ENFP Advice – How To Succeed in Your Business or Career

ENFP personality type and Shiny object syndrome

So if you are an ENFP, there’s a very good chance that you have the tendency, let’s say the habit of changing direction and not necessarily acknowledging you’re changing direction and doing this way too often. This is called shiny object syndrome. You start on something and you see something that looks better, or maybe this wasn’t as easy as you thought it was. So you change to the next thing and the next thing.

What we ENFPs do that’s a little different than a lot of other people is we don’t really acknowledge we’re quitting, or changing directions, we do it all very subtly and we gradually change and we think that we’re doing what we plan to do, but if you look back six months or a year, you realize that you’ve got totally off course, and you’re not really doing what you meant to be doing.

Now, the problem with this is that it really eats away your chances of success, and the reason is that we’re out there competing in a world of INTJs or INFJs, the people who are pretty focused and dialled in at what they’re doing and they’re consistent and here we are changing directions, every few weeks, every few minutes, every few months, whatever it is.

ENFP Struggles – Are you changing your life plans every few minutes?

How are we going to compete with other people who are basically focused and doing one thing? I know why this has been such a challenge for me in the past and it’s really because we get excited about stuff. We like newness as ENFPs, we like things that are novel, we like variety, we like new challenges, that first part of a project is a lot more exciting in the end part, the little details.

I’m sure if you were to search for ENFP blogs, you’re going to find the highest number of blogs started and not finished, and that’s again because we like the starting.

I started out doing a bunch of different entrepreneurial things when I came out of school and most recently was working as a freelancer, I used freelancing to help me travel the world I lived in seven or eight countries, and along the way I started writing books. I published about 11-12, (there’s one I don’t really want to count) so let’s say I’ve published 11 books at this point. I built a coaching practice, I have online training courses etc.

So I figured out how to finish things and follow through. The first thing that really helped me figure this out, was changing my perception of time and so if you study NLP, or you’re familiar with Tony Robbins, I did my coaching training with him – He has a concept of time, basically he talks how we all have different perceptions of time. For some people, a minute is a long time for other people a week is nothing a year is nothing… If you’re an ENFP, this probably isn’t you, but you’ve probably met people who’ve had the same job for 10 years, 20 years, and to them a year is nothing. I have a friend who is very much like this. We talk about trip planning, and he’s planning two years ahead. Like it’s 2021 now he’s talking about 2023! I plan my trips, a month in advance, maybe two for something big.

ENFP Advice on how to stay consistent

So we have different perceptions of time and how long something is and as ENFPs we tend to have an urgency in our behaviour. We like to do things quickly. We want results now and that is good in many ways. It’s part of our strength, part of what allows us to really drive projects and initiate things. There are other personality types who will take a year to start their business and ENFPs might start it in a week on a hunch, right?

We haven’t got the kind of results we’ve expected and we’re optimists, we’re idealists and we expect good things to happen. Because of this, we end up changing our mind or thinking, “Okay, this does not work, let’s try something different.” and the reality is that things take a long time. If you want to be successful, for example, build a YouTube channel, or a blog, or some kind of successful thing, a podcast where you stand out to people, it takes a long time to break through that noise.

If you’re living in a small town and you start doing public speaking, well, you’re probably the only person doing public speaking. So it’s pretty easy to get a following right away. If you come on YouTube, and you start making videos, it might be a year before you get any real traction, because there are so many people and you’re competing with the whole world.

There’s something that I learned around this topic that really helped me and It stuck with me. I went to this really cool school for getting my motorcycle license where they used all these military analogies and all this stuff, and someone said, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

So if you spend a week working really hard on something and you don’t get any results, you’re not going to be as disappointed because you’re coming in with the mental frame that this is going to be hard, and when you come in with that mental frame, you’re not as disappointed.

If we commit to starting a business, we start working on it and then something bad happens that makes us feel bad and we just emotionally want to quit, we can find a dozen ways to justify that – the economy changed, some job offer etc. but what is really going on is – we’re changing our minds, we’re quitting, we’re letting ourselves down. I would encourage you to set a kind of concrete destinations, you could call them goals, you can call them destinations, and when you set that, write it down and maybe share it with some people, and hold yourself to that. Say to yourself – this is where I want to go and really commit to it.

ENFPs and need for variety

How Can an ENFP Meet The NEED FOR VARIETY? Well if you don’t intentionally proactively meet your need for excitement and for newness, in some way, then you’ll unconsciously meet it through probably more destructive ways. So you can choose to do things that are novel that will bring you excitement, and be in charge. Or you can leave it to your unconscious (your ENFP need for excitement) and then you’ll end up doing things that could be damaging / self-sabotaging, like getting in big fights with your partner or always switching who you’re dating or changing your business direction all the time because you need that newness and you’re not meeting that need elsewhere. So I really encourage you to proactively meet that need for newness rather than just let it happen.