Welcome back to the personality hacker podcast. My name is Joel Mark Witt.

And I'm Antonia Dodge. Not that long ago, we were talking with a good friend of ours named Betsy Garmin, who is a coach and has put together a pretty great program on using journaling for expression and finding your life path and purpose.

She's one of the people we interviewed on our program called Empowered

for INFPs and INFJs.

And Betsy has this really interesting idea that I was captivated by as soon as she said it.

She talked about something that her term for is noble distractions. They're the things that take our attention

away from what we should be focused on and when we reconcile or talk ourselves into thinking it's perfectly fine by being

distracted by these things, then we create all of these like noble reasons for

the distraction. Like if you are supposed to be doing

self-care but you instead take the time to care for somebody else, well then that

was a noble distraction. And while we were talking about this idea,

Joel, you and I also realized that this concept of nobility,

this talking ourselves into believing

that what we're doing is the right and noble thing also

extends out into characteristics of ours.

And so we transferred the same concept of nobility onto something that you are now are now calling noble vices.

Things that in narrative form and the story form seem to be good, good characteristics, good quality of art, good qualities of ours.

But in the context that we are, you know, evidencing them or behaving them outward, they're

actually not good for us at all.

They're very unhealthy.

But the story around it seems to be a good thing.

And so this idea of noble vices are the things

...