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What Might be a Challenge for an INFP?

What Might be a Challenge for an INFP?

By Donna Dunning

People with preferences for INFP tend to use a calm, personal, approach. Harmony and meaning are important considerations for them.

Preferring to connect rather than confront, someone who prefers INFP may avoid conflict. As one individual with INFP preferences notes:

“I have a habit of not speaking up when something bothers me. That would be OK if I would just let the feeling go, but I hold my emotions in. I usually don’t speak up until something has bothered me for a long time. By then I am usually very angry, hurt, or frustrated. The most frustrating thing of all is that the other person may be completely unaware of the situation.”

Deciding how and when to approach a conflict is not a simple matter.

Engage or Retreat?

Somehow we all (not just INFPs), at times, must learn to make an internal decision to “let go” when we don’t like a situation or a person’s actions. Perhaps we can convince ourselves that the person did not intend to offend us or we can minimize the importance of the situation in the bigger picture.

At other times we need to “choose our battles” and speak up about matters that are important to us.

Our personality type preferences have an influence on how we tend to approach these situations. For people who prefer INFP, this decision can be made more difficult by their interest in avoiding conflict.

Does anyone have any tips for learning how and when to let go or speak up? How do your personality type preferences help or hinder you in situations where there is a potential for conflict?

Interested in learning more about how INFPs prefer to act and interact? Here are a few posts you might like.

Work is Personal for an INFP

Enhancers (ISFP and INFP) Personality Type Preferences and Stress

Developing Your Type: INFP

Narratives of Type: Enhancers (ISFPs and INFPs)

Is there an INFP in your Life?

Introduction to Type and Communication describes in detail how personality preferences influence communications.

If you live in the USA, Introduction to Type and Communication is now available on Kindle.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2012 at 6:52 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “What Might be a Challenge for an INFP?”

  1. Tina says:

    I’ve been avoiding ‘the little things’ for years and not letting go until something happened that I could not ignore and I do believe that I had to act to stop this person treating others in the same way. Since then, I have viewed conflict differently, it’s more like an opportunity to reach understanding and move on, instead of a horrible tense meeting where I was liable to get teary and not be able to communicate my message. This of course depends on the other person’s willingness to engage in the ‘conflict’ and want to resolve things.
    In the incident I mentioned above, the person did not want to recognise that they were doing something wrong but he left the organisation anyway and said he ‘regretted’ what he had done. The opportunity to use conflict was not an option and I felt disempowered. But all was not lost. 🙂

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