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If you’re a perceiver, you probably feel like you wake up every day in a world that wants you to be a spreadsheet.
Western culture is essentially a giant machine built by ESTJ-minded people. They love rules, traditions, and absolutely adore the five-year plan. You, on the other hand, are a perceiver. You probably have fourteen browser tabs open in your brain at any given moment. It can be exhausting, but it’s part of what makes you who you are you.
The weight of fitting into the world of critics creates a very specific misery. Sylvia Plath, a fellow perceiver, said it when she said, “The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt.” And many Sensors struggle with self-confidence because the world keeps telling you that your natural way of being is wrong. They say pick a lane. He prefers to drive completely off the road just to see where the dirt road leads.
Leo Burnett once remarked, “Curiosity about life, in all its aspects, I think is still the secret of great creative people.” But curiosity is rarely rewarded in a system that values compliance and rigid deadlines. Sometimes you feel basically broken.
Not sure what your personality type is? Take ours personality questionnaire here. Or you can take the official MBTI® here.
The agony of an unplanned life
Perceivers are chronically misunderstood. You don’t want to settle on one road. You want to experiment with different paths until you find one that feels right at least it’s like a prison. He hesitates when it comes to commitments, because choosing one thing is like killing a dozen other options.
You learn through trial and error. You learn by poking the bear. If you are a Sensing perceivingyou’ll probably need to touch the hot stove to make sure it’s really hot. You also question everything: the status quo, the rule book and all the traditions that everyone seems content to accept. If you’re a thinking perceiver, you’ll keep pointing out logical fallacies until everyone in the room wants to banish them. If you’re emotional, you highlight ethical hypocrisy or soul-crushing obsession at the expense of human experience.
Your mental ecosystem craves a chaotic mix of work, play, exploration, rabbit trails, and physical movement to produce anything of value. Julia Cameron said it best: “Serious art comes from serious play.” Yet they punish him for playing.
it’s mine ESTP husband he spent his entire childhood being scolded for not being able to sit still at the desk. His energy was treated as a moral failure. Oddly (at least to most judgmental types), he calculated equations much better and memorized facts much better when he was allowed to walk up and down the room burning off kinetic energy. My ENFP daughter faces the exact same uphill battle. Give him speed drills and memorization and his brain shuts down completely. Let him write stories, draw his answers, and take part in creative projects, and he’ll be brilliant.
Patron saint of weary perceivers
If you need proof that a chaotic, improvisational perceiver can survive, look no further than Walt Disney. He was a classic ENFP who was basically robbed of his childhood. At the age of nine, he woke up at 3:30 in the morning to deliver newspapers to his father in the freezing winter. Sometimes he just curled up in a sack of newspaper to sleep. His father was a cold, harsh man with a volcanic temper who took all of Walt’s money.
Disney grew up in massive trauma and knew failure deeply. He eventually founded his own animation company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio. Totally drained. He ended up sleeping on the floor of his office, showering at the train station, and eating cold beans from a can. He was completely devastated by the bankruptcy.
He felt a deep disappointment to everyone who believed in him. But instead of getting a normal job, he dragged his tired, self-doubting self to Hollywood. He faced rejection after rejection. Finally, on the third try, a distributor bought his Alice comedies. He and his brother built the Disney Brothers Studio and you know the rest of the story.
Disney achieved extraordinary success because it refused to stop experimenting. As Oscar Wildean ENFP who understood the task said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
7 ways to boost your confidence
You will doubt yourself. You are human and your brain is wired to protect you from the humiliation of failure in public. But you can’t let this fear dictate your life. This is how to survive and thrive as a Perceiver in a world that wants you to be normal.
1. Follow your chaotic heart
The road to doing anything worth doing is terrible enough. It’s infinitely worse when you force yourself down a path that makes you want to crawl under a rug and discredit it. Disney ignored those who told it that animation was a dead-end gimmick. Trust your gut. Pursue quirky goals that truly fit your natural inclinations. Give up the things that drain your will to live.
2. Learn to tolerate failure
You do everything you can to avoid failure because failure is embarrassing. But behind every successful person is an absolute mountain of garbage that they had to wade through. Forgive yourself for messing it up. Use disaster as a stepping stone. Andy Warhol, an ISFP who fully embraced the strangeness of existence advised, “Don’t think about making art, just do it. Let everyone decide whether it’s good or bad, like it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make more art.” Michael Jordan, a rumor ISTPhe said, “I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
3. Take small but consistent steps
Trying to do everything at once is a fantastic way to eat cereal out of a mug at 3am while doomscrolling. If your brain resists big plans, start offensively small. Pick a bite-sized goal and do it even if it seems ridiculous. Let’s put another one tomorrow. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can build momentum this way, one low stake at a time, until you accidentally trick yourself into making real progress.
4. Accumulate knowledge endlessly
Trust and understanding are locked in a codependent relationship. The more you know about this weird little niche, the better you understand it. The better you get, the less you doubt yourself. Read books, study movies, fall down the Wikipedia rabbit hole at 3am. Use the perceptive superpower of obsessive curiosity to build a foundation so solid that your self-doubt has nothing to build on.
5. Embrace pure self-deception
You have to be a bit delusional to try anything new. To achieve something you’ve never done, you have to believe in a reality that doesn’t currently exist. People will call you crazy until the moment you succeed, and then they’ll say they believed in you all along. Rita Mae Brown said, “I think the reward of conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.” Choose self-delusion over conforming to miserable reality.
6. Doubt your own doubts
His doubts are loud, annoying, and usually completely made up. They are just afraid of wearing a jacket and trying to protect you from possible losses. The irony is that if you avoid trying, you guarantee loss. Give your inner critic a funny name. Write him a letter. Ask yourself what would happen if the exact opposite of your fear were true. If you’re going to be skeptical of anything, be highly skeptical of your own insecurities.
7. Eat your courage daily
Courage is not a personality trait. It’s a muscle that to some people is like wet pasta because it never gets used. You build self-confidence with small, painful steps. Do the thing that makes you a little nauseous today. Then do it again tomorrow. Every time you act while your brain is telling you to stop, you dilute the power of your fear. Put your hand on your weary heart, take a deep breath, and do the scary thing anyway.
Want to learn more about yourself?
If you want to dig deeper into the puzzle of why you think and act the way you do, or if you’re hungry for a how-to guide on how to thrive as your authentic self, check out my eBook: Discovering You: Unleashing the Power of Your Personality Type.
Inside you will find the following:
- An in-depth exploration of all 16 personality types so you can finally put into words the patterns and quirks that make you who you are.
- Simple strategies for reaching the “Flow State” and unleashing your best creative energies.
- You can gain insight into how each type, including yours, reacts to stress, grief, relationships, and major life changes.
- A guide to understanding children of each type, plus advice on the dynamic of types in marriage and parenting (also, keep your sanity).
- Tips for communication and goal setting tailored to each personality type – because shouting into space is overrated.
Plus, real-life advice for surviving—maybe even enjoying—your own mind, plus a crash course in cultivating stronger, more authentic relationships with literally anyone.
But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what readers had to say:
“Discovering you is filled with life lessons that I can immediately apply to my life. I have learned to understand myself, my family, and my children in ways that will impact my life for years and years to come. Thank you Susan Storm!”
—Linda Rolegan
“Thank you for the wonderful tips you keep giving. Your writing has literally saved my relationship with my daughter.”
– Terri Bruner
To discover you it’s over 300 pages long and contains 53 chapters of insight, practical tips, and hard-earned wisdom because understanding yourself doesn’t feel like breaking an ancient curse.
If you’re ready to better understand your own mind, communicate more effectively with the people you love, and perhaps lose the urge to apologize for your existence, you’ll find something in these pages that resonates with you. Your story is worth understanding. Maybe it’s time.
