How to Express Your Ideas Successfully as an INFP | #AskDan
When you develop a great ability to communicate, everything else will flow.
Jim, an INFP from Tennessee, sent me a question about INFP communication skills and ways to express creativity:
I’m an INFP who shares the desire we INFPs have to make an impact on humanity.
It is the most deep-seated goal that consumes me when all other thoughts vacate and I find myself evaluating my life on a bigger picture.
My problem is that I have no idea what it is that I want to contribute to the world.
I don’t lack a passion for topics and certain activities, I just don’t know through which medium I can deliver the best of what I have to offer.
I’m in my head so much that I don’t know how to deliver the rich and intellectually stimulating content that exists in my inner landscape in a consumable way for others.
I guess my question is:
How do I formulate and hone in on what I want to contribute to the world and how do I clarify and translate my inner content into content that others will receive in as best form as can be expected?
So what’s going on with you Jim is the same thing that I think the INFP type (Mediator personality) experiences frequently, which is that you have this very rich inner world and a lot going on in your head.
Now, I have to take you at your word that it’s intellectually stimulating and very deep. For all I know, you just might be imagining a bunch of monkeys dancing around playing the drums, but to each their own, right? 🙂
So whatever your intellectually stimulating landscape is, you need to find a way to translate that to the world.
INFP Communication Advice: Expressing Yourself Clearly
The question you ended with was:
How do you clarify what you share and how you actually share it with people?
The advice that I think is most valuable for the INFP personality type and that really supersedes the question, which is what I strongly recommend doing is:
Investing a lot of your time into developing an extremely strong communication ability in any possible medium.
This is ultimately going to prove to be the most valuable thing you can do when it comes to expressing yourself effectively and clearly as an INFP:
To develop the ability to communicate what’s going on in your head with the world.
INFP Communication Media
There are many different communication outlets you can use to express yourself both clearly and creatively.
You can do this visually. It could be everything from illustrating to drawing, to painting, to photography, to probably other things, even videography would be one as well. It’s how to visually communicate.
It could be verbally: Learning to be a good public speaker, learning to tell stories, learning to just communicate and speak to people one-on-one in a really effective way in the written word. It could be writing non-fiction.
For me, one of my superpowers I think is taking more complex psychological theories, taking these bigger ideas and being able to communicate them to people in a way that just makes a lot of sense and is easy to understand and in at least a relatively fun way, I hope.
Some people do really well writing a non-fiction, others like fiction.
If we look at art – really, what is art, but communicating some kind of an idea or some kind of metaphor or opinion or emotion or feeling in one of these media?
The same is, of course, true for music. You could communicate through lyrics, but you could even be communicating through melody without actually saying anything.
More than anything else developing this communication ability will serve you as an INFP!
As a lot of you know, I travel a lot. I’ve lived in different countries around the world.
I usually do not speak the local language and sometimes this can be really frustrating. I’ll watch a conversation going on between someone who’s perhaps the translator. They speak English and the local language to the person who only speaks the local language and, even though I don’t speak the language, I can tell that they’re not communicating in the right way, but I can’t speak the local language, so I can’t intervene.
And I imagine that may be a similar feeling.
Having something in your head and you just wish you could communicate it with people and share it, but you can’t really do so in a clear or effective way.
This is why I think starting with the communication method is great because, when you develop a great ability to communicate, everything else will flow.
One of the attendees at my Life Design Fiesta event in Prague last year, Santi, does woodworking and he started a YouTube channel now doing woodworking videos. So imagine you walk into a tool, shed your whole garage setup and, if you don’t know how to use any tools, you don’t really imagine the things you could build because you might feel limited, like:
I wouldn’t even know how to make that, so why would I imagine what I want to make?
But once you have that skill, you know how to use every tool, you know how to turn just pieces of wood into a beautiful piece of furniture, then your imagination can go wild.
I really think when you develop this skill to communicate, the rest of it – figuring out what you communicate, to who you communicate, all that is going to come a lot easier for you.
Let me know in the comments:
If there was one communication medium that you could master, what would it be and why?
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