ENFP Feeling Overwhelmed? These 3 Methods Can Help

3 tips for when you’re feeling overwhelmed as an ENFP. Yes, you can. ENFP overwhelm is very real and it can be devastating for our productivity, confidence, and sense of self-worth.

ENFPs primary function, extroverted intuition, makes it really easy to get overwhelmed but the advice in this video has helped me a lot.

I’ll write down the methods mentioned in the video as well.

ENFP feeling overwhelmed – 3 tips that will help you take back control of your mind

1. Write it down on a piece of paper

The first thing is to get things out of your head and write it down on paper and to make clear, simple shortlist. When It comes to planning, I’m using the tiniest notebook I can buy and each day I write down two to five things that I want to get down that day and that’s what I focus on. Now, at the end of the day, if I happen to finish early, which has not happened yet because as I said, things can sometimes take longer than we think they need to, then I can think of all the little things and write those down too if there are other little items, but keeping things really simple and planning out your week.

So, I look at it this way – here are the things I’m going to get done this week. Anything not on this list, I am not going to get done this week, and I’m not going to think about or worry about. You might want to keep a master list somewhere.

Also what you can do is – at the start of each week, look at your master list, go through all the things you want to get done, and then pick the ones from there that you want to move to your weekly list and then from your weekly list, assign each thing to a day. There you have it.

But Dan, what if it’s Tuesday, and I’m working on my list, but I’m thinking about all the other things I’d like to be doing and maybe that there are other things I should be doing instead of the things that I am doing that I wrote down on my list?

2. Create at least two roles of yourself in your head

Well, funny you should ask. That’s where tip number two comes in, create multiple personality disorder for yourself, this is something I absolutely love to do. So you create two roles for yourself in your own head. (I’m completely serious about this.) This is how I’ve done it for myself, I’ve made CEO Dan, and employee Dan. And I don’t even think about this anymore, because it’s just sort of built-in and habitual. But I used to very consciously think about this.

So you have your CEO self, that is the self that makes big decisions thinks about strategy thinks about what needs to get done. Then you have your employee self, that’s the version of yourself that just executes whatever you’ve been told to do, and I know not all employees do that, but this employee – You are like a brain dead minion, your job is to just do what you’re told to do and that’s it. What you want to do is, let’s say on Sunday, you plan out your next week, then on Monday, you sit down to work, and you might think to yourself, Well, I don’t know if this is really the right work I should be doing – WELL GUESS WHAT – you’re a minion, you don’t get to decide what you should be doing. You’re the employee, and you just literally stick to that work and go through it.

If things come up in your head, and you think, well, maybe we should be doing this or that or whatever else. Cool. Write that down on a scrap paper, have a separate notebook, write all this out on it, not your main planning book, because then you’ll confuse that and you’ll have way too many things written down in it.

Get that out of your head, write it down, but commit to yourself. During the week, you are going to be the employee and you will just do the things you decided on doing one at a time.

Now each night, you should plan the day ahead. I would not suggest going into CEO mode each night and reevaluating everything, do that maybe once a week or once a month, but try to stick to strategies, because one of the things that will happen for us ENFP is if you have the freedom to change your strategy all the time when things get hard, maybe, just maybe you’re going to change the strategy instead of going through the difficult work. Maybe you come up with a really good strategy, but it involves some uncomfortable situations. Well, when you get to those situations, maybe you’ll say, hey, let’s try a different strategy to avoid those. So that’s another benefit of the CEO employee split in yourself and how you approach things.

3. Self-talk

Now the third part that comes in and is essential for this all to work together is self-talk. That’s just what it sounds like – talking to yourself. So if you get to a point where you’re feeling overwhelmed, what you want to do is look at your list of the few things you have for that day and just say to yourself one step at a time, this is what I’m working on today, there’s only one of me, there’s only so much I can do. I’ve decided these are the most important things to do, actually, the CEO version of me has decided that and I’m just going to do them and at the end of the day, relax, have a nice dinner, maybe have a glass of wine, and then tomorrow, I will fight the good fight again.

When you’re feeling that overwhelm. Just bring yourself back to the list and say this is what I’m working on, I’m going to work on it one thing at a time, I’m going to chip away at the block or put one foot in front of the other, whatever metaphor works best for you and just do that during the time and if you find yourself getting pulled out of that employee mind, just talk to yourself about that. Would you go to your boss in the middle of the day and say, “Hey Boss, I don’t like doing this. Why don’t we change the corporate strategy? This seems dumb to me, or I don’t really want to do it, it’s not fun.” No, you wouldn’t do that you would do the work anyhow, and that’s what you have to train yourself to do.

Use self-talk to bring yourself out of overwhelm and reassure yourself that you just stick on the task and do one thing after another. I promise you this, that if you do that, you will find that you feel calmer and more productive. At the end of the week, and especially at the end of a month, when you look back, you’re going to have so much more done than you would have otherwise.

Now, if you combine this approach with the double your brainpower approach, you’re probably going to be quadruplee as productive and effective as you would have been the other way. By the way, I don’t know if quadruplee is a word, but that’s okay. It can be now.