Being an ENFP

Personality: our greatest blessing can also seem like our biggest curse.

I've been learning some things about my personality that are very revealing about how my life has turned out so far and how to best guide it onward.  Extrovert, iNtuitive, Feeler, Perceiver - that's what the ENFP acronym refers to for those who are not MBTI fluent.  Most of you know an ENFP in your life, and hopefully this will help you understand them more.

This is just one element of the ENFP personality:

Blessing:  I love to start new projects.

Curse:  I love starting new projects much more than I care about finishing them.

Results:  As a student I was always happiest at the beginning of the semester where the possibilities of what I could learn, research, and work on were boundless and exciting.  By the end of the semester when there was just this one paper that I had been working on for the past month already and it had to be edited yet again, I was a depressed wreck.  But what got me through was the prospect of a new semester just around the corner!

Examples:

• I know a little bit of guitar, piano, trombone, drums, voice, erhu (traditional Chinese instrument) and have mastered none of them.  
• I know some Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, and even bought an audio Farsi Persian course and am fluent in only English.  

Interpretation:  I'm not bi-polar!  I seriously considered that I might be based on the up and down patterns that I was experiencing.  But in reality, this is just part of my personality and how it reacts to the academic system.  When everything starts at once and completes at once like on the academic term, my ENFP personality will naturally have highs and lows.

Prescriptions:

• I need high level accountability on completing the important things in life.  Really big projects should be broken down into phases where each phase feels like a fresh start.  
• I would also do well to stagger my new beginnings.  Unlike school, it would be good to maybe have a new project to start each month so there are always new beginnings to be excited about instead of having a season that is marked only by wrapping things up.
• I should look for a job where I can work on a team where someone else can be the finisher.  Put me in the brainstorming department!  

I watched this video AFTER I wrote the above list and my third prescription for myself was dead on what the video recommends.  This part about introverted versus extroverted intuition is what I call Myers Briggs on crack - its advanced, but with a strong extroverted intuition, I need to get this stuff figured out and mastered. 

This summer I did personality testing with a group of people and many of them kept telling me that they thought I was an Introvert, because I needed to take lots of processing time.  What I learned now, thanks in large part to the below video, that ENFP is the most introverted of the extroverts because I need time to sort out the intuitive information that I take in with a fire hose.

So the big lesson here for me is to manage my processing time...
HEY that's another reason why I need to keep it up with this blog - it's therapy for my personality to get this external processing!  Blogging is an example of something that I have started and then faded out on multiple times.  The possibilities of what I could do with a great blog are so huge and tantalizing... yet I'll never realize them if I don't stick to it for a while.  Please leave comments for me and encourage me to keep going with this blog, I need you, my audience to inspire me to longevity.

Thanks for reading and repost this for any ENFP friends you have.