Hey Dan here and in this video I'm answering an ask 10 question from an
ENFP in Romania Oana asks I'm an ENFP and a university student - at the moment
and I am in the position where I have to spend a lot of time every day
interacting and working together with my colleagues which may seem great as an
ENFP right well the problem is I can't seem to find any common ground with
anyone in terms of core values like integrity respect friendship
communication and appreciation and also the atmosphere is so competitive and
stressful all the time that I can feel the environment has a big negative
impact on my personality and mood how can I deal with this better and how can
I keep my mood up when so many things around me affect me one way or another
so that's an awesome question and something I think most of us have had to
deal with at at least one point in our lives if not all the time the first
thing I look at and I have three ways I would address this and different options
for you and the last one is probably what I would do which is not necessarily
the best option so the first thing I would look at is can you develop empathy
for them empathy in terms of understanding who they are and where
they come from one tool to do this might be using personality types figuring out
who they are based on that another might be just really making an effort to get
to know them better and that might be tough at first because you know you
don't like them and if you might not really want to get to know them that
much better but one of the really interesting things is most humans are
motivated by similar things you know deep down if you find someone who's
really arrogant a competitive probably deep down they weren't loved enough as a
kid and blah blah blah there's something there you can like about them now I'm
not saying to make these people your best friends personally I have certain
values and when people don't really meet those I'm pretty quick to cut them out
of my life or the very least keep them at arm's length right but getting to
know and understand where they're coming from and even trying to appreciate who
they are and where they're coming from maybe what's driving them it's going to
be one really useful for you as a human being developing that skill and two it
will make the environment a lot easier now when you accept people as broken as
they are or is different from you as they are it takes away a lot of maybe
that animosity or resentment or judging you might have and you just see like hey
that's Bob the guy with no integrity who's really driven and only cares about
winning that's Bob we love Bob you know so try developing the sense of empathy
for them and don't expect it back but do it mostly for yourself and one way I
would approach this is like your detective or psychologist investigate
them and try to kind of figure out like what makes them tick the second thing I
would really recommend doing as an ENFP is practicing expressing yourself and
disagreement so there's a chance I mean I don't know you we haven't met but a
lot of enfps were fairly agreeable we like to get along with people because
often arguing gets us quite emotional I know I find that there's friends I have
that love to argue they're into politics and will have the same argument and on
my end it gets pretty intense like it's really disturbing me and on their end
it's like yeah I argue politics all day this is just like a fun game right so
for that reason a lot of enfps we do tend to be fairly agreeable or go with
the flow until we go to the other extreme where we're definitely not
agreeable and so one thing I would definitely recommend is expressing
yourself you know don't let them say things to you or just generally be
saying things in a discussion that you really disagree with and you let it go
because you don't want to be confrontational or don't want to get
into an argument that's not going to serve you and that's not going to serve
them so it's a lot better to put it on the table
another thing I would say to do and this is something that I do a lot of my life
for better or worse and I really don't know if sometimes it's out of fear or it
is really just strategically the best thing to do but is change your
environment you know there's certain environments that appeal to certain
people some people love a really competitive cutthroat work environment
that's really thrive other people hate that they want to get along with their
colleagues and really be connecting and working together on a shared mission so
when you're thinking about your life especially beyond university I'm not
saying to go drop out of university necessarily but when you're thinking
beyond you know keep this in mind use this as a
learning experience what is the type of environment you want to be in and maybe
starting with is a taking notes like what environment don't you want to be in
what kind of people do you want to avoid and I would definitely say avoid work
environment that are going to be full of people who are very competitive and who
don't share your values now of course there's a lot of personal growth and
interpersonal skills you can gain from being in a really tough environment the
last thing you want to become is like an American child these days who gets a
trophy for everything they do right facing adversity is good it develops us
and makes us stronger but in the long run I do think that if you're constantly
an environment that really goes against who you are and you're using all that
energy you have all that willpower to get by in that environment you're
probably missing out on other things you could be doing and creating if you were
in a really energizing harmonious environment you could save all that
energy that you're otherwise using to survive the environment and put it
towards doing something really great and so that would be the big-picture
solution I'd look at especially looking forward is changing that environment
don't feel like there's something wrong with you or even necessarily something
wrong with the other people it's just maybe not the right environment for you
so the three possible solutions there choose one or all three one develop your
sense of empathy more for the people as you understand them and appreciate who
they are you're much less likely to feel negative emotions about the whole thing
to learn to speak up for yourself and express your opinion if you're not doing
that already and three consider changing your environment either now or in the
future thanks for watching this I publish new videos every Sunday Tuesday
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you