Hi guys! I I'm an ENXP and I was looking for some advice about knowing myself better. I saw the mods are ENPs and maybe you guys could help me. I recently noticed a pattern regarding my own actions that is basically ruining my life. I seem to rely too much on my Ne, specially about my future and my career. I'm ruled by a need of pursuing anything that catches my attention in a determined moment. I obsess over it for a while and then move on. I've changed my major 4 times now. Every activity I do is temporary. And if I don't find something I can obsess over I get depressed and bored. Anyways, I think this has led me to not trust myself anymore, since I can't commit to anything because I lose interest in everything and I'm always looking for new possibilities. I have reached a point where I can't allow myself to pursue everything I want and I have to make decisions and commit. But I'm too scared to become trapped and take responsibility for my own decisions. I think this would be easier if I knew myself better, but I don't think I know who I am besides my own random interests, which is weird I guess. How can I develop my own Fi? Or Ti? How do you guys deal with your dominant Ne? How do you commit to things? I'm 23 by the way. Shouldn't I have developed some Fi or Ti or something by now? I turned to mbti because I wanted to gain a better understanding of myself but holy shit this is hard. I could only recognize my dominant Ne. All this self analysis seems useless if I don't really know myself, I realized I'm not self aware at all. So anyways, as fellows Ne doms how did you guys developed your auxiliary functions? Any advice will be amazing! Thank you guys for everything you do here!
The first thing you need to do is recognize is you are an Enneagram 7 and all of this is ‘normal’ for them in lower health levels. To overcome this, you have to ‘grow up’ as a 7 and stop allowing fear of commitment or quick loss of focus from dominating your life. You have control over yourself, you are not utterly helpless to your whims (said the Fi user who has a moral tone of ‘you make your own choices and messes and you have to get out of them’ ;).
7s have to learn to be open to the scary idea of commitment to reap the dividends of hard work.
Read the 7 profile and see how allowing yourself to ‘run away’ from commitment (which includes not finishing or devoting yourself to any project) can hinder your life. Once you recognize WHAT you are doing, and WHY you are doing it, you can develop the power to STOP YOURSELF from doing it, or from allowing ‘excuses’ or fear to run you away from good things.
ENTP Mod. : Charity is right. Here is also where the judging functions come into play. With Fi, you can eventually weed out that which you aren't personally passionate about/ those goals which don't align with your personal values. With Ti, you can see a chain reaction of the patterns in your life, and determine the most effective path to help yourself using logic to streamline your processes, make it more elegant.
Slow the hell down. Force yourself to stop running toward the future and live right now. Repeat the mantra of ‘right now is all that matters today’ a 100 times an hour if you have to. Be present. Be invested. Bring yourself into ‘now.’
My co-mod is a 7w6 ENTP who suffers from a lot of the same issues; I will nudge her to offer her two cents to this post, in regards as to what she is currently doing about it. Basically, she had to talk herself into getting a permanent job rather than talking herself out of it. Once she got into it, she realized it didn’t suck as much as she feared. Her brain is her own worst enemy.
I had to talk myself into this job. I gave myself lots of reasons why I would love it. It might sound a little unrealistic going in with pre set expectations but at least you will not go in blind. Making a pros cons list is always a good idea. It helps to sift through your multiple ideas, and narrow down the ones which can really work. Test out the feasibility of your ideas, opportunities before hand. Talk to people, do your research. Just remember that things will never be as bad or boring as you think them to be. This is a cliche but something which helps me in the mornings when I know I have boring work to do is "Get up, dress up, show up. Never give up." Also it helps to live from day to day. Don't worry too far into the future, you never know what variables might upset your plans.
Work-wise, a 7 needs to travel, get the ‘high’ of meeting new people, and not to be involved in sheer detail-driven grunt work. They need challenges to work toward and obstacles to overcome. Pick a career that offers you all of that. If you do not, you will have a string of 6 months at ___ jobs that do not look good on your resume. Find a career in something that you feel passionate about, that offers some kind of mental stimulation.
ENTP 7 co-mod is an attorney who loves to find ways to ‘get around things’ in the law.
ENTP Mod. note: Always try to remember the root of your passion when you feel like defecting from one option to another. If you must leave, leverage what you have learned in one place and how you can dress that up to make your hopping about look good. That's what I did, and it worked for me. Some of the reasons I love my job are the constant intellectual stimulation, creative aspects of it, my love for criminology pays off, meeting interesting people. Sure there are sucky days when you have to deal with the bureaucratic demons. But that won't be every day. Unless your role requires you to do something like it. In which case I would suggest that you avoid picking up detail heavy, low Si or adherence related work which will make you feel miserable and frustrated. Try to pick something that plays to your strengths, improve your weaknesses. Compete with nobody but yourself. Every day you are better than you were, yesterday. Even with a little effort. It is important to not give up. It is so hard for 7s but we have the gift of rationalizing. So instead of using it as a mechanism to justify dropping things, use it to tell yourself why you should stick around. You as a 7 can make most things fun. So find little tricks and ways to make the work day fun. Whether it is achieving small, impactful targets or making games out of small, low stakes things. Also, having money and being able to live nicely is fun. Nobody is gonna pay you if they think that their money will be wasted on training you if your pattern is just leaving jobs. It took me a long time to develop this perspective but I am glad I did.
I (ENFP 6w5 sp/so) chose a career in magazine editing, because it gives me time to do what I actually love, which is write novels. I’m afraid I can’t give you advice from my own life that would work for you, because a 6w5 sp/so is far more focused and driven to finish their projects than a 7w6, which means I push through ‘the boring, tedious bits’ of projects regardless of how ‘excited’ I am. It’s not fun to edit a book 7 times, but I still do it. I force myself to show up to work, to sit there for 3 or 4 hours, and commit to X amount of words, pages, etc.
Do you think it’s “fun” for me always to keep this queue stocked, or to type up characters at the end of a long day because the queue is low? Or go back and update old profiles and move them from this blog onto wordpress? No. I hate it sometimes. It’s boring as hell. But I committed to it, I will see it through, even though looking into my “to update” folder makes me want to scream. I tackle huge projects one step at a time. I’m disciplined but I can procrastinate at work, rather than doing whatever needs doing.
Which really is the bottom line. You want to finish things? Just do them. Force yourself to show up and do the work, even if it’s “boring.” Most of life isn’t fun. Paying the bills isn’t fun. You do boring stuff to make a living, so you can have the money to do fun things. If you do not learn to do it, whether or not it is fun, you will wind up ‘stuck at home this month, because I have no money.’
That frustrates a 7 even more than being bored at work.
Accept that your fear of commitment is a fear-driven lie.
You are not going to get trapped by committing to something or someone. Head types massively over-think things and allow fear – in the 7’s case of “missing out” on better things – to dominate their life. Admit it’s fear. Admit that allowing fear to ruin your entire life is stupid. Then do something against the fear. Do the thing fear tells you not to: commit and work at it. Fight the urge every day to leave. Stick it out, and prove you ‘can’ to yourself.
Middle functions. You’re in college so you should be seeing either some Ti analyzing or Te “buckle down and set goals and get this schoolwork finished by the deadline” kicking in. Are you more inclined to self-doubt and beat yourself up like a young FiTe user after ‘failing’ to organize your time efficiently or to make excuses and blame external circumstances like a young TiFe user?
My Fi has always been strongly evident, though I didn’t know what it was at the time. Things that set off a NOPE response in me vs. the ‘rest of everything, which I don’t care about.’ The intense sensitivity as a child. The compassion for other people and especially for small animals. The understanding of emotional dynamics and how people ‘feel.’ The constant angst between caring too much about people’s feelings and being low Te blunt or rude when I’m having an off day. The ‘going away from everyone’ to deal with my feelings in private. I have always fiercely, Fi-ishly known what I like and do not like, and have no ability to ‘tolerate’ things that I do not like. Once, I didn’t like half the people seated at my table at a public event, so I shut down completely and did not say a word to anyone at the table for two hours. My Fe friend also hated them, but smiled and charmed them all. Lucky girl. She can fake her feelings. I can’t.
- ENFP Mod