ENFP Life & Career Advice: How To Choose Something?
“ENFPs like to do a ton of different things and picking just one as their career is where the real struggle comes in.”
In this post I’m answering a question from Sonia, an ENFP in Australia, about choosing the right career path for an ENFP.
If you’re an ENFP, how do you figure out what is the right direction to go?
So Sonia says:
I’m also an ENFP and relate to many of the topics of your videos.
What is the best way for an ENFP to discover the career path that is right for them?
I am feeling very doubtful on what path to choose and not being able to pick the right path for me because I actually like to do a lot of different things and have trouble coming to one decision because I always question whether that is the right decision.
Well, Sonia, I have news for you:
You are not alone.
This is a huge ENFP struggle.
We like to do a ton of different things and I often hear from ENFPs that coming up with things they’d like to do isn’t very hard.
Picking just one is where the real struggle comes in.
So I’m going to do my best in this post to share a strategy for getting more knowledge and then choosing the right path for you.
Step #1: Build Up Your Knowledge
The first thing you want to do is build up your knowledge.
The more you know, the better decision you can make.
There are two categories of knowledge.
The first is knowledge about yourself.
You’re going to get this from a few different sources. One are personality tests and other is people’s feedback.
So knowledge from tests or knowledge from things that people have told you about yourself can be really helpful.
The other type of self-knowledge is from your experience.
This is where the ENFP tendency to do a lot of different things can actually be really helpful. Because the more you try and fail, the more knowledge you’ll actually gain about yourself.
The second type of knowledge is more general knowledge about the opportunities that are available to you.
If you don’t know about all the different careers available just in the world in general, or what the trends might be, or the different kinds of businesses you could build off your skillset, no matter how much you know about yourself, you’re not going to be able to take yourself, and then that business and put it together.
So you want to develop as much knowledge as you can about yourself and then knowledge about all the different opportunities out there.
Heck, there are so many ways that you can earn a great living in such nice endeavors that 30-40 years ago no one would have thought would be possible.
And this is all thanks to the Internet and that so many people have a lot of money now, are bored and will pay you for all kinds of stuff.
So there are lots of different opportunities, you need to discover what those are and try to find the link between what you like to do and what the opportunities are.
Step #2: Uncover The Reality of Your Profession
The next thing you want to do is to uncover the reality of a profession or business before you jump into it.
One of the things I hear with a lot of disappointment from ENFPs is they get into a field like law or architecture based on what they thought the job would be like.
And the reality is very different.
Heck, I almost became a lawyer because of that TV show The Practice I assumed being a good lawyer was about going into court unprepared, and then coming up with some crazy scheme at the last minute that would help you get your client off and really be in a gray area of legality.
Turns out if I had become a lawyer, especially something like a corporate lawyer, I probably would have gone insane because a lot of the reality now is just reading documents, fact-checking, going over things and nothing like what I assumed the job would actually be.
So before you commit years of your life to something, find real people doing that job and see if you can spend a week shadowing them.
Or at least take them to lunch and ask about what the day to day is like and get a real sense of it.
Yes, you could post on some message board, but the people who are probably on message boards responding may not be the most accurate representation of the real successful people in the profession, so I really encourage you to find real people in the flesh that you can meet up with and learn about what the profession’s really like.
Making The Final Decision on Your ENFP Career
So at this stage, you’ve probably taken some of that knowledge about yourself, some of the knowledge about opportunities, come up with a few different things you think you could do, you’ve met with people in that profession, and you found out what it’s really like.
I have something I call the 70% rule. You can find about it in more detail here.
The gist of it is:
If you’re 70% sure, go for it, try it out, fail big time and then readjust.
If you’re 70% sure that a certain business is the right direction for you, go for it and, if you fail, guess what?
The next time, you’ll probably be around 75-85% sure and be even more likely to succeed.
So go for something, give it at least a year or two, see how it is for you and then adjust from there.
In the comments below, feel free to share:
How did you choose your ENFP career path?
Do you have any advice for ENFPs who struggle to pick their profession?
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