ENFP Career Advice: How to get your dream job

In this post I’m answering a question about how you can get out of a rut as an ENFP.

If you prefer reading, here is a video transcription bellow, made with Otter.ai

How to get out of a rut as an ENFP

You find yourself working in your inferior functions, or just struggling and not being your true ENFP self, how can you get out of that rut?

I am answering this question from Michael, who is an ex Pat from North America living in Lisbon, pretty close to me here.

By the way, if you go to dreamsaroundtheworld.com/askdan section, you can now submit your question via voice note, which is what Michael did.

So Michael said he does work either with clients or as a job in sales and marketing primarily for startups. Sometimes he’s been working, I guess directly for them, sometimes is more of a contractor or service provider, and that he has been struggling and hasn’t had a consistent flow of clients for the past 14 or 15 months, and how can he do that? He hates applying for jobs. He hates that whole process.

I don’t blame you. I hate applying for jobs. It’s probably one of the reasons I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade. Even when times are really bad, I was like, “Yeah, I can afford food, I bring my own coffee and a reusable cup to Starbucks, but still easier than putting together a proper resume. I’ll tell you that much.” So I totally get that and that’s why I would approach this whole thing differently.

ENFP Career Advice

Don’t try to get better at applying for jobs, use your ENFP abilities to go after jobs. What do you do best? Use your ENFP abilities and take a totally different approach to either getting clients or getting a job. Maybe you love connecting with people? Start networking like crazy. Get involved with people, with groups, do what you do best, maybe you’re really good at creating things? I love creating videos and teaching. If I was looking for a job I would put together some kind of a video or presentation or training that would show people that I know what I’m doing and I would send it out to different companies that I’d like to work with.

That’s tapping into a natural ability you have. Forget the resume, if you put together a great presentation and a company gets that, they’re not thinking, “Wait, wait, wait, we have to check his resume.” They’re thinking this guy knows his stuff, he’s smart, he’s well-spoken, he can communicate… If you can’t do any of those things, get good at them or whatever, do it in your own superpower. You can bypass all that.

There are professors at Business Schools, who never went to business schools, and maybe in some cases never even went to school. So all these qualifications that are put out – they are a way to filter people out and generally to keep things structured and organized.

If you try to play that game, good for you. But it’s going to be a battle. If you hate doing resumes, don’t play the resume game, play your own game go around it, you’re going to end up having much better results.

When you go away from the herd and do your own thing and your own approach. Think about it, If you’re hiring at a company (I’ve been hiring a lot over the last year), and you put up a job post somewhere, you get 100-200 applications, it is a pain in the butt to look at that. No one wants to do that. If someone came to me, and they just blew me away with a presentation or something they did, I’ll use my own case, they took one of my videos and remix it and made it 20 times better, or they showed me what a great writer they were with something they’d done or whatever it happens to be, maybe they figured out a problem I hadn’t and solved it in advance, I would be like done, let’s have an interview! Let’s get to this!

No real human likes reading through resumes, It’s not enjoyable. So when you bypass that whole system, then not only do you make it easier for yourself, but you also make it easier for the person who will decide if they actually hire and work with you, which is always good.

Think about what you are really good at. You told me you advise companies on marketing, so think about that. How would you market yourself if you were your own client? Would you go send out resumes? Of course not. You’d find a much more creative approach. Do that for yourself and you will find yourself with new clients or a job if that’s what you want in absolutely no time.

I do have a program for freelancers and coaches and consultants, It is called the FreeFreelancer. It is a training and group coaching program where we focus on mindset and getting clients making proposals, marketing, all the practical stuff, as well as sort some things I talked about in this video, like the strategic ways of doing things, building your business around your personality, so you’re not always feeling drained and struggling etc. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can join the waiting list here.