“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.
When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.†- Thich Nhat Hanh
I think it's interesting that some of the ENFPs on this thread have expressed that they just can't scale walls of text. I've seen other ENFPs comment on other threads that they usually read only the first sentence of a post before responding to it.
I assume that most people know that ENFPs and ENTPs are notorious for being easily distracted… in fact, several of my ENFP and ENTP friends are on medicine for Adult ADD. But what’s really interesting to me is how ENFPs/ENTPs self-regulate the amount of information they take in. I think that Ne Doms (i.e., ENFPs and ENTPs) have a harder time shutting off outside distractions than most other types… which means they are prone to throttle information… like skipping over walls of text that might demand their consideration.
This is one of the reasons I need alone time on a regular basis. It’s like I can’t shut off my Ne which is, in conjunction with my Fi, constantly reading the emotional tenor of the people around me. And sometimes I can’t bear this constant stream of information. The only way I seem to be able to stop it, is to be alone.
I first became aware of the benefits of throttling incoming information when I was in graduate school. I and my cohorts were assigned as many as 10-15 books per week. This was in addition to the academic journals in our field we had to scrutinize. Such a reading schedule was nearly impossible to keep up with, regardless of personality type.
I, like my classmates, was overwhelmed by the workload. I was a full-time Ph.D. student, a part-time graduate teaching assistant, a freelance writer (to supplement my income), and a wife with typical spousal responsibilities. To survive, I had to learn some real-politick-grad-student survival skills, which included being able to skim a book, quickly determine its salient points, and then speak thoughtfully and articulately on these in graduate seminar.
I was brilliant at this. Really. It played to all my ENFP skills. In fact, my skills became so renowned that my fellow graduate students started a betting pool on whether or not I would get publicly praised by my more curmudgeonly professors for books I hadn’t read. I enjoyed the attention immensely. And, for the first time I became aware of (and started to formally cultivate) my gift of the gab.
I was surprised to find that I could speak more articulately if I hadn’t read the assigned reading material thoroughly. < I ask you to re-read this statement because I think this is the heart of the matter.
In other words, it was because I hadn’t read the assignment in its entirety, I was able to better pontificate on the salient points. By skimming the reading, I prevented myself from being distracted by all the intellectual permutations that I could see so easily with my Ne. These endless possibilities were overwhelming… and the idea of having to sort all this extra information derived from a more thorough treatment of the reading was daunting.
Grad school was long ago, but I still throttle incoming information by a variety of methods. For example, I will take a few days off to reflect before posting to a thread on this very forum. Or, I might skim a thread, at first skipping walls of text, until I’m able to come back to the thread when my Ne isn’t overly stimulated. And, when my Ne is overstimulated and I’m under stress, I still rely on my ability to speak and write well. This is why it’s sometimes way easier for me to post something on this thread, than it is for me to read it carefully and thoroughly.
So I think the moral of the story here is that Ne Doms sometimes have to throttle their information intake as a means of self-preservation. And that it is sometimes easier for them to express themselves than to listen carefully. And, also that it is easy for an Ne Dom to rely too much on these crutches to navigate their worlds.
This is why I’ve worked very hard to not overly rely on my bull sh*tting abilities, in order to be able to skate by without reading the entire book cover-to-cover. And why I consciously try avoid just skimming things for the salient points, in lieu of thoughtful reading and thorough comprehension. It’s a struggle everyday. And, I don’t always succeed. But when I do, I'm a better person for it.*
*One of the things that has really helped me is practicing Mindfulness meditation. If you don't know what mindfulness is, I recommend you Google the term. Here's a quick summary I found on the Web.
), I will write, I will go into an Fi-Si loop, or I will, as you allude to, go out and do something sensational, in the literal sense, like go dancing, go for a walk, but even while I walk I tend to be in my head, very much so.
