People were staring at me, the mother of the groom, because I was basically acting like a waitress.

That was a little weird.

But as long as I was in a good mood and having a good time, people were smiling at me, I was smiling back, and we were waving to each other.

It was weird, but it was fun.

What an idea.

It was fun.

I said to my husband, “Honey, are we going to spend time together at some point?”

Probably not.

We were both working our fingers to the bone.

But that was okay because when everything was said and done and the event was over, it was time for the marriage to begin.

That is when the challenges really started presenting themselves.

I actually needed to explain to my now daughter-in-law, “You can’t cut off your parents overnight. You haven’t been explaining to them. You haven’t been talking to them about the things that have been bothering you. You have to communicate.”

That is the only way you can synchronize.

That is how you can synergize.

Even if you need to set boundaries, you can say, “There are certain things in my life that are not negotiable. If you are not going to respect my wishes and listen to what I say, then you’re not going to participate as much. I’m not going to lend as much weight to what you say as I would if you respected my wishes and appreciated my value personally—not just as your daughter, but as a person.”

The same applies with a friend, colleague, or another family member.

We all have inherent, indescribable value to each other.

We just need to communicate honestly, accurately, and effectively.

How much do you communicate accurately and effectively?

That can be difficult because when we’re talking about different personalities, sometimes we have to learn different languages.

Literally, one word can mean something positive to one person and be an insult to someone else.

Are people worth the investment of your time, energy, thoughts, and even changes in your behavior?

Definitely.

If you are going to stay synchronized with them and be able to synergize with them, that relationship can potentially help unite you with other people too.

Let’s bring another number into the equation.

We were talking about seven and three, then seven and four.

What if another person comes into the situation?

You need to understand that the base is one thing and the exponent is another.

Let’s say you have seven and three, and a four comes along.

If you add the four to the seven, the base becomes 11.

Eleven to the third power is 1,331, not 343.

What if the three and seven say to the four, “You know what? We’re going to let you be the exponent”?

Then you have 10 to the fourth power.

That is 10,000, not 2,401.

What if the three and four unite and you keep the seven as the exponent?

Three plus four is seven.

Seven to the seventh power is 823,543.

That’s just adding three to four and then using seven as the exponent.

In my metaphor, the exponent is the fuel and energy that facilitate the base number manifesting.

The exponent is not necessarily the one doing the visible work.

It can be the force propelling, supporting, and making sure the work gets done.

Do you believe that positive energy, a good attitude, support, encouragement, and facilitating what other people are doing can sometimes have a greater impact than doing the activity yourself?

That may mean a few things in relationships.

Communication is very important.

Knowing who is good at what and doing what you’re good at is important.

The base is what is being done.

In my metaphor, the exponent is the manifestation or empowerment of it.

If you know you are helping create a higher-quality product, that is more important than quantity alone.

Knowing who you’re with and having a connection to them is going to influence what the people around you experience.

When I was with my husband, daughter, and other son, and we kept our energy positive together, whatever situation was physically happening, we could not only manage it—we could conquer it.

We could solve the problems.

We could handle the situations to the point that if you took an inventory of the guests and asked, “How is this going?” they thought it was amazing.

Without giving you too much personal information, my daughter doesn’t wear dresses.

The fact that she was one of the bridesmaids and wore an absolutely beautiful dress was significant.

Everyone thinks my daughter is gorgeous anyway.

But with her hair, makeup, jewelry, and dress, she looked phenomenal.

And I knew something the guests didn’t.

I knew she hated it.

Her love for her brother and seeing his happiness was more powerful than her loathing of all things aesthetically girly.

You would never have known she hated what she was wearing because her happiness, along with the support and encouragement her father and I gave her—“Keep going, sweetie. You’re doing an amazing job”—was worth it.

If you know that your impact on other people can help them do things they never thought they would do before, then sometimes the effort is worth it.

It is worth the blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice that come with the territory.

When you synchronize with people and synergize with them, you need to keep in mind what they’re doing and what they’re going through so that you can support and facilitate them.

In my coaching workbook, I ask people:

Where are you now?

Where are you going?

How are you going to get there in the most natural and organic way for you?

Get to know yourself.

Once you know yourself, then you can include other people in your world.

You have tools and resources in the form of gifts, talents, strengths, and abilities.

But you also have personal resources in the people you know.

My father used to love saying, “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”

When you have appreciation, respect, and trust for and with the people in your life, they will want to be with you.

Even if they’re not physically there doing what you’re doing, they may be available, willing, and able to respond if you reach out.

How much better do you feel just knowing that if you needed them, they would be there if you asked?

Sometimes that knowledge alone reduces the need.

If you know the people who know, appreciate, respect, and trust you could say at any moment, “Absolutely. I’m here because you are more important to me than this temporary external situation,” that creates security.

The external situation will be gone at some point.

The connection and relationship can last.

That brings me back to marriage.

I’ve been talking about marriage a lot for the last few months because my now daughter-in-law really wants to have what my husband and I have.

My clients say, “Wow, after 32 years, you guys are still like boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe you know what you’re doing.”

I wrote a book because there is a lot of information, but it is contingent on a few principles.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to share those principles with you.

Heads up: in principle, I describe some of them as very anti-feminist.

But they work well for me because they are about getting together.

There are four scriptural principles I like to use as pillars to sustain marriage.

Marriage is not like every other relationship.

You have signed a document, a contract, that says you are not simply going to walk away.

You have to stick together.

My first principle is: don’t go to bed angry.

Know how to manage whatever is going on inside yourself enough to work through it, let it go, release it, or manage it so that the toxicity of the negativity is no longer driving the situation.

You might not be able to solve the situation that provoked you.

You might not get the exact solution you want.

But if you know how to compartmentalize the different elements, and if you have communicated with whoever is involved, you do not have to remain angry just because it was not solved immediately.

You can continue working on it together.

The second principle is about a husband continuing to delight passionately and sexually in his wife even after years and years of marriage.

The scriptural image is very strong.

I summarize it by saying a husband should be intoxicated with his wife’s body and desire her.

That can put him in a good mood.

The third principle is: don’t deprive each other.

That is also a scriptural marriage principle.

If one mate is very hungry for physical love with their companion, what good purpose is served by deliberately using deprivation as a weapon?

A lot of feminist women I grew up with used sex as a weapon.

I don’t believe that is good for marriage.

You can say to your mate, “Look, I’m just not in the mood right now.”

Then take a step back.

Take care of yourself.

Get healthy again.

Work toward getting back into that mood because physical love can be very powerful.

If, for some reason, you are not physically in a condition to participate, or mentally or emotionally you are in a low-quality state, do your partner a favor and take care of yourself.

Say, “Give me time to put the mask on myself in whatever way I need to. I promise that when we come back together, I will be exponentially better with you, to you, and for you.”

Love is willing to give more than it receives.

A loving partner may say, “First of all, thank you for being honest with me. Second, do what you need to do and let me know if there is anything I can do to expedite the process or make it better.”

The fourth principle is this:

It is better for a husband to sleep on the corner of a roof alone than in a warm, soft bed with a woman who wants to fight all day, every day, about everything.

Do we need to fight?

No.

We can communicate.

We can create peace.

Again, we can go to bed in a good mood with each other.

But we have to talk about things so that we know we are synchronized.

If there is something we disagree about, there are many different ways we can deal with it.

But we need the information.

Sometimes we assume that if somebody knows us or loves us, they should automatically know what is important to us.

Ladies and gentlemen, just say it.

Just tell the person.

Maybe you think they are a horrible person for not knowing.

You know what?

Be a good person and tell them.

Positive is more powerful than negative.

Giving, especially from a sincere heart, can impact them.

I ask people to take an inventory.

When somebody is done interacting with you, are they a better or worse-quality version of themselves than before you entered the scene?

Does experiencing something with you make people healthier and more positive?

Positive is more powerful than negative.

I’ll tell you why.

Number one, people who are negative are either going to react positively and join you, or they may leave because positivity can be irritating to somebody committed to staying negative.

Number two, if you have that foundation, it does not matter what temporary negative situation is going on.

Your determination to maintain a positive attitude can help you conquer the external temporary circumstances.

Now think about laughter.

Laughter is cathartic.

It is contagious.

It is vital to marriage.

People ask how, after 32 years, my husband and I are still like boyfriend and girlfriend.

One reason is that we laugh at ourselves and know how to laugh with each other, not at each other.

I love to tell people that there are two experiences I associate with a release of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins together.

One is orgasm.

If you want to look up those four hormones and neurotransmitters, they do different things for different reasons.

When we climax sexually, I associate that experience with all four.

You know another experience I associate with them?

Laughter.

That is good to know.

When we laugh with someone, we are having a good time.

We are relaxed with them, but we also have energy.

If we know how to get together with the people who matter to us and say, “I’m going to create positive emotional energy inside you,” that becomes a vital key to synchronizing.

It helps you synergize.

It helps unite you and strengthen the bond you have, so that even if you are away from each other, when you come back together, you resynchronize.

You get back together in a high-quality way.

That is a gift.

It is a blessing.

I also tell people marriage is not a right.

It is a privilege.

You have to be qualified to participate in that kind of arrangement.

Let me ask you this:

Do opposites attract, or do birds of a feather flock together?

One thing I tell people in my book is that you have to be different enough to get everything in life done.

Being married means incorporating your partner into what you are doing.

Being good at different things means more things can get done.

But you also need to be similar enough to be compatible because you agree about important things.

That commonality is part of the blood flow of your relationship.

You need unity in focus and purpose.

Do you know yourself and the person you’re with well enough to say:

“These are the things we agree about, so that will be the core of our connection. These are the things we are different in, so let’s assign each other different kinds of activities so that we are both feeling useful, productive, and valuable”?

That is very important to the success of the arrangement.

We have about 10 or 12 minutes left.

If you have a question about what I’m talking about, call the station at 888-627-6008.

Now I’m going to explain some of this in terms of functionality.

The personality profile I like to use, and that I just wrote a book about called Embrace Your True Nature and Improve Your Functionality, is Myers-Briggs.

A lot of people have taken that test, but unfortunately they don’t understand certain things about functions.

You can have a disposition, which is a broad general overview.

Your functionality, as I explain it, is the order of not only what you do most to least, but also what tends to be easiest to hardest and strongest to weakest for you.

Whatever your personality is, that is not exclusively what you are going to do.

You are going to have to do things that are not your preference.

So learning about your personality and functional order also means learning how to handle things that are not your natural preference.

You may still have to do them in a way that fits your personality, for reasons that fit your personality, or find someone else who naturally does them better.

What do you think is worse: doing what you’re not, or not doing what you are?

It can be hard to differentiate.

Not doing what you are can hurt you.

Doing what you’re not, badly and repeatedly, can affect other people too.

I explain functionality as being almost like breathing and eating.

You need to honor the way you naturally function.

When you continually operate outside your personality, you may feel as though you are not getting the oxygen and food you need to handle all the other things life still demands.

I’ll give a quick overview of the four dichotomies.

The first is social energy.

You are either an introvert or extrovert.

The second is how you absorb and process information.

In Myers-Briggs terms, that is Sensing or Intuition.

The third is how you make decisions.

You are Thinking or Feeling.

The fourth is how you tend to organize and carry out decisions.

That is Judging or Perceiving.

You may need to take the test.

But if you get my book, by the time you reach the second chapter, my goal is for you to understand that this is not merely about what you currently do.

The question is: what is organically easiest for you?

If you were left alone and operating by preference, what would you naturally do?

Think about the four dichotomies:

your social energy,

the way you absorb and process information,

the way you make decisions,

and the way you carry out decisions.

Then you have to understand that the functional order is really about the two middle letters: Sensing and Intuition, Thinking and Feeling.

You have to use all of these processes.

It is a question of which ones are more natural or less natural for you.

I’ll give you a random example: ESFJ.

The J in that personality tells us, in the framework I’m using, that the third letter—Feeling—is the extraverted judging function.

That means the Sensing process is introverted.

Even if you are an introvert, you are going to do some things in an extroverted way.

Even if you are an extrovert, you are going to do some things in an introverted way.

The last letter helps indicate which middle function is expressed outwardly.

If you are a J, the judging function—Thinking or Feeling—is the extroverted one.

If you are a P, the perceiving function—Sensing or Intuition—is the extroverted one.

The other middle function is introverted.

The first letter then tells you whether your dominant orientation is introverted or extroverted.

Then there are dominant, auxiliary, tertiary, and inferior levels.

Your dominant quality is the function you most naturally rely on.

The auxiliary is next.

The tertiary introduces another side of your personality.

The inferior function is often the one you find most difficult and draining.

That is okay because it is the polar opposite of your dominant function.

In an ESFJ, the J indicates that Feeling is extroverted.

Because the person is an extrovert, Extroverted Feeling is the dominant function.

Sensing is therefore introverted and becomes the auxiliary function.

If Extroverted Feeling is dominant, its polar opposite, Introverted Thinking, is the inferior function.

If the Sensing is introverted, then Intuition is extroverted, making Extroverted Intuition the tertiary function.

Your tertiary and inferior functions may not be your preference, but life will still require you to use them.

And there are other people for whom the things you find tertiary or inferior are dominant or auxiliary strengths.

You can seek out those people.

Be honest with the people in your life—your mate, family members, neighbors, people you spend time with.

There are going to be things you appreciate, respect, and trust about them simply because you are terrible at those things and they are amazingly good at them.

The differences that could potentially divide you can instead unite you because you need those people, and they need you.

That is important not only to appreciate, but to maximize.

I love the fact that my husband is an ESTP.

I’m an INTP.

I tell people it is good to have different dispositions because you are going to want to do different activities in life.

Having two of the same letters also means we agree enough about certain ways of approaching things.

He is still going to want to do completely different things than I do.

That is nice because there are many different things that need to get done every day.

He loves to cook, and he is very good at it.

I can’t cook to save my life.

I don’t care that I’m the wife.

And he comes from a place in Mexico where women traditionally do a lot of that work.

But if we know, appreciate, trust, and respect our differences, we can maximize the potential good that can be done.

Yes, tamales.

My husband makes tamales.

They’re not like what you’re going to get on the street.

They’re not like what you’re going to get at a grocery store.

People will spend money on a good product.

So I can say to him, “Honey, as an INTP, I am very good at accounting. I’m very good at paperwork.”

He never has to do that part of the business.

And I am basically forbidden from entering the kitchen.

We know what we like to do.

We know what we’re good at.

And we have a good time when we are together.

I’m going to say it again.

The most important principles in life, as I teach them:

Number one, there is no neutral energy.

You are either positive or negative.

Number two, there is no inertia.

You are either moving toward someone, away from them, or with them.

Number three, positive is more powerful than negative.

And knowledge comes with accountability.

Knowledge gives you power.

Power makes you accountable.

If you know that everything you’re doing is going to impact the people in your life, you have free will.

You have the choice to have a positive or negative effect on other people.

When you unite with people, you facilitate them, empower them, and can make what they do exponentially more effective.

But that can also happen negatively.

You can hurt people.

If you know your energy is negative and you are coming together with people in a way that negatively affects them, that can damage not only the person you are with, but everyone around you who feels the effect.

Do you owe it to the people in your life to be honest with them and say, “I can’t do this in a high-quality way right now”?

You can tell them:

“You have choices. You can put up with me and resist all this negativity, or give me a minute to go and get myself recentered. I promise that when I come back, I will be a better-quality version of myself. I believe you deserve that.”

People are often willing to work with you, forgive you, help you, and support you if they appreciate, respect, and trust you and know that you are honest, sincere, and generous in the way you interact with them.

I have a website: Life-Synergy-Coaching.com.

I explain a lot of things in a lot of ways there.

One of them is Embrace Your True Nature and Improve Your Functionality.

That is a book you can get on Amazon.

It is about personality differences.

Then I have the Life Coaching Workbook.

It is basically an instruction manual for how to get what you want out of life in a proactive, healthy, and positive way.

Then I also have my Till Death Do Us Part book.

I haven’t made the audiobook for that one yet, but the other two are available in downloadable audio form.

I read the manuscript to you because not everybody wants to sit and do nothing while they read.

You can multitask.

But keep in mind that the information I provide is about making sure you are the best possible version of who you are.

That is your gift to other people.

If you understand yourself and know the people around you, you are more likely to accept them.

That is going to be good not only for you and the other person, but for everyone else who will be around you or potentially interact with you.

If you know you have the power to facilitate someone else’s success, you may want to take advantage of that opportunity and potential because the impact can be priceless.

I’m also on LinkedIn.

I’m planning to give some presentations starting in September, but I’m not yet sure how many people are willing to go physically to a place when everybody is still on their phones.

If there is enough interest in one of the major cities I’ll be talking about on LinkedIn, go look at my profile, Gabrielle Cardona.

I’m going to make a decision in the next few weeks.

Feel free to respond to anything I post on that website.

I got off the other social-media venues because they were too casual for what I wanted.

I really like my professional connections on LinkedIn.

They’re very high-quality people.

And I want to give a special shout-out to Don Newsom.

He is the producer I’ve worked with over the years and, along with his brother Doug, is associated with BBS Radio.

Thank you so much for all the support and help you’ve given me.

I love you both very much.

You are very special people to me.

Thank you for listening to The Power of Synergy on BBS Radio.

I’m Gabrielle Cardona.

Speaker 1 – Prerecorded Theme / Program Outro Voice:

The power of synergy.
Understanding you and me.
Every difference, every truth
leads us back to something new.

It’s the power we can be
when we see what’s underneath.