INFPs and ENFPs Avoidance and Escapism
“Usually, the things that we are avoiding aren’t actually that hard to do and when we do them, 99% of the time they were easier than we thought they would be.”
INFPs and ENFPs care about people
So I think we can agree on something here – the more you care about something, the more you have a sense of empathy and connection with other people’s feelings, the more you can really just sense the energy around you and the energy with other people, the more painful bad things can be, right?
I think it makes sense to me at least. So if you’re an ENFP or an INFP, you’re an NF, you’re very tied in with other people with their emotions or feelings.
We tend to really care, which has a lot of really positive benefits, it also has a big negative, and it’s that we tend to be avoiders. Maybe it is a difficult conversation, quitting a job, or even asking a roommate to clean up – we tend to avoid those because It might be a bit harder for us to do these things than it is for other people.
INFPs and ENFPs are avoiding difficult feelings
Now, something that plays in with this avoidance is escapism and escapism is our desire to, you know, leave difficult feelings.
Maybe you have a job you really don’t like or you’re in a bad relationship, where you just want to escape all of that, or it could be escaping sort of in the moment, who knows what else. Sometimes you have to make a difficult call – You check your phone, you saw that your landlord called and you have to call them and be like, “I don’t have any money” and you’re looking at your phone, and the right thing to do is just call them – but you’ll play games on your phone, watch a Netflix show, do something else, but that call ain’t happening.
On the other hand, when we do these “difficult things” – 99% of the time, they are easier than we thought they would be because, in our mind, they blow up, they become this big, terrible thing in real life. Not that big of a deal, right?
Escapism – It is a way to feel better, regardless of what’s going on in your life. Life is going really bad, you play a video game, you feel a bit better. Life is going amazing, you play a video game, you feel a bit worse, you sort of neutralize and that escapism area.
This isn’t a terrible thing, though. I love playing Xbox, I like some level of escapism. The problem comes when that takes over the majority of your life or I would argue more than an hour or two a day of your life. Especially if you’re trying to do something significant.
Fortunately, there are some solutions to this. Now I’m filming a series, I’ll do a couple of videos where I’ll talk about breaking addictions from phones, Netflix and this sort of thing, and creating an empowering environment. These all tie in with escapism and avoidance. So definitely check those out.
I don’t know if you can just overcome all that right now. You definitely can over time in life, you know, get more comfortable having confrontation, learn how to fire people, learn how to make difficult phone calls, or organize your inbox or whatever it is. But a better solution is probably finding ways to eliminate those activities from your life.
Keep a list of the things you avoid doing and get some help
If every time you need to, I don’t know, organize your calendar, you procrastinate it all day, maybe you should hire someone to help you organize your calendar, or just decide I’m never gonna have an organized calendar, which would be a disaster, you shouldn’t do that.
If you hate sales calls, but in your business, you’re trying to phone people up and make sales – take notes of that. Every time you procrastinate, you feel bad, you avoid that behaviour, write it down somewhere, and go back to that list and see like, “Damn, I’ve wasted like weeks of time avoiding this, I need to make a change.” That change could be hiring someone to help you get really good at sales, a trainer or you could hire someone to do sales for you.
Basically doing anything, except continuing to do the activities you avoid will be better. So keep a list of all the activities that you avoid, and reflect back on them. Ask yourself – how can you eliminate them? How can you delegate them? How can you outsource them, and do that every so often every couple of months, and you’ll find that once you get rid of those activities – you will feel much better and your life will become awesome. I really encourage you to do that.