A few years ago, I made a post about how the cognitive functions manifest in our behaviour and now I’m going to expand on that and give a more detailed, visually accompanied overview for each type, now for the ESFJ.
For the purpose of this guide, I’m taking a look at this interview with Olivia Colman, a British actress. You can find the links to other type spotting guides below which I will update over time when new guides are being added.
The dominant and the auxiliary cognitive functions that people use are those that are the ones that are really noticeable in the quality of their gaze, in their speech style, in their facial expressions, and their whole general demeanour, and so these are the ones that I will be focussing on here. In case of an ESFJ, these functions are Fe and Si. Thanks to this combination, ESFJs are the most emotive of all the types. High Fe leads to the automatic use of your face as a communication device, which is why FJs in general are really good at conveying their feelings or their opinion on a matter without even having to open their mouths and at adapting to the people around them and the situation at hand. But unlike the NFJs, who have high Ni and thus display a certain detachment (in comparison, take a look at Nicholas Hoult, an ENTJ, sitting next to Olivia Colman in the gifs below showing this kind of Ni-detachment), ESFJs always feel like a part of the scene as they do not go into a complete chameleon mode like the NFJs and instead try to appeal to other people in a more approachable and emotional way. You can nicely see Olivia Colman’s emotive range in the gif below, how her face is going on an entire journey while listening to someone else to quietly communicate not just that she is listening, but also how she is feeling about what is being said.
But this constant emotional self-expression can have an effect on the people they are with. While the NFJs tend to use their Fe to hide themselves and to adapt to others, ESFJs are not uncommon to use their Fe to project what’s inside them to the outside and are able to steer the mood of a room in a different direction. This way, they are able to enthusiastically cheer people on and make them believe in themselves or create a sense of warmth and togetherness, but also to fill everyone in proximity with not so nice emotions. I know that particularly ESFJs are not popular among FPs for this very reason, so I want to note that this is usually not a deliberate malicious kind of action to manipulate people. It’s just what happens when a person is very in tune with other people, it’s automatic. There is nothing inherently good or bad about dominant Fe, it’s how it’s used by individual people. But since ESFJs are so focused on the dynamics and relationships with other people, they typically put in the effort of making sure that everyone in the room feels included and appreciated to maintain harmony and a sense of unity. One way of doing this is by actively trying to establish eye contact with everyone in the conversation while they are both talking and listening, which is exactly what you can see Olivia Colman doing in the gif below. Note that being on the Si/Ne spectrum, ESFJs completely lack the intensity in their gaze that SPs and NJs display, and so their eyes typically have some kind of softness to them, due to dominant Fe even more so than the STJs. Further, adapting to other people and being effortlessly friendly with them, even if they don’t like them, is their way of showing respect to the other person, regardless of how they feel about them. If they don’t treat someone this way, however, it’s a conscious choice as they are probably filled with too much disdain for this other person to be able to bring themselves to do it. In this case, it’s a conscious decision to make a point. Another thing that I’ve found is that most ESFJs are extreme kinds of hand talkers.
Something that all the SJs share due to their high Si, even though it may not apply to every single individual SJ but to the vast majority of them, are two telltale signs: 1) a certain sense of elegance and grace in their posture and movements, and 2) a certain kind of tension around the mouth, which leads to the typical wrinkles in that area that develop with age. Olivia Colman is not an exception to either of those. Even though she has referred to herself as walking like a farmer (x), her hand movements and her tense upright posture even while wildly gesticulating do convey an intrinsic elegance.
When it comes to speaking patterns, let me first say that ESFJs are often amazing storytellers. They can recall so many details about the story they are talking about and know exactly how to appeal to their audience and how to make the story funny. They do not have a monotonous voice at all and they emphasise every point they are making with a vivid expression on their face to the degree that they sometimes substitute saying a word by simply showing its meaning on their face. Concerning the speech itself, high Si generally leads to a very fluent way of speaking without many pauses (unlike the NJs and SPs) and if they do need to pause, they fill it with uhm, so a moment of silence rarely comes up between their words. And even when they have another thought they want to express while already speaking, they are usually able to embed this new thought into the begun sentence and then carry on with it from where they left off, without making any grammatical errors like an NJ would. The stronger the ESFJ’s (and ESTJ’s) tertiary Ne is, however, the more they fall into an Ne-like speech pattern, so that they rapidly repeat the beginnings of a word like a stutter or they repeat whole words a few times before carrying on with the sentence (for example, one ESFJ with strong Ne who is very prone to do this is British actor Bradley James). However, other ESFJs tend to suppress this urge, which then results in a long quite strained and creaky sounding, not fully articulated [m] or [n], before they carry on with their sentence. Olivia Colman does not show this Ne-like speech pattern much, neither the open nor the suppressed one, so there is an example below of her straightforward speech talking about how hard it is for her to keep a straight face while playing Queen Elizabeth II (an ISTJ), who is not emotive at all:
It’s quite hard. Well, so if ... other characters are saying something that’s sad, I naturally can’t help myself, I go mwargh [vivid facial expression of her crying, see the second gif] and burst into tears, which is not what the queen does. She is our rock, [...] not often. No-not caught on camera. And uhm, so uh they film quite a lot on the back of my head on those days and also they’ve come up with a trick! So they give me an earpiece and they play the shipping forecast to me, so I just have to try to tune in to the shipping forecast and and that was just rude cause I’m not really listening to my fellow actors. I’m just trying not to listen to them.
Other How to spot type XY guides so far: INFJ, ENFJ, INTP, ISFP