Struggles of the INFJ Artist, Part 1
Even though INFJs are the rarest of the 16 MBTI profiles, they make up most of my clientele, I’m sure in part because I’m one myself. As a result, I’ve gotten more familiar with the ways we INFJ’s can struggle as artists.
People with Intuitive Feeling (INFJ, ENFJ, INFP, and ENFP) share a passion for helping, personal growth, and being connected to a greater purpose. Since my work is all about helping people find and live out their why, it’s no wonder that my studio is full of Intuitive Feeling people.
Even if you’re not an INFJ specifically, you’ll see a lot of yourself in many of these descriptions if you have Intuitive Feeling in your MBTI.
We deeply want to express ourselves, but we’re too busy helping other people express themselves.
This is the #1 issue my INFJ clients face by far, and it’s because most of them are also teachers who love teaching.
INFJ’s are helpers at heart. We’re sensitive, warm, compassionate, altruistic humans who champion each individual’s humanity. We’re drawn most commonly to helping careers in education, counseling, psychology, and medicine. We are driven to make life better for the people around us, and we’re good at it.
We have a strong sense of justice. We want a world that can make space for each individual’s right to self-expression and autonomy, and we want to help people connect to their intuition and internal wisdom so they can exercise that right.
But we can get so caught up in helping others that we look up and realize we haven’t given ourselves the things we’ve been giving others. We have a deep need to express ourselves, too, and we feel unfulfilled when we can’t.
Possible Actions
- Define ways your self-expression activities can be helpful to others.
- Learn to see yourself as equally deserving of the time and help that you give to others for self-expression.
- Release some of your current responsibilities in order to make room for more self-expression activities.
- Sign up for self-expressive activities (lessons, classes, open mics, songwriting circles, joining a band, etc.) where someone else can help you honor your need for self-expression.
We love people so much that we struggle to protect our alone time.
INFJ’s love people. We care about them deeply, enjoy their company, and find them fascinating intellectually. We really love spending time with our closest friends in particular, who are usually folks who also love personal growth and development.
But our Introverted trait means we replenish our energy from being alone.
No amount of helping people or being around our favorite people can recharge us the way being alone can.
INFJ’s generally score pretty high on Agreeableness in the Big Five, which means we can sometimes struggle to draw boundaries around alone time, particularly if the people we’re closest to are extroverts and/or need some kind of help.
Possible Actions
- Protect your alone time. Your system deeply needs it, especially if you want to create. Protect it like you would protect something precious for the people you care about.
- Learn more about drawing boundaries with your therapist and through books about boundaries.
- Remember that the people who truly love you want you to have alone time. People who expect you to help them at the regular expense of your alone time are not operating with your best interests at heart.
We’re often underpaid and overworked, leaving little time or energy for our art.
Personal fulfillment, not money, is the main driver of how INFJ’s make choices, and we often choose careers that aren’t known for being lucrative.
INFJ’s also loathe the idea of making money at someone else’s expense, and can have such a deep fear of doing so that we severely under-negotiate and underprice ourselves.
And because INFJ’s love jobs where we have independence and autonomy, many of us are self-employed.
This means we often work way too many hours while also not paying attention to just how overworked we are because we’re so focused on the people we’re helping, generally at the expense of our own financial and energetic self-care.
Due to all of this, overworking due to being underpaid is one of the most common creative blocks for INFJ’s in my studio.
We INFJ’s will always need careers that are fulfilling. We’re miserable otherwise. But we can learn to take better financial care of ourselves, too.
Possible Actions
- Learn to see yourself as deserving of the financial security you want for others.
- Define the ways having more money (and thus, time) can help you help others more. (Think quality, not just quantity.)
- Work with a business coach who can help you negotiate a better salary, get a higher paying job, or change your self-employed business model. I highly recommend The SpeakEasy Cooperative as a resource for voice business owners.
- If you’re a voice teacher, read the article Michelle Markwart Deveaux and I wrote about raising your rates.
We love learning so much that we struggle to stop and do stuff with what we learn.
INFJ’s love learning just for the sake of it. We love new ideas and ways of seeing the world, which means we are almost always looking for new things to learn.
Not only can you find us regularly learning from books, audiobooks, and videos, but you’ll also learn we can barely go a couple months without being in a new class, course, workshop, webinar, seminar, conference, or institute.
With creativity in particular, it takes conscious effort to pull ourselves away from learning new stuff in order to create things with the new stuff. We struggle to resist signing up for a new course so we can spend that time writing songs instead.
Since we have a strong desire to do things that make a difference in the world, we aren’t fully satisfied until we do something positive with what we’ve learned. We can use that drive to keep us focused on creative projects.
Possible Actions
- In your annual calendar, reserve time after each learning experience to incorporate and experiment with the new information.
- At the end of each learning experience, create a specific action plan including several (many?) different ways to use what you’ve learned.
- Instead of jumping to new information right away when you’re craving newness, first try new ways of using the information you already have in your creations.
- Before signing up for your next learning experience, see how you can take one of your current projects further in a way that aligns with a larger purpose.
