Campaigner (ENFP) Productivity Tips: Results and Relationships

Campaigners (ENFPs) are enthusiastic, creative, and likely to keep an eye on the welfare and happiness of their coworkers. These gregarious personality types are generally a pleasure to work with. However, their outgoing nature can sometimes go a little far and turn into people-pleasing. Pleasing others isn’t bad, unless it gets in the way of effectiveness and impinges on Campaigners’ ability to care for their own needs and obligations.

The biggest productivity challenges that Campaigners face stem primarily from the convergence of their natural enthusiasm, affection for others, and ample open-mindedness. None of these are bad, of course. However, having difficulty sticking with long-term plans, staying on task, and being unrealistically optimistic can emerge from this constellation of characteristics. All those rich and often motivating people skills sometimes need focus.

Our approach here will be to suggest ways for Campaigners to ground their ideas and intentions, in order to create more results-oriented plans, and to help people with this personality type with their distractions. Hopefully, these suggestions will help Campaigners fine-tune their productivity without interfering with their natural interpersonal skills or their tendency to explore creatively.

Aim, Attend, and Assert

Aim

Like most Prospecting personality types, Campaigners may find that the many options surrounding almost any decision or action in their lives can be overwhelming or, at least, plentiful. These choices can be multiplied by the wishes and demands of the people in their professional lives, whether that’s a manager or coworkers. Choosing a single target among many potential targets can be difficult for Campaigners.

Once a choice is made, Prospecting individuals may also find staying the course until they complete a task or project to be a challenge. Having a planning system in place can help guarantee results. The simpler the task, the less involved the plan. Nonetheless, these principles can be helpful for the most basic jobs and the most complex projects. Here are some steps that you can take to both choose a direction and maintain momentum along the way to your goal.

You may need to narrow and define your work target, so that it’s clear and manageable. The narrowing of focus may require something like a two-column pros-and-cons chart. Finding a theme or topic may take several rounds of pros-and-cons charts if there are more than two choices. After you’ve picked one target, rewrite it to make sure that there is a measurable outcome to aim for.
Create steps to the goal. For a simple task, it may only take one or two steps. The steps should be concrete and measurable and, within their descriptions, answer the question, “How will I know when this step has been completed?” Ensure that each step is somewhat self-contained, relatively small, and manageable. Try not to make any one step a project in itself, to avoid bogging down your sense of forward motion. Getting stuck on a single step can feel frustrating, especially to Prospecting personality types.
List all resources, human and otherwise, to ensure that you have what you need for the task or project. One of your resources may be a budget. Gather, hire, or recruit these resources.
Assess your progress and the quality of the work often as you move through each step toward the goal. When you reach your goal, assess again. A final review of a task or project can make all future tasks or projects easier.

Following these steps should streamline the process in a way that lessens the potential for choice overload.

Attend

You may have noticed that we paid a lot of attention to the details in the four steps for planning listed above. Campaigner personalities are great with overviews and broad principles. As a Campaigner, you might feel a little confined by the specifics, but reaching success often involves putting all of the correct individual details together with care.

Your preference for exploring broader ideas is valuable, so you probably want to hang on to that. But you may also want to add a greater awareness of and appreciation for singular details to your way of thinking. It may not be that you miss details altogether, but you may scatter your focus by attending to too many at the same time. Add the distraction of new details that other people may bring to your attention, and your focus on the necessary individual details may become compromised. Mindfulness activities may help you increase your focus here.

It’s possible to learn how to approach life more slowly, deliberately, and mindfully. Many exercises can bring stronger attention to the important details in life. Here are a few that we like.

1. Meditation

Meditation is often thought of as a spiritual practice, and that view may depend a lot on how you define “meditation” and “spiritual.” Many see it purely as a physical/mental activity grounded in the everyday material world, without what most would consider a spiritual element. No matter your view, practicing meditation is great for focusing and appreciating immediate things.

People often avoid meditation, thinking that it’s impossible to shut off one’s brain, and those people are mostly right. But that’s not what mediation typically is. The organ that sits at the top of our heads is relentless and works hard to produce dreams and catalog memories, even when the rest of the body has fallen into a deep sleep. Our typical brain activity is sometimes called a “monkey mind” because of its frenetic activity.

Most forms of meditation don’t advocate trying to stop your thinking. Instead, meditation involves noticing and redirecting the thoughts that you have.

You start meditation by focusing your thoughts on something like your breath or a candle. But, inevitably, that thing your boss said that felt like a veiled insult, the image of your significant other looking particularly attractive the last time you saw them, or some other incidental notion will take center stage in your thoughts. Your breathing is no longer the star of the show. The meditator’s job is to notice the thought that has taken over and gently and nonjudgmentally let it go, like letting go of a balloon, allowing their awareness of their breath to return to the main stage. At no point is there an attempt to stop thoughts from happening, nor are any points ever lost when (not if) off-task thoughts intrude on awareness of their breath.

Meditation is less about tough-love discipline and more about gently inviting awareness into your thinking. It doesn’t take too many sessions before the meditator notices that this sort of awareness starts to generalize into the rest of their life, regardless of their personality type. Focus will likely improve as Campaigner personalities who meditate continue to practice, and this new level of focus is likely to influence productivity.

2. Become an Observer

Another way to grow your relationship with details is to start looking for them in a new way throughout your life. You can even make a game of it.

The next time you’re at the grocery store and have a little time, look for five items that you’ve never seen before. For beginners, look in the international food section. For the more advanced, avoid that section – finding “foreign” food that you’ve never seen before is likely too easy.

Or perhaps go to a large art museum and count how many times you see a swan or a cup in the different paintings or sculptures as you stroll by them. Choose any item that interests you, but don’t frustrate yourself by making your target too obscure.

Or take an art class and learn to paint or draw. For honing observational and detail skills, avoid creating pieces that are too abstract.

For more on training your powers of observation, consider this MIT case study.

Maybe a way to build your appreciation for details and strengthen your network simultaneously is to establish a practice of sincerely and accurately complimenting people throughout your day. The only rules are that compliments have to be specific and they have to be precise.

“That report you wrote was riveting” is a nice compliment but not good enough for developing an appreciation for details.

“I loved the part in your report where you demonstrated that paying just a few more seconds of attention to the customer increased our sales by 11%” is more specific and more likely to build your skills for noticing details. And as a bonus, compliments often create bonds between people.

3. Create Your Own Exercise

Hopefully, the exercises above have inspired your own take on techniques for building a greater appreciation for detail. There are likely countless ways to develop your focus on the specific attributes of something. If you have any fun or interesting ideas that might appeal to Campaigner personalities, share them in the comment section below.

Assert

“People-pleasing” can often be a humblebrag. “Yes, I’m guilty of trying to make everybody happy. I care too much.” But while some people may have questionable motives for labeling themselves this way, people-pleasing can be very problematic in reality. It’s especially problematic when it entails trying to please others at the expense of taking care of oneself and focusing on one’s own endeavors.

The need to keep as many people as happy as possible can sometimes be a primary driver for Campaigner personalities. This need can make it very difficult for you as a Campaigner to make choices that others don’t support unanimously. Sometimes moving forward toward productivity is contingent on making unpopular decisions.

Of course, we advocate kindness, but there can be times when people take advantage of other people’s goodwill, either consciously or unconsciously. And sometimes tough love is a more effective and perhaps kinder choice than letting people drift without adequate consequences or the right amount of resistance to their ill-advised preferences.

While Campaigners’ people skills are often off the charts, issues may arise around boundaries and assertions. Both can affect productivity by creating distracting drama in the office, rendering people with this personality type less than effective. You can become spread too thin or be too focused on the needs of others rather than the job at hand. Burnout and poor job reviews may follow.

Boundaries are a personal line that you create that others cannot cross without your permission. When thinking about boundaries, understand that most people will respect your boundaries – and you for setting them. However, others may not be happy with your boundary decisions and may push back.

Occasionally, you may need to reinforce your boundaries repeatedly until the relevant people respect them. This insistence may feel too much like conflict for many people with the Campaigner personality type, and you may sometimes feel uncomfortable setting and enforcing your limits. You may need to brace yourself for this possibility and strongly commit yourself to this form of self-care. And there are gentle ways to stand your ground. You don’t have to go against the personal style of most Campaigners. Kindness and diplomacy are usually superior styles when dealing with people. Just keep in mind that the goal is to maintain your boundaries, and sometimes that may not please everyone around you.

You decide boundaries based on many things. First and foremost, your subjective comfort levels can tell you a lot about where you want a boundary. Because it’s your personal preference, some people may disagree with you. If the one who disagrees with you is your boss, and they aren’t crossing any legal or ethical lines, then you may have to decide between your boundary and your employment. That can be tough.

However, if the person who disagrees with your personal choice is not above you on an employment hierarchy, then you have a right to trust and enforce your comfort level. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be pushback, so make sure that you’re being reasonable and that your boundary can stand up to potential tests that may come along later.

Another thing to consider when setting a boundary are your values. Based on principles, are there certain things that you won’t do or allow others to do in your name? You have to live with yourself, so honor your values.

Boundaries may also take into account any safety concerns. If you feel unsafe with someone entering your personal space in a particular way, you have the right to curtail that by setting a boundary.

So, what does this have to do with productivity? People-pleasing often entails allowing people to cross your boundaries. If you feel uncomfortable, unsure, or otherwise compromised because someone intrudes into your space, this can be distracting and demotivating. For Feeling personality types, chaotic feelings can sometimes create chaotic thinking, and a lack of respect for a person’s boundaries can create that chaos.

The second tool that people with the Campaigner personality type may want to acquire or sharpen is their assertiveness skill. Assertive behavior is a way of negotiating your needs, your wants, and the acceptance of your ideas in a manner that is nonconfrontational.

In a way, assertive behavior should appeal to Campaigners’ people-pleasing tendencies on some level. A good assertive interaction should have all parties walking away feeling respected and heard. Accusations and blame have no place in this approach. However, that doesn’t always mean that the assertive person will get their way, but they will have expressed their preference clearly and in a nonaggressive way.

Here are a few assertive techniques:

Make clear statements: Choose your words carefully to avoid ambiguity about your position. If your request or idea comes across as messy, then it may appear that you don’t have a firm grasp on what you’re trying to convey or what you want. If what you want isn’t clear to you, it won’t be clear to the person you’re discussing your desires with.
“I feel” statements: You feel what you feel, and that’s not up for debate. You don’t have to justify your feelings. “I feel like you expect me to do a lot of the work on my own when we should be sharing the burden.”
Broken record: This technique involves paraphrasing and repeating your request or position calmly and not allowing the other party to distract you from your concerns. The keys to this technique are remaining as dispassionate as possible and staying the course. Inserting strong feelings into this technique invites unwanted distractions. While you may not want to present your ideas in a starkly robotic way, you want to lean a little in that direction when using this technique.
Active listening: The other party needs to feel respected and heard for assertiveness to work. Listen carefully to what they have to say and even repeat what they say back to them in your own words. However, avoid the typical Campaigner temptation to solve other people’s problems. That can turn into a distraction and may lead you away from presenting your wants and needs.
Compromise: Compromise or otherwise sweeten the pot without negating your concerns. Stay with the core of your assertion, but look for opportunities to give the other person a win on the things around the edges of what you’re asking for. “If you could watch the floor for me on Friday mornings, so that I can work efficiently on inventory without any customer interruptions, I would likely be free to take over the shop during the last hour of the day. Then, you could leave a bit earlier on those Fridays when you need to pick up your kids from school.”

Assertiveness techniques ideally create an emotional and practical win-win situation for both parties. Campaigners who learn and use these techniques are likely to find that they are less frustrated and more fulfilled when working with others. And the ability to calmly assert your opinions will focus your choices while increasing your decisiveness. In the end, this will likely enhance your productivity.

Free Spirits Can Produce

Some of the content above may feel regimented to typical Campaigner personalities. You tend to be freer spirits than most, and we highly advocate finding ways to leverage your unique perspective productively. Unfortunately, productivity sometimes means dealing with life’s more tedious nuts and bolts, like deadlines and tax forms. If you think of those as an extension attached to your creative approach, rather than something that’s an interfering blockage, you may find greater success in life – or, at least, a smoother path.

What are your biggest issues with productivity as it’s affected by your personality and personal style? If you have found solutions, why not help other Campaigners and share them with our community in the comments section below.