ENFP Career Advice: 7 Insights For The Perfect Job
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Hey, today You’re going to learn why it is so common for ENFP to struggle to find the perfect job.
If you are an ENFP in a career change, and you may have changed careers a couple more times than friends or family think is normal, then this article is going to be really valuable for you.
Reason #1 Why ENFPs struggle with career – We think Life is a movie
Reason number one why ENFPs can struggle in our careers is that we think life is a movie. Turns out life and movies can sometimes be a little bit different.
So we see a movie or a TV show, and how someone like a lawyer or teacher or astronaut is portrayed, and we think that is what we want to do. The thing is – we don’t necessarily figure out the day-to-day of that job. A lawyer speaking in court giving the big speech saving someone’s life, that is what we imagine, but you have to study really hard for a long time and then do a lot of paperwork for another decade, and then maybe you get to stand up in court and give a big speech. Well, in that case, maybe it’s not exactly what we signed up for.
Reason #2 – ENFPs learn fast; the typical career ladder won’t work
For number two, we learn fast, and we’re not exactly designed for a typical career ladder. I’ve coached hundreds of ENFPs at this point in my life, and one thing that a lot of us have in common is we learn things quite quickly.
This is somewhat tied to our intelligence, but also just our extroverted intuition. We pick up information and learn things very quickly. Most career ladders are based on having a promotion about every two years, and most ENFPs are bored after about two months.
That’s usually around the stage where ENFPs have learned most of what can be learned, picked up 90% of the job at that stage, and had that excitement. You look ahead and you realize that you have to do the same thing for the next few years. Well, you like the growing and learning part. That was really exciting but doing the same thing over and over again – not so exciting after all.
So for this reason, a lot of typical corporate jobs are not very appealing after the first couple of months. So a lot of ENFPs have this excitement about the new job, they’re new, it’s enjoyable, and then get really bored and just drag their feet for the next year, year and a half until maybe they get a promotion.
So let’s say you’ve been at a job for a couple months, and you’re bored. Now you’ve learned what you need to do, you’re getting good praise from the boss, but you’re bored, you’re not fulfilled. Should you just stick with it like people are telling you to do? I don’t think so I think that to me, seems really wasteful, isn’t it?
If you’re capable of learning really quickly and doing something in two months, what on the other hand would take other people a year, then why would you just do nothing for the next 10 months?
What if you could be learning and growing for 12 months of the year? This is number three, you don’t challenge yourself enough.
Reason #3 – ENFPs need to challenge themselves more
See, there are environments where your job would require you to be learning and growing and challenged all the time, but when an ENFP settles for a job somewhere in the middle, something that friends and family maybe respect but isn’t really pushing them to their limit, that’s when you end up with is two months or 10 months off kind of cycle.
But if you find a company or boss who will really challenge you and push you and you’re in a dynamic, diverse work environment where you’re doing a ton of different things, and always learning, genuinely small businesses, entrepreneurial companies tend to be this way a lot more, in that kind of environment, you’re going to be able to grow consistently and not actually get bored, because you’ll keep being challenged and you’ll keep evolving.
Reason #4 – ENFPs SHOULDN’T follow someone else’s life path
You’re reading articles about the best jobs and career opportunities in 2021. and you’re talking to family members who are telling you what you should do, and that leads to some kind of compromise.
You’re trying to do a job that someone else thinks you should do, that you don’t really want to do because you’re not that good at it or that engaged or maybe you are good at it because you’re one of these ENFPs who’s good at everything, but just don’t enjoy it and lives in hell in your own head because everyone’s telling you that you’re good at it and that you should just keep it and you’ll have a great life and in your mind, and you’re like, “I want to jump off a bridge right now I could be doing so much more with my life.”
Reason #5 – You’re stuck in a compromise zone
You won’t admit what you really want, so you’re sort of stuck in this compromised zone where you won’t jump fully into some kind of creative career or entrepreneurial venture, etc. so you end up going down this compromised career path, following someone else’s dream.
Ultimately, it’s a little bit your fault too for not admitting what it is you really want and this often happens because we don’t know how to get what we want.
So if we don’t know how to get it, we just say, “Well, I guess I don’t want it.”, because that just seems like the way to do things and well, this is a topic that deserves its own video. The quick advice here around this is when you’re thinking about what you want in life, don’t think about how to get it, just think about what you want.
If there’s a career that you want, focus on that, figure out what it would look like, why you want it, and get really excited and really committed to it.
Then once you’ve committed to it, figure out how to get it. If you mix your HOW, your WHAT, and your WHY all together in your mind, you’re basically just going to compromise in life and not do anything worthy of mention whatsoever, because you’ll constantly be stopping short of a bigger dream because you get stuck in the HOW, and the HOW you will figure out you’re an ENFP you’ve got the HOW, don’t worry about that. But you’ve got to commit first and have some pressure and then you’ll figure out the HOW.
Reason #6 – Career lists for ENFPs are BS!
I have an entire video and an article on this topic. A lot of the career lists for ENFP are complete and utter garbage. They are archaic. They are based on lists generated decades ago and then copied from each other, like some crazy mess and not providing you nearly enough information you need to actually find that right job.
Sometimes people will see that list, see some movies, come up with their career plan, and 15 years and a lot of student debt later realize that the job wasn’t for them.
So check out that other video or article for some clarification on that and how you can make better decisions.
Reason #7 – The System kinda sucks for ENFPs
One thing you might notice about me is I rarely blame outside factors or make excuses or say that the world sucks, that life is so hard, etc. It’s not my attitude. But I’m including one here, which is that the system kind of sucks for ENFPs.
I’ll give you an example of that. As companies get bigger, it’s worthwhile to have people specialize. In fact, people who are more floater position to do a lot of different things and jump around and learn things really quickly, are very valuable as entrepreneurs like myself or working for small businesses, working with entrepreneurs and being able to jump around.
As companies grow, roles need to become more specialized, and this isn’t some evil conspiracy, this is just how it works. I’m even finding that in my own business as we get more and more people on my team and finding the need to specialize roles and really specify who does what, whereas earlier on, when we were just three people, it was a lot more jumping around and doing a lot of different things.
So as companies get larger and larger, the roles become more and more specific, and as the internet makes everyone shop in the same places, there are fewer and fewer small businesses and more and more large companies, and so we have the sort of Amazon effect where basically you get a very defined role, which can basically be done by a robot as soon as that robot is invented.
Very specialized careers tend not to be as interesting to ENFPs. So perhaps as a coach or psychologist, even though that’s very specialized, you basically are doing one thing that can be really interesting to ENFP is because each person is a different challenge. Each conversation is very different. But within the system within larger corporations having a very specialized role can actually be really limiting for us and it makes it more challenging as well.
