With the Covid crisis ongoing all around the world, more people than ever before are thinking about leaving their old jobs to pursue a creative path in online business that’s actually fulfilling to them. INFJs and INFPs naturally gravitate toward writing, coaching, blogging, and creating other forms of content that can help people grow and evolve. But one of the biggest roadblocks they run into is this idea of finding their creative niche.
Whenever I talk to a new client who’s come to me because they’re suffering the pain of blocked creativity, I start by drilling down into the values that motivate their creative life. In other words, the reason they want to be creative or have more creativity in their lives. Through this exercise with my clients, I’ve found that most of the time this remains a general, vague sort of idea to people who feel called to be writers or artists. We know we want to connect with our creativity on a deeper level, but when we examine why that is, we have a hard time coming up with answers.
Almost every new client who comes to me is interested in improving their creativity. And by that, I mean they want to be more creative, spend more time on creativity in their lives, and finish creative projects they’ve put on hold for months, sometimes years.
When I ask them what they think the problem is they give me a variety of reasons. “I don’t have enough time.” “I don’t know where to begin.” “I feel overwhelmed by the steps involved.” However, when we begin to dig down into the underlying emotional causes, we find that all those little reasons evaporate, and we’re still left with the big ugly problem: blocked creativity.
Every INFJ or INFP I have ever met seems to suffer from anxiety, and the more I’ve studied this phenomenon, the more I see that it’s related to us being out of alignment with our intuition. In the first video of my 3-part video series on INFJs, INFPs and intuition (Are You an INFJ or INFP Suppressing Your Intuition?) I explain exactly how this anxiety manifests and I also give a quick exercise anyone can use to begin reconnecting with suppressed intuition. However, right after INFJs and INFPs do this exercise, another question (or rather, big fear) tends to come up:
One of the most frequently asked questions I get from INFJs and INFPs is about suppressed intuition. It seems that so many of us shut down our natural intuitive gifts in childhood or early adolescence. This happens due to a variety of reasons, ranging from a narcissistic parent who never allowed us to truly be ourselves, to peer pressure in school from other kids who thought we were weird, or even teachers who couldn’t understand how we operated.
These experiences are extremely common for INFJs and INFPs, unfortunately. Most of us grow up feeling that something is wrong with us, something is “defective,” and so we try to go in the opposite direction and make ourselves into something different in order to fit in with the mainstream population.