#simulatedworld

ISTJ, or Introverted Sensing Thinking Judger, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Si, Te, Fi, Ne}.

 Dominant: Introverted Sensation (Si)

"I'm a realistic, no-nonsense kind of person. Some people think that makes me old-fashioned--and I guess sometimes I am--but it's not because I think older ideas or approaches are inherently better. I just see a lot of wisdom in being prepared and knowing how you're going to approach any given problem and get the result you want. I figure, if you've been there and done it yourself, you don't need anyone else's advice because you know for yourself how to get the job done. That's the only way to keep things under control, really. People sometimes think all I do is work--but that's not true. I like to have fun, too--I just like to make sure my work is done first so that I can relax and enjoy myself comfortably. I enjoy building real knowledge and useful skills that relate to the things I find myself naturally good at. There's simply no sense in wandering around trying to jump into a million different areas--it's important to know what you do well and stick to it reliably. I've got to have a sense of direction--usually guided by what I've learned through my own experiences--and it's very important to me to keep my word and dependably do what I say I'm going to do, when I say I'm going to do it. If I don't help make life stable for others, how can I expect it to stay that way for me?"

Often stereotyped for their sense of duty and reliability, ISTJs are most often perceived by others as practical-minded people who like to structure things just right to stay within realistic limits and keep things within their comfort zones. It's not that they have no interest in play, as others may incorrectly assume from their oft-stoic demeanor--indeed, ISTJs lend themselves to a very particular brand of subtle and esoteric humor that others may often miss entirely--it's just that they know exactly how they like their surroundings to be, and they do everything they can to maximize the stability of the conditions and experiences in which they prefer to immerse themselves.

As a dominant Pi type, it's extremely evident to the ISTJ that he needs to be careful what sorts of information and experiences he allows himself prolonged exposure to. Often especially impressionable as children, ISTJs discover quickly that they have an unconscious tendency to concentrate both their work and play time toward highly specified areas in which they can amass the greatest amount of raw data possible. Unlike INTJs, who may spend years of their lives trying to determine what exactly it is they are passionate about and what role they want to fulfill, ISTJs tend to learn early on that they have very specific tastes and preferences and that life goes much better for them when they design and structure it around maximizing their exposure to the particular kinds of sensory information that bring them the most consistent success--and from that consistent success springs the life-long sense of fulfillment they derive from routinized structure and repetition of the activities they know from experience that they can perform proficiently.

It's hard to articulate exactly what it is that ISTJs will describe as what they enjoy about their life's work, but it tends to relate to the feeling of familiarity related to the repetition of certain "rituals" involved in the process of working with things that bring them sensory enjoyment. An ISTJ into literature might describe the smell of an old book as one opens its pages for the first time in years, or the texture of the worn paper rubbing against his fingers as he carefully turns them. An ISTJ who's passionate about fine wine might extol the virtues of that first sharp taste of alcohol when the liquid makes contact with his tongue. ISTJs may surprise friends and family with the depth of knowledge and experience they build in relation to their often esoteric and unexpected hobbies and interests. Every time they experience a familiar sensation, the more pleasing and complete and comforting that sensation becomes--and the more their internal database becomes aligned toward desire for more sensations of a similar nature.

There's a scene in the short-lived TV show Freaks and Geeks where a (presumably ISFP) girl is describing her love for the Grateful Dead album American Beauty--"I wish I could forget I'd ever heard it, just so I could hear it for the first time again!" This attitude would likely strike an ISTJ as peculiar and even downright nonsensical. Experiencing something new just for its own sake is like making the first paintbrush stroke on a new, blank canvas. It's not totally worthless, but the best things in life get better with time--every time we listen to our favorite record, or watch our favorite movie, or bond with a friend or loved one, all of our compiled experiences with the familiarity of those sensations come together to produce an even more complete communion with the sensory enjoyment of that specific kind of experience. The more we build sensory data related to that which we already know we enjoy and understand, the more richly and deeply we appreciate everything it has to offer, and the more we can internalize the fundamental nature of this sensation and mark its place more clearly on our private maps of previous impressions. New things are fine, and they have their place, but they simply don't compare to the depth with which we can appreciate that which we've come to know intimately over years of attachment and connection.

This taste for depth of understanding through sensory familiarity leads ISTJs to, often unintentionally, build extraordinary internal banks of knowledge, facts, possessions, and skill sets related directly to the flavors of experience by which they come to define not only their areas of interest and life's work, but by extension their entire identities. Outsiders may be totally unaware of the rich world of internal experiences the ISTJ is constantly busy building and reinforcing--if seen and understood only through Te, their preferred means of interacting and organizing their external world connections, one may have no idea what personal pursuits and interests truly define the ISTJ's (typically very private) sense of self.

 Auxiliary: Extroverted Thinking (Te)

"You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong."

--Warren Buffett, ISTJ

Unfortunately, dominant Si on its own does very little to grant the ISTJ any form of meaningful communication with others. Since its method of comprehension and its means of interpreting experiences are so inherently personalized, so dependent upon the individual's private reactions and the idiosyncrasies of his own worldview, some form of objective judgment, evaluation and organization becomes a necessary tool in the formation of relationships to people and institutions outside the self, and thus aids in the eventual acquisition of more of the highly specified sensory input upon which the dominant function thrives.

Here the ISTJ carves out a place for the attitude by which most outsiders--even close friends and family, in many cases--come to define and understand his nature. Te enters the mix as a much-needed universal metric by which to categorize, organize, evaluate, measure, and test for consistency. Painfully aware that his own impressions, in most cases, are too subjective to even communicate meaningfully to others, the ISTJ must master a secondary language and form of communication by which he can establish the sort of structure and order by which his relationships to the external world can be conducted meaningfully and depended upon to continue bringing him the sorts of experience to which he is accustomed. Through strong Te, the ISTJ supports Si's need for routinized sensory input by aligning himself with an objectively observable and empirically demonstrable construct for standardizing the way we as a group understand and enforce logical categorization and evaluation.

Often, Te as an auxiliary function may be applied as a sort of bureaucratic "mask" for dealing with people the ISTJ neither likes nor has any interest in communicating with on a legitimately personal basis. (Indeed, she may enjoy a private laugh at the ironic contrast between her private self and her "public face", and the entertaining realization that the outsider believes this Te "mask" actually constitutes the totality of her personal identity.) ISTJs are not unaware that others may view them, due to their Te handling of virtually all external interactions, as uptight sticklers for regulation--and they're not above playing into this image, both because they do see a lot of value in keeping things structured and regulated, and because they often find it immensely funny when others completely misinterpret their private selves based on the public masks they display for purposes of cooperative productivity. (This particular brand of dual-identity humor also seems to strike INTJs in a similar way.)

In terms of practical application, Te promotes an overarching concern for making sure things are done right. The ISTJ will go to painstaking detail to make sure that which she's responsible for is performed correctly and thoroughly, and that it meets the expectations and standards of the people who know how to do it the right way. "Measure twice, cut once." Chronically cautious and eternally vigilant, ISTJs will not stand by and watch a job be done incorrectly when they know how to do it themselves. If no one else can be counted on to do things the right way, ISTJs will step in and shoulder all of the responsibility themselves. When they have a job to do, very little can distract them or get in the way of timely completion of their goals.

As with all TJ types, Te also creates a high sense of accountability and responsibility for one's own situation and well-being. Te balks at the idea of inefficient distribution of resources, and ISTJs are no exception. Strong-willed and determined to make ends meet purely through their own individual hard work and perseverance, ISTJs may even go so far as to reject charity or free resources from others when they see no reason they can't simply redouble their efforts and work harder to generate their own means of financial support. They won't stop until the quota is met, the deadline satisfied, the standards upheld. All of this ties directly back into Si's desire for stability: Te represents a universal set of logical standards and evaluations from which no one is exempt. Nobody gets exceptions to the rules, because the rules represent the lifeblood of the system under which all interactions with others are governed: if we can't count on the rules to be enforced uniformly and consistently, we can't count on anything, and if life can't be predictably structured and molded into useful constructs and interactions between parties, Si can't expect to receive the specific kinds of sensory input to which it's become accustomed. Then we're lost without a map--up the creek without a paddle. And that's the last place in the world an ISTJ wants to be.

 Tertiary: Introverted Feeling (Fi)

Buried deep within the private realms of the ISTJ's psyche, we find the tertiary function, Fi. Of great interest is the fact that most ISTJs are far more aware of their own Feeling functions than the people surrounding them--often, even some close friends and family may describe the ISTJ as cold and unsympathetic, descriptions which, unfortunately, both hurt the ISTJ's very private feelings and reinforce his desire to keep those feelings further isolated from the world around him.

Nevertheless, Fi in ISTJs seems to often produce a sort of romantic, chivalrous attachment to what they see as all the best things about the various ways things have been in the past. Again, it's important to note that they don't value older methods or ideals purely for the sake of tradition; they simply recognize that few methods or approaches would have any lasting impact if there were not some clear utility or wisdom in them. Traditions would likely not have become traditions in the first place if there were not some inherent value in the sort of universal virtues and common sense right-and-wrong that they represent so succinctly. Through Fi, ISTJs find a sense of personalized aesthetic value and moral fiber: transient goals, objectives, and even laws may come and go; however, the deeply held personal values by which they can hold themselves accountable to the timeless nature of virtue and Goodness itself can always be counted on to remain the same. That which is right shall always be right, and that which is wrong shall always stay that way. Fi grants the ISTJ the power to break from and object to man-made rules and laws which conflict with the very fiber of his inner being. It reminds him that sometimes, the right thing to do is simply the right thing to do, regardless of what any official authorities may have to say about it. Fi expects no reward or recognition for its observation of these moral precepts inherent in the fabric of the human condition: it simply calls a spade a spade, and it expects that any good and decent human being should understand the obvious value in that sentiment.

When Fi takes too strong a role in cognition and overtakes Te, forming an "SiFi loop", the ISTJ may completely and totally withdraw from virtually all surroundings and circumstances which are not immediately familiar and comforting to his sense of stable interpretive meaning. All forms of external interaction seems to involve uncertainty, which makes them inherently unsafe--avoidant behavior becomes the norm, as the ISTJ with poor Te finds himself both unable to confidently take command of any situation or assert his organizational abilities toward any productive end, and irrationally sensitive to any form of experiential input which does not align with the sense of dependable routine which defines the boundaries of his comfort zone. The SiFi loop ISTJ will continue to narrow his perceptual intake further and further, convinced that anything he doesn't already know completely will only attack and further corrupt or damage his easily impressionable sense of personal ethics and ideals. Inferior Ne--as we will see in the next section--leads to a flood of dangerous and threatening external possibilities which must be contained and avoided at all costs.

Ideally, tertiary Fi should assist Te in providing the ISTJ a sense of grounding in that which she knows to be right and just. The two may combine and manifest together in ways others find unfair or overly controlling; however, the ISTJ remains resolute in that which she knows has always been and will always be the way that a virtuous person conducts herself. Imagine, if you will, the friend who forcibly obtains her drunken cohort's car keys--she may not technically have a legal right to do so, but Fi understands that sometimes the objectively measurable law is not enough. You may hate her for it now, but in time you'll see that it's for your own good, and the ISTJ's willingness to put up with your unpleasant response in the mean time serves only as a sign of reinforcement to Fi's certainty that it's setting aside petty desires for popularity in order to stick up for what true friends know is genuinely important--and there's a lot to be said for that.

 Inferior: Extroverted iNtuition (Ne)

Lastly, we find the feared and hidden iNtuitive function, seemingly at odds with everything by which Si defines its sense of personal and perceptual limitations. While Si would lead us to seek information in the vein of that which we already know we are comfortable with, and to build more depth of experience in those areas, Ne comes along and suggests the exact opposite: that we explore as much new and unfamiliar territory as we can find, and that as soon as we begin to develop any sort of familiarity with it, we abandon it and move on to another new train of untapped information. Ne creates that nagging sense of incompleteness in the back of the ISTJ's mind: when undeveloped, it's responsible for the feeling that no matter how much we think we've mapped out, there's always an infinite number of unexplored pathways that will ultimately change the meaning and significance of everything we think we've learned thus far. While Si is most at home extending its depth of understanding in a few specific comfort zones, Ne seems to strike at the very heart of this approach by insisting that we change course as often as possible, just in case we happen upon something interesting and unexpected.

To the young ISTJ, this attitude comes off as reckless, hedonistic, and outright frightening. In the midst of such apparent chaos, Si can find no sense of purpose, no tangible objective or clear direction, and no apparent rhyme or reason among anything it already knows. Ne represents the subconscious desire to throw out the map and be glad it's gone, to get lost just for the sake of forcing ourselves to explore and find the way back through experimentation and guesswork. In the grip of the inferior function, the ISTJ may feel his entire world is collapsing around him: nothing is certain, and all manner of terrifying possible future scenarios may be lurking just around the corner. This can manifest itself in the form of a number of uncharacteristic impulsive behaviors: the ISTJ may feel he must abandon everything he has worked to build his life toward, to start over elsewhere with a completely clean slate, to throw out the masses of extensive impressions Si has spent years building and start again from nothing. Few things could be more intimidating.

As the ISTJ gains wisdom and experience, he will gradually learn to integrate Ne into his preferred Si mindset by recognizing it as a part of his cognition which he can, in time, learn to predict and anticipate. I've known ISTJs who, much to the surprise of their friends and family, will occasionally disappear for a (meticulously planned) weekend in Atlantic City, indulging in one big burst of all the things they normally work so tirelessly to block from their experiential palates. The key for IJs dealing with inferior Pe functions seems to be finding controlled outlets in which they can grant themselves measured doses of the sort of "off the rails" experiences their subconscious desires point toward while staying within a structured framework that prevents total ruination in the event that things get out of control.

As this process continues to mature and refine itself over time, the ISTJ will eventually find herself increasingly more comfortable with more risk and more exposure to the new and unfamiliar experiences her inferior function desires. Because occasional indulgence in unfamiliarity will result in the internalization of new kinds of experiences, the unfamiliar will slowly become familiar as she increases the breadth of her taste for different kinds of impressions and ideas. The more this continues, the more it will naturally occur to the ISTJ that all areas of life are somehow interconnected in terms of a larger picture she does not yet fully understand--and the more this picture and the interconnectedness it represents become an area of interest, the more she will naturally satisfy dominant Si's needs by absorbing ever more information related to that singular subject area--and by extension through inferior Ne, all subject areas.

By forcing herself occasionally out of her comfort zone, the ISTJ will find that the more she seeks out new areas of study, the more the entire world will assimilate itself into her comfort zone. The very thing she fears most will become her greatest strength: the more the unknown becomes the known, the more the concept of "unknown" will, in itself, disappear and ultimately become unknown! The well-balanced ISTJ becomes something of an accidental polymath: well-versed in many areas, yet blissfully unaware of the separation between them. The resultant individuals almost invariably strike their communities as people of vast wisdom and experience--fair-minded and venerable, worthy of the utmost respect and admiration.

ESTJ, or Extroverted Sensing Thinking Judger, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Te, Si, Ne, Fi}.

 Dominant: Extroverted Thinking (Te)

"More than anything I want to be seen as a competent leader, a strong organizer capable of taking charge and getting results. I think there are good reasons for the commonly accepted and proven methods of getting things done: they work! People come to me when they need help setting up their plans or moving their projects forward because they know I'm consistently dependable, and they trust me to take on the important responsibilities because they know I'll work as hard as I can to make sure things are done right. I will take full responsibility if something I'm in charge of doesn't go well, so I need to work with people I can count on to meet expectations and respect schedules and deadlines. Sometimes others see me as too much of a stickler for rules and structure, but I'm not sure they realize how important it is to have a concrete plan of action and a central focus for everything you do. I don't like to waste time or energy and it bothers me when people don't bother with the research and preparation to make sure they're using the most effective methods. Work ethic is something I place a lot of importance on--it's important to do your fair share, and to be self-sufficient enough that you can stand up on your own and support your own needs. If you ever want to feel like you've accomplished anything in life, shouldn't you work hard to ensure that you're doing things the right way?"

ESTJs at their best are driven, focused, and productive--and those are the qualities by which they typically define their identities and self-images. As Te dominants, they have little patience for inefficiency, and they trust in the collective knowledge of whichever external groups they see as knowledgeable and worthwhile authorities. They are singularly aware that for any given job or task, there exists a most effective methodology, and they will bend over backwards to make sure they know what it is and that the project gets moving in the right direction. While others may complain about or disregard formal rules systems or regulations, ESTJs will generally stick up for them. There's a reason for the right method, a logic to the system and the way the different steps in a process interconnect. ESTJs, in most cases, seem to naturally understand this kind of causality on a deeper level than most other people do.

Nonetheless, ESTJs are often misunderstood and misrepresented in the media as tyrannical control freaks, overbearing bosses, or blind traditionalists. Since they are typically aggressive and confident in the pursuit of their goals, and since concern for the emotional states of others is not generally the first thing they look for when assessing a situation, it's easy to mistake their desire for progress and success as selfish insistence on absolute self-authority. But while ESTJs do insist on a clearly defined chain of command and organizational structure, it's not generally because they have any overwhelming desire to make the lives of others miserable--it's because they understand the significance of the consequences of the absence of recognizable logical structure and continuity of process. They may often find themselves the only organizationally competent member of an entire team. Because they value planning and tangible progress to such a high degree, ESTJs often feel personally responsible for the success or failure of any given job or initiative. If they haven't done everything they can to ensure the best result, they will be unable to live with themselves if the effort falls through. They may often see others as so unable to handle the administrative relationships they grasp so naturally that they fear the entire project will collapse around them (negatively impacting everyone involved) if they don't put forth their best efforts to keep things afloat.

Naturally, this can (and does) cause friction with a variety of other types. It's hard to browse any typology forum without hearing a disgruntled xNxP complain about his overbearing ESTJ father, boss, or public leader. What most people (especially disgruntled NPs) don't realize about ESTJs, though, is that they are the people who keep life running smoothly when everything is falling apart and no one else knows what to do. While they may sometimes become frustrated or angry with people they perceive as ineffectual or insubordinate, they're often surprisingly calm and confident in the face of crisis (assuming it's a crisis they've anticipated and prepared for.) Te as a dominant function is most satisfied when a situation arises where all of its knowledge and preparation apply directly to achieving the best solution, where they're able to prove their skills and competence directly by producing measurable results for their tireless efforts. When logical and empirical evaluations are standardized according to a universal rubric, no one can argue with the real-life results of hard work, preparation, and execution. The ability to maintain focus on these all-important goals leads almost invariably to a sense of pride in self-sufficiency that nearly all xxTJ types share--ESTJs loathe depending on others for resources, and they build a lot of their self-images on their ability to look out for themselves and provide concrete direction for their own lives as well as the lives of those around them.

A common ESTJ misconception is that they care only about the end result and not about the people involved in the process. This is generally much less true than it may seem on the surface: often, especially in the context of groups where the ESTJ is personally connected to the people she's working with, the impending possibility of failure (and its associated negative impact on the group) may very well be the entire reason she feels compelled to lend direction and efficient leadership to the situation in the first place. The ESTJ is not out to annoy others--she simply recognizes their logical mistakes and infrastructure inefficiencies to a much higher degree than they do, and she can't stand by and watch while others (especially those important to her on a personal basis) waste their time and effort on a system or process that's bound to fail due to simple, common sense planning errors. If she sees something that could be improved or brought up to "industry standards", the ESTJ may have great difficulty restraining her natural desire to correct it. While she may not always do so in the manner most palatable to those around her, her commitment to achievement (and to helping those around her achieve) is undeniable.

 Auxiliary: Introverted Sensation (Si)

As an auxiliary function, Si is responsible for providing a balancing effect between the external logic and facts of Te's world (where ESTJs feel most at home) and the private perceptual associations they come to develop as they build more skills and experiences. Si is primarily related to connections of information with personalized meaning and expectations--as the ESTJ learns and develops, he discovers gradually that not everything in life can be fully explained or understood using standardized measurements and fact-based assessments. While the very concept of subjectivity is, in itself, annoying and inconvenient for Te--ESTJs love being able to decisively and objectively prove the value of their ideas and methodologies--the influence of Si introduces them to a deeper world of internal sensory information processing, where only extensive collections of deeply personalized experiences can produce the level of competence and thorough understanding they desire most.

Earlier in life, ESTJs may find it difficult to place any genuine value on anything that cannot be clearly marked, measured, and evaluated according to an objective hierarchy. Dominant Te reasons that all worthwhile knowledge is collected, stored, and represented by the outwardly observable laws and logical relationships between externally verifiable processes and concepts--the beauty of which rests in the fact that no one individual's experience or opinion can taint the collective objectivity of knowledge as a general body. The role of Si begins to integrate into the ESTJ's cognition as he discovers that not everything he needs to know can be found in books or learned through study of the methods of others--he will learn that certain parts of life can only be understood by directly experiencing them for oneself, by discovering significance through internalization of actual sensory experience and association of perceptual expectations created therein.

In practice, this tends to lead to a gradual shift from overconfidence in the absolute correctness of logical authorities toward an emphasis on individual understanding and a more open-minded attitude toward the possibility that the subjective perceptions of others (and indeed, of themselves) may hold as much validity as the objective rules by which ESTJs structure their lives. One cannot truly grasp the subtleties of life's experiences without many years of hard-fought trial and error, and there is room for interpretive difference even within the confines of a well-defined schedule or working method. As they build more skills and collect more information from various areas, ESTJs will learn to develop their own interpretive paradigms--and they may be surprised to discover that their own experiences don't always align perfectly with the standards that their prized objective expectations might suggest.

It's worth noting that, as a perceptive function, Si makes no evaluation or judgment upon the sensory information it internalizes and ultimately builds into the ESTJ's comfort zone and sense of perceptual continuity. Like their ISTJ cousins but to a lesser extent, ESTJs must be careful to avoid situations in which too many negative or unrealistic associations may be generated between their private, experiential reactions and the measurable realities of the world around them. They are generally careful to stay within contexts where they know what they're doing, lest their subjective hunches generate too large a schism between their problem-solving abilities and the objective expectations of the people on whom they depend for personal interaction and structural boundaries. Left to its own devices, Si can lead ESTJs down potentially destructive roads--as creatures of habit who need to keep things under control in order to feel comfortable, they must take care to avoid letting themselves become too comfortable with uncontrollable situations.

As Si grows stronger and generates stronger cognitive balance, the ESTJ will develop her own perceptual set, and the more sensory information she internalizes relating to her areas of interest, the more she will "normalize" new sensations by adjusting her perceptions of them to the expectations her individual experiences have come to generate. Interestingly, though ESTJs are often seen as naturally detail-oriented, it's actually the development of auxiliary Si that facilitates this attention to detail more than anything else--Te on its own may very well overlook important details in favor of expediency and progress. Introduction of Si into the system will grant the ESTJ a mental "map" of information, a sort of "sixth sense" in terms of what "feels right" and what doesn't. That which matches expectations built on prior successes and failures will, ideally, match up with that which external laws and obligations suggest is fair and accurate. Nonetheless, the well-balanced ESTJ is capable of discerning the difference between the two, and of using her own experiential knowledge to correct the error when the outer world's expectations conflict with it.

 Tertiary: Extroverted iNtuition (Ne)

As life carries on, ESTJs will inevitably be confronted with a side of their personalities that doesn't seem to fit within the structural expectations of their preferred cognitive attitudes. Tertiary Ne enters the picture as an agent of creative exploration--but also as an element of unpredictability and potentially chaotic influence. It's responsible for several different adjustments that may confuse and possibly even alienate others, at least until the ESTJ learns to understand this part of himself thoroughly enough to incorporate it into his cognitive approach in a healthy and productive way.

While dominant Te's chief desire is to be judged as a competent arbitrator in line with the categorical expectations of those considered knowledgeable, Ne contributes to the extroverted side of the ESTJ personality by adding an accompanying desire to be perceived as unique and creative. The accompanying tendency to throw caution to the wind and think outside the box may alarm or frighten close associates and even the ESTJ himself--ignoring accepted evaluative norms and forging into the unknown solely in search of novel or unexpected results is virtually antithetical to the way most ESTJs tend to handle themselves and define their place in the world. They may rightly wonder, as Ne develops, where this sudden desire to tear down established expectations and wander into something different is coming from, and they may fear that it threatens all that they've worked so hard their entire lives to establish. Nonetheless, the introduction of Ne should provide a useful alternative perspective when situations invariably arise where the tried and true methods that have proven successful in the past cease, for whatever reason, to continue living up to expectations.

Most ESTJs seem to funnel tertiary Ne into some sort of creative outlet, which may or may not ever relate concretely to their career goals. Since they so often choose careers primarily on the basis that they will provide stable and consistent financial support, they find themselves unable to inject much personal individuality into their everyday working lives, and thus one common solution is to join some sort of creative endeavor where they can feel free to let Ne roam and explore without having to worry whether their inner creative spirit conflicts with any contractual obligations. Other ESTJs express their Ne by surrounding themselves with friends and associates involved in creative fields--often such people can provide them with feedback on their own work, and help them feel inspired to continue working toward new frontiers when others in their professional lives seem to lack interest or inspiration.

If auxiliary Si is poorly developed, granting Ne a stronger role in the ESTJ's cognition than she is naturally comfortable with, the "TeNe loop" ESTJ may find herself in an impossible situation: torn between preserving the old guard and promoting the new wave of the future, her conflicting desires to be seen as both rationally level-headed and wildly revolutionary may circumvent legitimate progress, ultimately resulting in high stress and burnout. She may find that even though her approach is working, it's become too dull and uninteresting to continue with--and then, intent on finding something new, may branch out too far and experiment with too many new possibilities with no real direction, sabotaging herself as she loses focus and indulges ever further into mindless experimentation for nothing but its own sake. She may struggle with the fear that everything she's learned will become useless, that she may wake up one day and discover that she herself has become obsolete overnight. Lost in the expansive world of change for change's sake, TeNe has the potential to make the ESTJ into a slave to the expectations of others. Uncertain of what will bring her personal satisfaction and stuck with the exhausting task of constantly satisfying conflicting expectations from vastly different worlds, she may find herself feeling utterly dissatisfied, yet clueless as to how to progress.

When integrated correctly, tertiary Ne should provide an additional balancing influence by reminding the ESTJ that change can be a good thing, that new direction is sometimes the very thing that will ultimately result in the greatest amount of progress and the best results. Strong and confident ESTJs will often manage to work their intuitive tendencies into their careers: by introducing Ne into their cognitive approaches but still allowing it to remain subservient to Te and Si, the well-rounded ESTJ will work to promote optimal efficiency, while still maintaining the ability to change or rework areas which no longer seem to produce the consistent results which create the satisfaction she's become used to. Life will, ideally, remain fundamentally predictable and controlled, but open to occasional change and reinvention when necessary.

 Inferior: Introverted Feeling (Fi)

As the weakest and least controllable force in the ESTJ's cognitive hierarchy, inferior Fi can present a number of issues which create substantial difficulty for most ESTJs throughout the majority of their lives. Since they spend the majority of their time dealing with impersonal and objective evaluations on a large-scale, and since these evaluations tend to apply to large numbers of people in many different contexts, taking time to sit down and reflect on their own private ethical values may strike ESTJs as an inefficient use of time, at best--or a hypocritical and illogical mistake, at worst. Often naturally distrustful of the very concept of introverted judgment, ESTJs may find themselves grappling with the ethical implications of their working lives, struggling to balance their organizational talents against their personal feelings about the greater value and inherent worth of the work they involve themselves in.

In their weaker moments, ESTJs in the grip of inferior Fi may become uncharacteristically offended when others don't see or immediately accept the value in their preferred methodologies. As they often feel genuinely responsible for the well-being of those around them, they may take it quite personally when they feel that their advice--their primary contribution to the improvement of their surroundings--is being ignored or rejected. They may struggle with feelings of hypocrisy or personal inadequacy when their emotions tell them to react negatively to this sort of perceived rejection, conflicting with their stronger and more conscious Thinking objectives. Since they normally expect others to be able to set aside their personal feelings in favor of accomplishing more important goals, the sudden inability to do this themselves may strike them as a form of weakness of which they must absolve themselves at all costs. They may not only feel guilty, but also guilty about feeling guilty in the first place. (This last part is especially true of male ESTJs, who often consider it their responsibility to maintain a dispassionately logical outlook at all times.)

Some ESTJs may even be so painfully aware of their own natural difficulties in this area that they overcompensate (whether consciously or not) by pushing specific moral agendas to the point of exaggerated emphasis on seemingly random or insignificant ethical dilemmas or problems with society at large. In these situations it's not uncommon to see them applying Fi in service of Te's awareness of its own talents--feeling legitimately distressed by the ethical problems with a given situation, but much less confident in their ability to express these feelings than in their known areas of strength, they may take up projects or causes in service of their private moral values, but under the guise of simple improvements to efficiency of process. ESTJs rarely expect thanks or appreciation for performing what Fi sees as their moral duty. Somewhat counterintuitively, the driving unconscious force behind Fi ("I must be a Good Person and I must contribute to Good Causes") may have much more to do with the ESTJ's motivations in many situations than his characteristically impersonal demeanor suggests. Usually, ESTJs are not entirely unaware of their own tendency toward bluntness and direct criticism, but are confused and uncertain as to how to express their private feelings more openly or connect emotionally with others. The resultant confusion can create a variety of difficulties in terms of structuring and maintaining interpersonal relationships (though ESTJs are typically reliable and devoted enough friends and family members that loved ones can forgive or simply overlook their shortcomings in this area.)

With time and experience, inferior Fi should ultimately lead to a more well-rounded personality as the unconscious side of the TeFi duality blends more smoothly with the conscious side, leading to a more complete personality capable of balancing the importance of scheduled progress against the private moral tenets of the internal self. This is often a long and arduous process, however--to ESTJs, it may often seem like halting the development of their projects to deal with every little emotional or moral quandary of every individual involved would be so time-consuming and inefficient as to prevent any real results from ever being created, or any useful goals from ever reaching completion. As he becomes more in touch with his own emotional needs and personal values, however, the ESTJ will naturally develop more empathy for the similar needs of those surrounding him. As he learns to keep an eye (even if only in the back of his mind) on his own humanistic moral responsibilities, he treads ever closer to completing the all-important project that is his own personal growth--and he'll feel all the more satisfied when he gets there.

ISFJ, or Introverted Sensing Feeling Judger, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Si, Fe, Ti, Ne}.

 Dominant: Introverted Sensation (Si)

"It seems so obvious that it's kind of silly I even have to say it, but things just always seem to go more smoothly when you know exactly what you're doing. There's really nothing quite like having your own private map for how to do things--the more I study and work on the areas I'm interested in, the more I develop this ability to connect my experiences to everything else I've done, and the process just builds and builds. I don't even mean for it to happen that way--I guess I just know what kinds of things I like, and I know what makes me comfortable and what doesn't, and I know that the more I plan my life around setting myself up to work in areas I know I'm confident in, the more I'm going to succeed and the more in-depth information I'm going to have about the skills I specialize most in. I think one of my greatest strengths is that I know what I'm good at, and, perhaps even more importantly, I know what I'm not good at, and I have the good sense to know when to avoid the latter. I don't understand why people insist on haphazardly jumping into things they don't have any idea how to handle properly. What's the point? If you don't know what you're doing, aren't you just bound to fail?"

ISFJ is one of the most poorly understood types in the entire Jungian Cognitive Function canon. The fact that they're often misunderstood and inaccurately stereotyped as groveling doormats who live to serve others and let people walk all over them serves only as a testament to the true extent of their humility in terms of how private they keep their true selves and their real passions and interests.

While they do prefer to conduct the bulk of their interactions with the external world through auxiliary Fe (which I'll get to in the next section), that is not at all the primary focus of an ISFJ's cognitive hierarchy or preferred lifestyle. To understand the significance of Si, we need to touch for a moment on the overall nature of introverted perception (Pi) in general, and to compare and contrast it with the extroverted perception attitudes by which most people who have written about ISFJs have gathered their information and totally missed the point of what these people and their dominant attitudes are really all about.

There's a scene in the film Across the Universe where two characters argue over the dinner table about the nature of experience and identity. While one of them, a young P type, argues that, "Who you are determines what you do", the older character (presumably a J type) insists on exactly the opposite: "What you do determines who you are." This latter attitude is a great way to introduce oneself to the philosophy central to Si: we build our identities on the experiences we've internalized. This is fundamentally why Si dominants go to such great lengths to control their experiential intake: they're not turning down unfamiliar experiences just to annoy their ExxP friends; they simply understand that the comfort in perceptual familiarity is such a powerful force in their own lives that they have to be extremely careful not to fill themselves up with too many experiences that might not end up being healthy or productive for them in the long run.

They know themselves well enough to realize that, above all, their natural tendency to seek out very specific kinds of informational and experiential input depends directly on the kinds of input they've become accustomed to through their prior life experiences. Like their Ni dominant cousins, Si dominants are most concerned with how their individual cognitive tendencies associate meaning with various kinds of signs and information; however, since they assign this meaning based on direct association with highly detailed sensory information imprinted on their consciousness from previous associations, they know that if they start spending a lot of time involving themselves in a certain kind of experience, the fact that it becomes familiar and slowly works its way into their experiential comfort zone means they may start to like it. And then they may never stop doing it.

While Pe dominants are constantly on the search for all sorts of new information and new experiences of as many different kinds as they can get their hands on, there's not as much of a threat of becoming attached to any one specific sort of experience or information. They'll just tire of it and look for something new the next day anyway, but not so for Pi dominants: since they have to focus their attention fully and completely on whatever kind of information they're seeking out, they can't just shut off this focus and switch to a different kind of input on a whim. Once they allow themselves to become immersed in the absorption of an experience, they know they won't stop until they've built a completely internalized map of every detail of every piece of meaning this experience has for them. Their choices of experiences literally create their identities--so how can they not be constantly wary of what sorts of experiences they let in?

ISFJs are, above all, highly cognizant of their own impressionable nature. They like to figure out what areas interest them, and then maximize the absorption of all sorts of information, data, skill sets, and experiences related to "mapping" as much of that terrain as humanly possible. I've known ISFJs who sit up all night on Wikipedia reading about their favorite subjects. Note that they don't prefer hopping around to as many different unrelated articles as they can find--they have a focus, a taste for certain particular flavors of input, and they want to know everything they can about those specific areas. If you've ever watched Antiques Road Show, well over half of the expert analysts who appear on that show are likely ISxJ types. They didn't necessarily set out to become experts in their fields--they just found that they so enjoyed internalizing sensory information related to, say, World War II-era Confederate rifles, or Kandinsky paintings from the 1920s, that after focusing their lives on these fascinating pursuits for so long, they eventually found that they'd become certifiable experts. Given enough time to learn, absorb, and practice all the established information, methodology, and techniques in a given area, Si dominants will outperform virtually everyone in terms of consistency and thorough attention to detail.

 Auxiliary: Extroverted Feeling (Fe)

"Govern a family as you would cook a small fish--very gently."

--Chinese proverb

Once we move past the dominant and start to focus on the auxiliary, we start to see where the general misunderstandings and assumptions about the ISFJ type originate. Given only knowledge of their public faces, it's relatively easy to assume ISFJs have no internal lives and exist as sort of less effective versions of ESFJs, using Fe as a public interaction method but not commanding it as fluently as their ESFJ brethren.

This is, of course, due to the fact that Fe is only a secondary concern for ISFJs--an important part of their lives but ultimately subservient to their personal quests for experiences associated with the familiar sensations they find most pleasing. In order to form meaningful connections with others and establish any sort of communal framework, it's vital that ISFJs master the objectively verifiable language and methodology of externalized Feeling judgment. As Fe develops, ISFJs will develop important interpersonal skills, along with consistent attention to the needs of their friends, family, and other individuals to whom their connective obligations suggest they share mutual responsibility. This is where the commonly understood impressions of ISFJs as loyal and conscientious group supporters come from: and indeed, when Fe is strongly in place, this awareness will absolutely form a vital component of their total selves. They will work tirelessly to promote the best interests of their loved ones, developing fluency not only with practical day to day maintenance tasks, but with any skill which may contribute to the well-being of others that their culturally supported networks of interpersonal obligations suggest is their responsibility.

All the while, the healthy ISFJ manages to balance this network of familial responsibility against her own personal desire to continue her quest for absorption of ever more information and experiences related to the sorts of sensory input that, over time, come to define her comfort zone. Indeed, Si and Fe should ideally become intertwined and mutually beneficial to each other, as the experiences associated with organizing, encouraging, assisting, and bonding with loved ones help to grant more definite and outwardly observable shape and meaning to her internal mass of undifferentiated experiential input. Fe is vital to the formation of interpersonal networks upon which her fundamental need for consistency and routine (based on a desire for new information to relate concretely to that which has been internalized and understood before) can depend. It grants her not only a means of communicating and defining the significance of her relationships to others, but an ability to depend upon others and show them that she herself can be depended upon as well.

If Fe goes undeveloped and leaves SiTi to handle the majority of cognition, the ISFJ is prone to feelings of terror that his trusted support network will fall out from under him at any given moment. Trusting others to handle important tasks becomes an uneasy endeavor at best. Since the feeling of trust and security upon which Si depends so heavily is never connected in any meaningful way to the bonds and relationships defined by interaction with others, the SiTi loop ISFJ feels that no one but himself can ever be depended upon to bring him the sort of consistently reliable experience his dominant function necessitates that he have access to. Without a way to describe or objectively designate his feelings for others or theirs for him, no sense of faith in upholding mutual responsibilities can form--he must do everything for himself, or risk total ruination through the failure of other less reliable individuals to uphold their agreements and obligations. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself--or risk facing the unknown, totally unprepared--which, of course, represents Si's worst fear of all.

 Tertiary: Introverted Thinking (Ti)

As ISFJs find themselves so singularly focused on developing their internal maps of experiential impressions and defining their directions in life based on the kinds of experiences these maps point them toward, at some point in life it follows that they should begin to ask the question: What if the map is wrong?

Dealing with this possibility is, to Si, unfamiliar (and therefore frightening) enough that most ISFJs defer almost exclusively to Fe in determining the answer: If my impression of how something is has somehow misled me or given me wrong information, surely I can count on the people to whom I hold cultural and familial bonds to remind me that I've lost touch with what our community finds most important. Surely, by listening to the ethical consensus of those to whom I feel closest, I can discover and rectify the problem when my own desires conflict with the institutional customs and values by which my relationships to others are given objective meaning and definition. Unfortunately, however, the savvy ISFJ will invariably notice situations in which neither Si nor Fe seems to offer any reasonable solution. Despite Si's inherent preference for that which has come to define its comfort zone ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"), at some point the ISFJ will be forced to evaluate situations in which her community's collectivized ethical norms will strike some part of her being as somehow fundamentally flawed, even if these norms are consistent with the kind of experience she has built into Si's vast internal database as the familiar and consistent standard she has come to trust.

When this happens, the involvement of tertiary Ti enters the picture primarily to serve as a sort of corrective force in the event that something has been written onto the map that may come into conflict with the ISFJ's own innate sense of logical reasoning. "This is what I've always done, and it's what everyone I find important says I should be doing, and yet something about it simply doesn't make sense." This can be doubly disconcerting as it represents not only a break from the unconditional trust the ISFJ normally places in her own self-referential experience, but also a deliberate separation from the outward judgments upon which her relationships to others are most directly verified through external reinforcement. The introduction of Ti into the mix seems to poke holes in the very fabric of everything by which the ISFJ has come to define her own existence--and yet she still can't ignore it. It's only through this vital corrective process, however, that the ISFJ is able to rewrite segments of her own sensory maps to align more closely with a sense of universal fairness and consistency in principle which extends beyond that which her own limited personal experiences with the evaluative standards of her communities have the context or precedent to grasp or define completely.

When applied negatively in a poorly developed state, Ti may cause counterproductive changes as its insistence on "just knowing" that something is (or is not) inherently fair or reasonable can reinforce all of Si's worst tendencies in terms of subjective self-reference as the ideal solution to any and all problems or disagreements. Convinced beyond all doubt that only he has the true depth of experience to understand the problem in realistic terms, the SiTi loop ISFJ may reject any and all outside opinions regardless of the status or relationship implied by the characteristics of the person offering them. "Listen, my wife doesn't know what's best for our children--I'm the one who's been there looking after them from day one!" Neglecting Fe's vital external input can leave the ISFJ lacking any sort of meaningful outside standard against which to weigh his own subjective evaluations of the overall value of any given idea, practice, or methodology.

On the other hand, once Fe has been granted the necessary growth and development time, Ti may step in to assist it with the evaluation process and remind the ISFJ that yes, it is possible for our family and friends to be wrong, and sometimes we need to have the courage to stand up for our own beliefs when faced with decisions that will directly impact our own lives and personal needs. More importantly, Ti allows the aforementioned sort of retroactive "map correction" process by which internalized sensory experience can be questioned, devalued, and ultimately overwritten with more effective and consistent ideals. For the ISFJ, Ti is there primarily to serve as a reminder that his own experiences and impressions do not always equate directly with the mostly universally just or reasonable approach, and that, somewhat paradoxically, sometimes the only person who can make this distinction to the necessary degree is himself.

 Inferior: Extroverted iNtuition (Ne)

Last but not least, the Achilles' Heel: many of the typical complaints others have about SJs (and especially ISJs) can be traced to manifestations of inferior Ne. On a surface level, Ne opposes everything Si holds dear and considers vital to maintaining a healthy outlook: while Si would encourage us to find exactly what we're looking for on our internal maps before setting out to find it, Ne takes a somewhat different approach: that the most interesting things in life are usually surprises.

It should be relatively obvious by now that Si doesn't like surprises. It wants complete information and it wants time to sort through every piece of the information given and compare it to the sense of static, internal consistencies by which everything in its worldview is granted stable meaning and significance. Until you can relate a given piece of information to something you already know, until you can show where it would fall on the map you already have, Si not only has no use for it, but is actually threatened by its imposing presence among the already-sorted information by which its identity and worldview are defined. Inferior Ne seems to throw a wrench into that identity itself: By encouraging the ISFJ to ignore what he knows and instead let loose and actually enjoy a constant influx of new and unfamiliar ideas from as many different unconnected sources as possible, Ne seems to attack everything the Si mindset holds as important or meaningful. Rather than carefully compare each nugget of data to every other piece of data we already hold, each new piece of information seems to suggest even more connections to even further-reaching outwardly defined patterns that continue to change the meaning and threaten stable interpretation the more we indulge them.

It's almost as if Ne would suggest that the more we know, the more we don't know; the more we discover, the more we find out is potentially wrong with the map we're reading now. Rather than contribute to a more complete understanding, inferior Ne frightens the ISFJ by telling him that the more he learns, the more he will be forced to deal with the unknown without a plan of action or the opportunity to educate himself on the possible responses. The result is often a form of stalled burn-out, trapped between the desire for knowledge/preparedness and the inevitable realization that the more knowledge he gains in his preferred areas, the more he will have to acknowledge new relationships and connections between that knowledge and other as-of-yet unknown areas. The resultant realization that he will never possess a complete map strikes the ISFJ as a terrifying reality: there will always be uncertainty and there will always be things he has to adapt to without preparation time.

In practice, inferior Ne often manifests itself in the form of outlandish insecurities and fears resulting from the inability to distinguish between the relative probabilities of the occurrence of various events: as the ISFJ becomes more and more stressed, he is forced to confront an uncontrollable flood of increasingly strange and unrealistic possibilities for the future--what if my spouse dies of a heart attack? What if my office is engulfed by a giant fireball? What if aliens enslave Earth and kidnap my children and I never see them again? What if the unrelenting flow of constant future possibilities totally ruins my confidence in any sort of stable or consistent lifestyle--what if I can never count on anything to stay the same again?

Of course, like all inferior functions, Ne can eventually be harnessed for positive use--but it takes a long time and a lot of personal development. When a very well-balanced ISFJ is able to stop viewing Ne as a disturbing threat to his sense of security and perceptive stability, it should actually assist and support dominant Si's desire for more information by granting him new paths and avenues by which to obtain more information of the specific types and categories which he finds so pleasing. He will continue to seek out information and experiences that seem related to that which he's already mapped--that doesn't change--but what does change is his ability to recognize the relationships between seemingly "unrelated" areas of knowledge. He may not even consciously realize he's doing it, but this expanded awareness of the interconnectedness of all knowledge will make the ISFJ feel more comfortable learning and adapting to new contexts than he ever thought possible. Areas in which he has relatively little experience will suddenly seem much more familiar (and therefore less daunting) than they ever have before--he will unconsciously find something in the new area that relates back to something he already knows; by making the unfamiliar seem familiar, he will "limit" his perceptual intake (and thus remain in his comfort zone) while expanding it into all sorts of new directions. He will unwittingly teach himself to improvise through the simple realization that, when we are able to see some form of abstract relationship between any combination of ideas we can imagine, everything seems related in some way or another, and thus all new information can be traced back to that with which he is already well-versed and comfortable.

Exploration in the name of expanding one's comfort zone, so that one never has to leave it--whether or not the self-actualized ISFJ realizes this is what he's doing, it makes his experiences that much more complete, and his life that much more well-rounded and fulfilling.

ESFJ, or Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judger, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Fe, Si, Ne, Ti}.

 Dominant: Extroverted Feeling (Fe)

"I'd say that I focus primarily on my responsibilities and obligations to others, to the people around me. It's not just the people that are directly involved with my life--although they are the most important ones--it's just that I really feel I'm at my best when I'm getting directly involved and doing something that's immediately useful to someone else. I'm good at just looking at the facts, figuring out a practical way to help people get what they need, and then getting it done. I think a lot of people have a tendency to needlessly complicate things, so they often come to me for advice because I'm good at simplifying their problems into concrete, realistic steps that will make a genuine difference today. And what I'm really best at is doing this in a way that makes me a lot of friends--I don't like to step on people's toes, and I feel I'm pretty good at moving things forward in a way that makes most everybody happy. I have a gift for bringing out the best in people--I know how to encourage them because I can just tell what they need to hear in order to motivate them to do their best. It's hard to express just how important it is to have a strong network of people that you can count on, and to always, always reciprocate that need by being the person others can count on at all costs. There's really nothing worse to me than letting down the people who depend on me--they need me and I feel most fulfilled when I can be there to assist them in any way necessary. If I don't know how, I'll do the research and find out what real steps are needed to bring important goals into reality. I also think it's really important to be as prepared as you can, but also to take life one step at a time! Just figure out what needs to be done next, and then focus on that one thing until it's done. If you get too caught up in daydreaming and trying to figure out everything before you even start, how can you ever really make a difference in anyone else's life?"

Like all SJ types, ESFJs are, unfortunately, often inaccurately stereotyped as busy bodies who have nothing to better to do than enforce arbitrary tradition and social courtesy on those around them. In reality, this is simply not the case for most ESFJs and the idea that this is representative of their behavior is rooted in a number of fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of their function attitudes.

First of all, Fe dominants do not change their moral attitudes with the wind, and they don't automatically blend into whatever cultural milieu happens to surround them. Although they're typically very skilled at deliberately doing this when they want to, it's important to remember that Fe dominants define their positions and directions in life according to their interpersonal obligations--and that means their relationships are defined by sets of common values and implied understanding due to similar cultural and moral backgrounds. Because their interpersonal strategy depends primarily on finding common ground by which to relate to others and form complex networks of personal, familial, and societal loyalties, ESFJs at their best can find something in common with just about anyone. This is often misinterpreted (especially by Fi types) as a deliberate attempt at manipulation for personal gain--and while it's true that less savory ESFJs are not above abusing their gifts for such nefarious purposes, to assume that this is their standard MO is to completely miss the central point of their value system. Developing common ethical viewpoints with others is, of course, the ESFJ's way of checking his own viewpoint against a collectivized standard that transcends the limitations on his own personal experiences, like a system of moral checks and balances. But more than that, it's also his primary method of relating to and dealing effectively with his external surroundings: ESFJs feel most at home when constantly in contact with a lot of different people, because it gives them the greatest number of opportunities to both stay in touch with the consensus among their peers about what is the "right" way to feel, and to offer their heartfelt help and support at every turn.

It's often hard to explain to Fi types how this sort of mentality constitutes a genuine expression of real feeling--but in order to fully understand the Fe mindset we need to step outside the assumption that everyone experiences the idea of moral virtue in terms of an individual or subjective standard. Even Ti dominant/auxiliary types, while they are themselves Fe types as well, may have great difficulty reconciling their strong individual principles with the philosophy most central to the Fe outlook: that the actual content of moral beliefs themselves pales in comparison to the importance of the relationships and support networks they represent. When faced with an ethical dilemma, the ESFJ's natural conclusion is that she cannot make any objectively reasonable evaluation of the situation until she understands how the people in the relationships by which she defines her entire existence will feel about the issue in question. If it becomes evident that her first conclusion is roundly rejected by the people she views as peers, she will, in characteristic Fe fashion, tend to push aside her own personal misgivings and adjust her outlook to whatever appears most likely to promote the overall well-being of the larger group while avoiding unnecessary conflict and keeping everyone as happy as possible. For this reason, it's not at all uncommon to see ESFJs in leadership positions--much like their ENFJ cousins, they naturally gravitate toward situations where they can utilize their people skills to balance productive delegation of tasks against diplomatic cooperation in order to build toward lasting, long-term relationships. In Fe's world, if you don't have clearly structured relationships through objectively observable declarations of mutual responsibility, you have no coherent means of navigating life itself.

The classic irony of the ESFJ archetype serves to highlight what is both one of the type's greatest strengths and simultaneously one of its most glaring weaknesses: self-sacrificial insistence on setting aside one's own needs and feelings as long as the broader needs of the larger group are met. While this can result in some extraordinarily selfless behavior when applied positively, it can also become a serious issue if not kept in check, as the ESFJ retains the ability to view himself as a "good person" only when he feels he is doing something that serves a practical need or purpose for others--and if that means trying as hard as he can to block out the reality of his own misgivings or reservations, he may forge on down this dangerous path with little regard for the long-term consequences of continually squelching his own best interests. Worse yet, due to this causal association between (and, at times, even total inability to separate) "what's best for everyone else" and "what's best for me", exceptionally unhealthy ESFJs may sometimes find themselves abusing Fe's awareness of collectivized moral values in order to justify behavior that is ultimately self-serving by convincing themselves that everything they do is "what's best for my people" in the end. Of course, this sort of behavior is relatively uncommon in most ESFJs--the worst thing you'll generally see from most of them is the occasional unintentional step on someone else's idea of personal freedom or expression (though such mishaps are generally well-intentioned) in favor of helping everyone else. The Fe dominant mindset is, in itself, almost utilitarian: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

 Auxiliary: Introverted Sensation (Si)

As an auxiliary function, Si serves an important purpose as a sort of life raft back to the inner self, a balancing force against the constant demands and expectations of the external world and its objective Feeling requirements. Unlike ISFJs, who are more inclined to (privately) disregard external cultural or familial traditions if their own experiences and insights lead them to believe some other approach will be more comfortable or more effective, ESFJs often have a difficult time breaking from the social fabric of their peers and companions. Like all Pi functions, auxiliary Si serves as a reminder that, no matter what external data may say, there are some things we "just know" from experience, often welling up apparently out of nowhere and providing strong hunches and instincts that something simply doesn't feel familiar enough to be right.

While Si dominant types typically have little to no problem placing their own experiential perceptions and the resultant expectations of meaning ("I know it's this way because I've done it and I know how it's supposed to feel") above externally imposed methodology, the Si auxiliary types (ESxJ) may struggle to a substantially greater degree to integrate their own personal experiences and assumptions into the framework of externalized expectations by which they govern their lives and define their sense of purpose. In seeking to grow and develop on a personal level, it's vital for the ESFJ to recognize that not all experiences in life can be related completely to others, and that some of the most important personal developments must come from the inside.

As Je dominant types, ESFJs need to depend on some externally verifiable standard by which to "prove" the merit and validity of their belief systems and approaches to problem-solving. If the only evidence she can provide for the value of her ideas is that "it just feels wrong if I don't" or "somehow I just know this is the best way", the ESFJ may simply ignore her instincts despite knowing deep down that something is being handled less than ideally--anything to avoid being branded an "outsider" or accused of selfishly placing her own needs above the all-encompassing needs of a greater (and therefore more important) majority. While she may often become accustomed to handling life primarily through habit, routine, and clear instructions, being forced to learn to interpret meaning according to whatever her gut instincts tell her may seem, at first, to fly in the face of dominant Fe's overwhelming prerogatives. All too often Si is relegated to the background--its suggestions and cognitive influence may make themselves internally evident, but when they conflict with external expectations, the beleaguered ESFJ may find herself at a loss for how to explain them in any way that resonates with her peers or team members.

In general, ESFJs do not appreciate having to completely remap an experience or skill set they've internalized before, and in most cases they're able (via Si's highly specified database of sensation and associated meaning) to recognize their own natural limitations and avoid wandering too far out into the wild without a clear map. If they find that their established interpretations are continually generating inaccurate or useless results, they may be left wondering whether they can really count on the consistent outcomes around which they tend to structure their happiness and personal comfort. When their personal preferences, obligations, responsibilities, and relationships cease to provide consistently positive feedback, something must be terribly wrong--and ESFJs see it as their personal duty to find out what that is and fill in the gaps, in order to get things running smoothly again as soon as possible. Not only do they need to feel that others depend on them (Fe), they also need to feel secure in the knowledge that they can depend on others (Si)--lest their expectations be let down, sabotaging their ability to predict the outcomes of their actions and thus leaving them at the mercy of random chaos.

Of course, on the positive side, ESFJs who understand how to tap into and express Si in a way that their peers find palatable will vastly increase their skill sets while simultaneously setting themselves apart and injecting their own personal experiences and interpretations into whatever they find themselves engaged in. There's a lot to be said for knowing when to keep things simple and just stick with what's already known to work, and Si provides a way for ESFJs to conceptualize ways of doing this while still staying within a framework that is predictable and comfortable to the personal sensory expectations they've come to internalize. Like all Pi functions, auxiliary Si has a certain perceptual comfort zone where it feels most useful and applicable, but unlike Ni, its information is based on direct sensory data, and the red flags go up the second something violates its expectations for "normal" assessments of meaning and interpretation. This may even result in seemingly irrational superstitious beliefs--Si, perhaps moreso than any other function attitude, epitomizes the idea that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." If we've done it a particular way before and we know it worked, why risk changing anything about our approach until it stops working? After all, we can never be quite sure what "minor" details will end up making a big difference to the outcome, and to Si, it just doesn't make good sense to destroy a winning formula in pursuit of some idealistic pipe dream.

 Tertiary: Extroverted iNtuition (Ne)

Rounding out the ESFJ's personality in the tertiary position, Ne can perhaps best be described as a "wild card" in the ESFJ cognitive style. While they will rarely throw caution to the wind and leap into the unknown as easily as, say, Ne dominants, they will often find smaller ways to change things up and attempt new and different directions in life solely for the purpose of experimentation. Some ESFJs express tertiary Ne by assuming the "class clown" or other entertainer role among their peer groups. (In this regard, it's not unreasonable to confuse them with Se dominants, although their motivations are not quite the same.)

Continuing in this vein, many ESFJs enjoy planning and hosting parties and social events--their reputations as the world's hosts and hostesses, while somewhat overemphasized in most ESFJ profiles, is not entirely undeserved. Instead of completely changing the idea or purpose of these gatherings, however, as an Ne dominant might, tertiary Ne will step in and lead to smaller (but still often adventurous) changes within the context of the more important and consistently maintained ritual. For example, one ESFJ that I know makes a point of trying every Chinese restaurant she can find--she maintains Si's enjoyment of the consistent expectation that her love of Chinese food demands, but she's constantly looking for new variations within that consistent theme, just in case something unexpectedly positive and novel happens. This "Ne experimentation within the context of Si's comfort zone" becomes a running theme for not only for ESFJs, but also for many SJ types in the process of developing their tertiary or inferior Ne: Ne represents a desire for change, exploration, and immediate response to all sorts of different information and new stimuli. It's the undying optimism present in the hope for a better future, and it's a large part of what gives many ESFJs their characteristic upbeat attitude: when they're able to combine a realistic, task-oriented handle on day-to-day goals with an open-minded willingness to experiment with new and creative approaches to those goals, they seamlessly integrate practical productivity with a healthy level of personal growth and innovation.

Of course, not all Ne use is positive in nature. When Si is neglected, leaving FeNe to fend for themselves with no substantial introverted perspective, ESFJs may become far too caught up in the impressions they make on others, resulting in strange and confusing behavior that seems to waver between exaggerated displays of loyalty (and oversensitivity to perceived failure of others to reciprocate it) and outlandish attempts to garner attention and be viewed as interesting or noteworthy. Unfortunately for the FeNe loop ESFJ, these two goals can easily conflict, and when Si fails to provide the subjective perception required to mitigate such circumstances, many stereotypically negative ESFJ traits can arise, precluding the successful bonding and interpersonal exchanges of loyalty upon which the ESFJ builds his self-image. When dealing with more unbalanced ESFJs, expect emotional manipulation, extreme neediness, and even unwarranted intrusion into the private affairs of others--all "for their own good", of course.

It's also worth noting that the common assumptions about ESFJ demeanor and surface behavior are misguided at best, and sharply counterproductive at worst. By virtue of its spontaneous and improvisational nature, tertiary Ne may occasionally lead the ESFJ into a role or persona that no one--not even himself--expects from him, and since Ne left to its own devices takes so little time to reflect internally, the resultant changes (albeit mostly temporary) may not always reflect the kind and giving attitude to which ESFJs typically aspire. While they may tend to present a friendly, sunny face to most outsiders most of the time, it's during a crisis (preferably one they've had time to thoroughly prepare for) when the true strength of their resolve, determination, and organizational abilities comes to light. Even when they are decidedly uncomfortable due to abrupt and unwelcome change, ESFJs will rarely reduce themselves to states of outright panic--they don't have time for that, because they're too busy focusing on making sure everyone else stays calm in moving toward a resolution that both accomplishes something meaningful and makes every member feel like a crucial part of a cohesive team or unit. Ask an ESFJ what's most important in a work situation, and you'll surely find camaraderie, teamwork, cooperation, and mutual respect at the top of the list--but it's important to recognize that even these ideals, while they are the first line of defense for ESFJs, can be temporarily set aside if circumstances becomes dire enough. When everything is falling apart, ESFJs will do whatever it takes to protect their own--and while they'd prefer to do it diplomatically in most cases, they will not shy away from confrontation if an unexpected situation truly leaves no other options.

 Inferior: Introverted Thinking (Ti)

When applied as an inferior function attitude, Ti tends to serve the somewhat peculiar purpose of providing that little voice in the back of the ESFJ's head that says, "Wait a minute--I don't care how well this binds my people together; it just doesn't make any sense!" As Je dominant types, ESFJs often have trouble finding any purpose in the idea of introverted judgment at all. After all, from an Fe standpoint, judgment serves primarily to connect people through an objectively observable rubric that can settle disputes through mutual adherence to a common set of moral prerogatives. When Ti comes along and begins insisting on extremely subjective and personalized principles, its presence may often feel not just foreign, but outright counterproductive. Fe operates primarily through generalized moral precepts that operate most effectively when used to govern and unite large groups--the idea of judgment-based principles that only make sense subjectively seems to subvert the obvious group-oriented nature of this prime directive, leaving the ESFJ to wonder why he should ever bother listening to such seemingly selfish impulses in the first place.

The aforementioned conflict between personal needs and the needs of the larger group is closely related to the conflict between dominant Fe and undifferentiated inferior Ti. While ultimately these two attitudes should work together to produce a more complete and well-rounded worldview, the development process along the way is almost invariably more than a little rocky. As unconscious Ti influences flood his consciousness in moments of stress, the ESFJ will often take out his confusing feelings on himself by redoubling his efforts to ignore these "selfish" impulses. One common method of attempting to cope with the resultant stress and personal guilt involves the reaffirmation of Fe's collective principles by self-reference back to Ti's own belief that "everything my group believes clearly makes the most inherent sense (by virtue of the fact that my group is better than yours.)" Dogmatic insistence upon the self-evident nature of her own cultural values may often characterize the ESFJ in the grip of inferior Ti--once her mind is made up that something is inherently true or correct, she may have great difficulty opening up to the possibility that other methods of reasoning and evaluation are worth any consideration at all.

Furthermore, this form of circular reasoning may go completely unnoticed and seem perfectly natural to the generally weak and incomplete Thinking function represented by inferior Ti. Refusal to consider other possibilities grants both a convenient excuse to remain in one's comfort zone and to reinforce the superiority of one's own familial or social body. Inferior Ti has a tendency to produce a nagging feeling that there's no purely structural reason that any one group's values should be objectively superior to any other's, but this difficult realization can all too easily be swept up in the current of Fe's powerful loyalist sympathies and brushed under the rug for convenience's sake. Ultimately, dominant Fe must confront the idea that foreign value systems exist and that it's impractical and parochial to go through life excluding virtually everyone who doesn't fit the arbitrary constraints of the ESFJ's own personal background and time-tested methods.

As two sides of the same coin, Fe and Ti will eventually reconcile with each other enough to recognize their own symbiotic relationship: the stronger Ti becomes, the more the ESFJ develops his own sense of personalized integrity and universal principles, and the less Ti will serve to simply parrot the group-oriented values ingrained by Fe's relationships to others and reinforced by Si's penchant for ritual. The result: a well-rounded, dependable individual who's loyal to a fault, but knows where to draw the line and set out on his own when his life path veers off in a different direction.

ISFP, or Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiver, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Fi, Se, Ni, Te}.

 Dominant: Introverted Feeling (Fi)

"I think it's important not to overthink things. I guess I know generally how I feel about things, but I often don't really consciously think about it until a situation comes up, and then I just respond in whatever way feels right at the time. I don't think you can really prepare for the most important moments in life because you never really know what things are going to be like until you get there and feel for yourself how it affects you, emotionally and physically. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out how other people feel, too--just from watching them and thinking about how I'd feel if I were in their shoes. It's really important to treat people in a caring and understanding way--I know that's how I'd want them to treat me. More than anything, I guess, I just want to be who I am and not try to overanalyze or define things more heavily than I need to. Just feel it out, do what seems moral and feels right to you in that moment and you'll know what to do when the time comes."

ISFPs, more than just about any other type, need to feel that they have the freedom to spread out and be themselves, to do whatever it takes to find the kind of life and the kind of friends and the kind of job and the kind of hobbies that really feel like "home" and make them feel balanced and at peace with themselves and their values. While they are equally as focused on personal values and an individualistic sense of morality as INFPs, the major difference in the application of dominant Fi is that ISFPs do not analyze and reanalyze their values through hypothetical or theoretical extensions of their imaginations. Unless they are directly contributing to solving a real moral dilemma that affects them or a friend or loved one personally, they see little value in hashing and rehashing all the different possible applications of their values when there is so much immediately available information to deal with in the real world of tangible sensations and emotions.

For this reason, among others, ISFPs epitomize the sort of "go with the flow and let your heart be your guide" sort of mentality that's often attributed to P types; however, unlike the EP types, who react to their environments in a way that's designed to appeal to the demands and expectations of their perceptual surroundings, ISFPs begin by consulting their subjective internal values and then support and assist their private judgments with the information immediately surrounding them. What makes this process unique is that ISFPs don't necessarily know how a given idea or moral concept will affect their sense of ethics until a realistically tangible scenario arises in which they can react in the way that feels most natural. It just doesn't strike them as a worthwhile investment of time to worry about things that don't directly impact the immediacy of the situation in front of them. While INFPs may know substantially in advance how all sorts of different situations would impact their ideals and the resultant emotional evaluations, ISFPs often can't assign any real meaning to a theoretical ideal until they're right in the middle of an actual situation that makes it real for them. When asked, "How would you feel if xyz happened?", often the ISFP answer is, "I don't know--it's never happened and it's not happening now. So who cares?"

Introverted feeling for ISFPs often prompts the assimilation and support of various ethical causes and crusades, ranging from basic, everyday human kindness to grand-sweeping visions for idealistic change and promotion of universal harmony (especially as tertiary Ni develops and grants the ISFP a deeper range of interpretive possibilities for the application of his values toward global alignment with what he sees as "the greater good.") These ideals represent more than just optimistic hopes and daydreams; they serve as a window into the ISFP's uniquely personal vision for a better world tomorrow than we have today. The development of this vision can take an ISFP the better part of his life to mold into something coherent enough that it can be explained or shared concretely with others--but ISFPs spend the better part of their lives filling themselves with real experiences precisely so that they will understand themselves and their relationship to the world fully and completely enough to share this vision in a way that combines the fire of their passions with raw, genuine empathy for the needs and feelings that unite humanity on a universal level.

You can find these developing visions in the artistic works ISFPs tend to spend substantial amounts of time perfecting--often credited as "artists", ISFPs may display this affinity for aesthetic quality through music, graphic design, acting, fashion, arts and crafts, woodwork or other concrete artistic creations--but they need not show it through traditional artistic outlets, and it's important to realize that while many ISFPs are involved in artistic pursuits, many are not. Some may go their entire lives without ever finding the right medium to express exactly what they feel inside, but rest assured they're always searching. Some may find it through something as simple as feeding the homeless, adopting stray animals, or mentoring young children--anything that makes them feel as if they've had some sort of positive, tangible impact on another person's life. ISFPs almost always practice what they preach--if they advocate something, you can bet they're out there doing it themselves.

 Auxiliary: Extroverted Sensation (Se)

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind."

--Bruce Lee, ISFP

Alert and ready to react on a split second's notice, auxiliary Se serves as Fi's liaison to the exciting world of sensations and sensory responses. It's the combination of Se's natural command of visual/auditory appeal and Fi's sense of aesthetic value and significance that grants ISFPs their oft-stereotyped position as purveyors of all things artistic and expressive. While this reputation may be somewhat exaggerated, it is true that ISFPs often feel a need to express and display their personal identities through visually engaging media--their homes and personal dress are often a little offbeat and uniquely decorated, aimed at creating a sense of calmness and tranquility that connects us to our spiritual and emotional needs while avoiding social expectations and pretense. ISFPs need things to be real, and they need to show their convictions, tastes, and preferences through real demonstrations of the sensory properties thereof. As with all SP types, it's important to remember that actions speak louder than words: Se puts the ISFP in touch with the sensory expectations of his surroundings and the natural audiences those surroundings create. This lends itself not only to their vaunted sense of improvisational spontaneity, but also a clear idea of what "plays" and what doesn't--some ISFPs even make it their business to be keenly aware of what trends and fashions in visual and aesthetic design are currently making the greatest impact on the greatest number of people, and to make a conscious effort to stay ahead of the curve. (Some even become what you might call "hipsters"--effortlessly grasping the essence of "cool" but quietly comfortable with the status it conveys, and silently amused at the failed attempts of others to imitate it.)

Unlike ESPs, who often fill their time with exciting and physically thrilling activities largely for the immediate excitement involved in losing themselves in their sensory reactions, ISFPs engage in similar surface behaviors for a somewhat different purpose: they need these sorts of experiences not only because they appreciate the face value of sensory impression for its own sake, but more importantly because putting themselves into unfamiliar situations forces them to define their own values and identities through the means they choose to find their way out. ISFPs often feel they must prove that they have what it takes to find their way out of dangerous situations as a means of confirming the value and moral worth of their own character to themselves.

ISFPs have a reputation for dropping everything and leaving to embark on some sort of journey or expedition with little to no preparation and no apparent reason for doing so beyond a momentary whim. Variety is the spice of life, and if they do the same thing for too long, ISFPs may feel trapped and locked in to one course of action--they need to change their surroundings every so often just to make sure they aren't losing touch with what's really important to them by becoming too entrenched in one approach or one way of living life. While this may confuse other types (except EPs, who do the same things purely to stave off boredom, as is a constant concern for them), ISFPs have more reason for doing this than simple enjoyment of the experience itself. Since they often see little to no value in hypothetical self-analysis, they may find it difficult to get in touch with their true selves until they've forced themselves into difficult or unexpected situations that require immediate and instinctive responses. People show their true colors most completely when a crisis arises, and as dominant Fi types, it's of the utmost importance to discover and nurture their individual identities: what better way for Fi to accomplish this than to involve oneself directly in real life, and see how we respond? Paradoxically for a type often characterized as so calm and serene, it's often during moments of acute crisis that ISFPs find the experiences that come to define the overall meaning of their lives.

On the other hand, Se may result in some negative tendencies for the ISFP who applies it in excess. When an ISFP sees a situation she perceives as patently wrong or immoral, she may throw herself headlong into the fray with little regard for the long-term implications of this behavior. While her resourcefulness and tactile adaptability are valuable gifts, it is possible for her to misjudge or overestimate her own on-the-spot problem solving ability and to actually make problems worse by getting involved in situations where her presence exacerbates the problem and then fails to introduce any genuinely useful solution. As long as Fi feels it is sticking up for what's right, Se may misrepresent the ISFP's generally good intentions through arrogant displays of physical bravado, or excessively grand gestures of love, or some bizarre combination of the two. I've known male ISFPs who, due to upbringing in an environment unfriendly to their fundamentally sensitive nature, have grown to overcompensate for this perceived "weakness" by exaggerating their Se in order to show their friends and families that they can be "manly" too--they may hit on every woman in a 20 mile radius, start fights at the drop of a hat, or constantly feel pressure to "perform" and impress their "audiences" at every juncture.

While Se does tend to lend itself to a certain flair for performance and its impact on an audience, constantly living in this mode of interaction is an approach better left to Se dominants--when an Se auxiliary type attempts it, he may wear himself too thin and block out the more important internal identity that defines his sense of self. While development of Se is certainly a useful and necessary component of the ISFP's total cognitive balance, forcing too much of it too quickly will almost invariably result in a feeling of squelched identity. "Who am I really?", Fi may rightly ask. It's vital for the young ISFP to remember that, while it's healthy to experiment with new sorts of situations and approaches to life, he needs to spend more time reflecting on the significance of these events to himself, in order to carve out their part in his total self-understanding and sense of internal balance.

 Tertiary: Introverted iNtuition (Ni)

As time and maturity set in, ISFPs often begin to feel that something is missing in their perspectives. They know how to judge right from wrong, and they know how to respond instinctively and make an impact on others, but they may still feel as though something is missing--something they can't quite identify or articulate. It's tertiary Ni that fills this gap--by adding a sense of intuitive depth to their range of cognitive options, ISFPs can begin to see beyond the immediacy of the moment consider the implications of their values and actions on a grander scale.

I have one ISFP friend who, seemingly on a whim, left home to hike the entire ~2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail on a personal mission to prove to himself that he could endure the challenges involved. This is classic ISFP behavior: when he returned, my social group could scarcely believe he was the same person. Where before he had been angry, impulsive, and dissatisfied with his life, now he radiated a sense of calmness, of comfortable acceptance of his own identity--a master of his own destiny. When asked what had changed, he simply replied that after hiking 2,200 miles and staring death in the face on numerous occasions, living purely off the land and finding his own way to his own end, the ordinary challenges of everyday life just didn't really seem significant in the grand scheme of things anymore.

What my friend had done was developed his tertiary Ni: no longer content to consider only the immediate implications of the interaction between his values and his present surroundings, he had become able to reconsider the assumptions his mindset would naturally make regarding the overall significance of everything surrounding him. He had developed an entirely new level of perspective and the effect was obvious and inspirational to everyone around him.

When ISFPs apply Ni is a less productive way, typically by neglecting Se development and slipping into an FiNi loop, the result is generally a combination of bitter cynicism toward the intentions of everyone around them, and feelings of hopeless isolation and detachment from the real and concrete experiences by which they discover their sense of meaning and purpose. Burdened with too much Ni too soon, the ISFP may decide to simply "drop out" of life in general--convinced that nothing will ever grant him the sense of personal fulfillment he desires because nothing is truly significant in a global sense, he may resign himself to cynical commentary on the hopelessness of it all. "Why even bother? Nothing is ever going to change. Nothing I do is ever going to make any serious difference to anybody--so what's the point? Why should I even bother? I already know what's going to happen, and it's not anything I want to be a part of--so I quit."

The solution generally involves learning to get wrapped up in the excitement of the moment, in finding some activity that not only brings the ISFP closer to her idealized sense of internal harmony, but that will remind her that things can always change on a moment's notice, and we should always be ready to respond and adapt our approach to the external world in kind. When a proficient Ni combines with this properly developed Se, it grants the ISFP a newfound sense of the long-term significance of her actions: rather than indulge in self-pity and doubt the value in anything she does, as FiNi would encourage on its own, a balanced handle on Ni will create the realization that every day of her life, the ISFP has a chance to change the world for the better. Even the smallest act of kindness, compassion, or personal expression can impact someone's life--or even many people's lives--on a much grander scale than we may ever directly know.

 Inferior: Extroverted Thinking (Te)

Rounding out the weaker end of the ISFP cognitive hierarchy, we come to Te. Directly at odds with Fi's sense of individual freedom, undeveloped Te threatens everything the ISFP considers central to the core of his values: personal ethics, freedom to change or remove external structure abruptly, and ability to express oneself freely and redefine (or completely ignore) convention. In short, when the ISFP has not yet integrated Te, it seems to put a damper on everything he considers important about himself and his way of life.

It's not uncommon to see young ISFPs, especially, using the concept of Te itself as a general scapegoat for all that's wrong with the world. This happens most frequently when something is getting in the way of their sense of spontaneity and they start to feel trapped or locked into one particular methodology or way of seeing things. Many ISFPs would do well to remember that the purpose of this attitude is efficiency and organization, not necessarily the personal attack or deliberate blow to their identities that they may often perceive it as. When an external source of Te threatens her own subconscious identification with it, the ISFP would generally prefer do anything she can to escape the situation rather than resorting to full-on confrontation. Unless they (or their loved ones) have been deeply and deliberately attacked or injured, ISFPs rarely hold grudges for long periods of time; however, when they are irritated, we can expect occasional small measures of minor revenge, ranging from not showing up for obligations ("You don't care about my contributions? Fine, have fun doing the work without me!") to passive-aggressive needling at the suggestion that she be forced to do anything against her will that doesn't feel like the right course of action at the moment.

When inferior Te explodes, it tends to result in the ISFP temporarily indulging in all the behaviors he normally hates and thus works hard to keep locked away in his subconscious. As with INFPs, this often surfaces in the midst of creative projects that the ISFP finds important, and it happens most often when creative partners are not deemed to be holding up their weight in terms of contribution to the project, or are trying to steer the creative flow in a direction that strikes Fi as clearly "wrong", or not in the spirit or essence of the feeling or mood he's trying to convey. Here is where we find the nitpicking perfectionist hiding inside the otherwise easy-going, friendly observer: strike at something too close to her heart, and you may quickly find an unexpected blowup when the normally quiet and compassionate ISFP is forced to assume a decision-making leadership role that, truth be told, she'd prefer would never have to occur because people should know how to conduct themselves in a reasonable and compassionate way.

"I don't want to be the bad guy, but if you keep pushing me I'm going to have to set things straight." Well aware of the uses of Se in terms of aggression and intimidation, most ISFPs tend to hide that side of themselves away except in situations where they believe it's necessary to protect their internal selves from similarly aggressive behavior from others. Nonetheless, when a situation becomes seriously threatening, if something is just too obscenely wrong or cruel or indecent to allow, Se's anger may trigger an even worse response from the far less comfortable Te. When the situation has gotten so bad that he's no longer content to respond to it through his normal instinctive sensory reaction, he must actually stop to deliberately plan and strategize an effective response for rearranging resources (mostly human resources, since that is what he prefers to work with) according to some external law or measurable standard that may stomp all over whatever others feel as individuals is important to the situation at hand. If you force Te out of an ISFP, it typically means you've done something he finds so unacceptable that he has to disrupt his natural flow of harmonious action and reaction in order to get something extremely threatening under control--and that's really not something he wants to do often.

Since this response is something he normally despises in others, seeing it from himself creates feelings of hypocrisy and the resultant guilt tends to generate a very negative association with any sort of Te usage at all. It takes a long time and a lot of experience for the ISFP to learn to communicate his grievances calmly and productively enough to lead a group effectively while balancing the competing goals of respecting everyone's individuality and simultaneously generating measurable results. Sometimes the two goals conflict and a decision has to be made--the generally idealistic and amiable ISFP may have serious difficulty putting his foot down on anything or standing up for his own viewpoint, even when others are actually taking advantage of his natural kindness and patience. Since they know they tend to be unable to control themselves when this sort of situation arises, they do their best to simply avoid confrontations until they've learned to develop a sort of detached diplomacy, by which they can comfortably voice their concerns--and even criticisms--without sounding too harsh for their own standards or letting their feelings boil over and exaggerate the criticisms being offered.

Eventually Fi, Se, Ni and Te should balance out into a very calm and understanding individual who knows how to apply just the right touch of administrative control without stepping on anyone's toes or allowing any disputes to turn from productive exchanges of ideas into hostile personal attacks. As he learns that sometimes personal feelings have to be sacrificed--or at least delayed temporarily--for the sake of moving forward with more widespread goals, his worldview will naturally right itself and come to broaden its understanding of harmonious, fair and balanced decision-making. Armed with a healthy sense of skepticism and concern for practicality, the well-balanced ISFP will find his goals and ideals aligning more closely with the immediacy of physical reality than he ever thought possible.

ISTP, or Introverted Sensing Thinking Perceiver, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Ti, Se, Ni, Fe}.

 Dominant: Introverted Thinking (Ti)

"Above all, I like to maintain a consistent outlook that fits well with the things I like to do and the way I like to do them. I'll stay out of your way and, as long as I offer you that courtesy, I expect the same in return. I like to work with things where I can figure out the best approach myself and then tweak and adjust the pieces and see or hear or smell an immediate change or improvement. If something isn't doing what I want it to, I need to be able to get my hands on it, figure out what makes it tick, and rebuild it how I want to without having to worry about it making sense to anyone else or getting approval from how they'd do it. More than anything, it's important that we let each other have the freedom to do what we want, when we want to--if I don't see that it's going to have any real impact or I don't think it makes any practical sense, I'm not going to do it."

ISTP is an often poorly understood type that embodies a number of seemingly contradictory characteristics and seems to confuse a lot of people. It's been suggested by some that ISTPs are so different from INTPs that they should not be seen as even having the same dominant function at all--but I contend that there quite a number of similarities between the two in principle, even if the outward expressions of these principles are approached in very different ways.

Above all, dominant Ti values a highly refined sense of universal correctness, fairness, and internal consistency. While ISTPs may not make this belief as overtly obvious as their oft-argumentative INTP cousins, they ultimately believe that fair is fair and there's no getting around the idea that some things are inherently more fair, more consistent, and more reasonable than others. The thing that makes this difficult to discern is that ISTPs are, by far, the least interested in debate of all four xxTP types. They'd much rather actively demonstrate their principles and ideals through concrete action than spend time sitting around trying to convince other people that they're right. While they may easily grasp the reasoning behind various abstract representations of logical reasoning (especially when tertiary Ni is developed), they simply don't see any reason to talk about it when they could be creating, building, or participating in something that generates realistically tangible representations of the structural and symmetrical relationships that fascinate their sense of global systemic consistency.

Inconsistent reasoning and poor logic irritate the ISTP just as much as they do the INTP; the ISTP is simply much less concerned with using abstracted hypothetical explanation to demonstrate why. Actions speak louder than words. Why should he bother with empty words and arguments when he can simply show you demonstrably what it is that represents the personal sense of structural completeness around which his values are centered?

Fiercely independent, resourceful, and self-reliant, ISTPs will tend to disregard or ignore outright any rule, law, or external expectation that doesn't fit their internal set of principles regarding what's inherently fair and reasonable. They are characteristically skeptical of any external attempt to compel them to behave in any particular way, as they feel that often the people designing and imposing these rules are neither logically-minded nor genuinely experienced in the areas of life that their frivolous rules and laws will impact most. Very few things upset the ISTP's core sense of fairness more than unreasonable attempts to restrict his freedom of action or impose the will of others upon his own.

Like most Ti types, ISTPs tend to have an interest in systems and the relationships and frameworks that make them fit together the way they do. They will pour extraordinary amounts of time into the study of these systems, but rarely through book study, never without hands-on experience, and not necessarily because they accomplish any particular goals--mostly just because internalizing and possessing complete understanding of all the variables that make up a complete system is inherently satisfying on its own.

 Auxiliary: Extroverted Sensation (Se)

While INTPs will tend to apply Ti's structural curiosity to more hypothetical or theoretical systems like higher mathematics, philosophy, or programming, the ISTP's dominant Ti tends to filter through Se to produce an interest in physical and mechanical systems that can be observed, experienced, and demonstrated through tangible physical processes. ISTPs are fascinated by how things work, and they want to be able to hurl themselves head-on into the full experience of how those things work by getting their hands on them and associating present-moment physical sensations (Se) with an ever-growing sense of universal truth (Ti) about how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. They tend to specialize in areas where they can use their keen present-tense awareness of sensory cues to bolster their natural ability to deconstruct and solve structural puzzles: ISTPs are often involved with auto mechanics, building/repairing electronics, designing and building architecture, performing or recording music, and so on--anything where they can get their hands on it and figure out for themselves how it works, then use that to make it do something interesting or exciting.

In addition to this, Se tends to promote an interest in the physically thrilling, high-adrenaline activities often recognized as a calling card of SP types. Indeed, ISTPs seem to take great satisfaction in understanding the variables that relate their quick sensory responsiveness to the underlying structure of the tangible, physical world around them, to the art of kinetic movement itself and how it creates reactions from the external sensory environment. It's easy to see why so many of them enjoy building and working on cars/motorcycles/aircraft, audio/visual equipment, guns/swords and other weapons, or musical instruments--these are the very objects that grant them the exciting experiences (and accompanying opportunities to practice their sensory responsiveness) that make them feel most excited and imminently alive.

But Se also serves another very important purpose: Connecting the ISTP to a real sense of what will impact other people's tastes and impressions in an immediately recognizable and universally understandable way. Well-balanced ISTPs are almost invariably "the cool guy/girl" in their social groups--they know where to be, what to wear, what to say, and how to say it; more importantly, they are confident enough in their natural talent and adaptability in these areas that, unlike ESTPs, they are keenly aware of how little they actually have to say in order to maintain that impression.

The peculiar relationship between Ti's desire for obscure systemic knowledge and Se's desire to maintain an image of smooth, nonchalant, effortless awareness of what's current and desirable leads to a rather fascinating conflict for many ISTPs: Constantly caught between "Ti nerdy" and "Se cool", they straddle the line between different worlds.

One of my favorite of examples of this phenomenon comes from the short-lived TV series Freaks and Geeks, where James Franco's ISTP character, Daniel Desario, is forced to join his high school's AV Club as punishment for pulling the fire alarm to get out of taking a test. At first he is angry about the news: AV Club? Isn't that a bunch of nerds? Oh God, nobody can possibly keep thinking I'm cool if I'm stuck doing this kind of boring crap (Se)! But later in the episode, another character sneaks into the AV room after hours and discovers Daniel in the back with the movie projector, poring over a schematic diagram of its functions and experimenting (hands-on, of course) with how it works. No matter how uncool Se may say AV Club is, he can't escape Ti's fascination with the inner workings of a complex mechanical system.

As ISTPs develop increasingly stronger Se, their awareness of others' immediate impressions of them combines with an uncanny knack for reading body language to grant them a surprisingly proficient awareness of the motivations of others. While they may not be able to expressly articulate what another person is thinking or planning, they often show exceptional talent with "gut feelings" that someone is not genuine, or is dishonest, or not confident, or hiding something. As a case in point, Doyle Brunson (that old guy with the cowboy hat you see playing poker on TV), often credited as "The Godfather of Poker", seems almost certainly ISTP in his exceptional command of body language and the astounding accuracy of his instinctive assessments of opponents at the live poker table.

On the downside, ISTPs can suffer anger issues with people they see as illogical or wrong-headed, and Se may lead them to physically demonstrate this anger through direct threats of physical violence, or worse--actually following through with them. Because the ISTP needs to be building his own understanding in order to continue with an activity, once he feels he is no longer learning or experiencing anything of value, he may become highly unreliable and abruptly drop out of projects or leave important obligations unfulfilled. The ISTP's polarized energy level may shift wildly from extreme excitement/frenzied action over a new and exciting activity to lengthy periods of non-productive burnout and back again, which can make her seem totally inert to outsiders who have not yet witnessed her in the active, excited phase.

This may lead to a tendency to drop people, things, groups, and interests as soon as they cease to generate immediate fulfillment--and as the ISTP is fundamentally introverted, he may not care at all how others perceive this inconsistent dedication/difficulty with commitment and may seem to abruptly disappear from all areas of life for weeks or months at a time, before randomly showing up and jumping back in as if nothing had ever happened. Most of my ISTP acquaintances are people that I see frequently for several months, and then not at all for several more--I've come to realize they don't mean any offense; it's just the way their cycle works.

 Tertiary: Introverted iNtuition (Ni)

Interestingly, despite their (somewhat accurate) reputation as apathetic loners, ISTPs typically feel strongly enough about their principles that they may even resort to vigilante justice in order to set things right with the world when legitimate establishments of law enforcement have failed to produce a just or consistent result. They're typically quite mindful of not stepping on other people's toes, but if you step on theirs, be prepared for a swift and unexpected backlash. Somewhat like INFJs, who share all of the same function attitudes, ISTPs in the grip of Ti+Ni may fantasize about using their superior strength and physical prowess (Se) to take revenge on people who unjustly bring harm to the innocent. "Eye for an eye" is often seen as the purest and most physically real affirmation of the sense of justice that factors so heavily into the ISTP's personal value judgments.

When undeveloped, tertiary Ni most frequently manifests itself in terms of semi-paranoid distrust of "the man" or of authority figures or anyone who may have the power to force the ISTP into any situation or role from which he does not have the option to escape when he wants to. This kind of cynicism may even lead the ISTP to claim some sort of supernatural foresight; he may doggedly insist that he "just knows" something to be the case despite total inability to explain why or display any physical evidence thereof. He may come to believe anything he does is simply playing into exactly what some unseen, evil "puppet master" of sorts wants him to do, and thus may insist that the situation is hopeless because he already knows how it's all going to end up.

 When applied more positively in a more developed state, tertiary Ni should bolster the ISTP's natural fluency with sensory cues by giving him deeper insight into the symbolic or suggestive meaning of the constant flow of outward sensory information he is normally attuned to. Rather than simply note what is and move on to noting something else that is, he will begin to consider the assumptions inherent in the set of rules he assumes must govern the way he interprets and evaluates that information, which, in time, will grant his "gut instincts" far more substantial meaning and accuracy by linking them to a deliberate purpose with much more far-reaching implications.

Ni should ideally help the ISTP to feel even more completely free: she will realize she can adapt not only her present actions, but also her entire outlook and attitude according to whatever the immediacy of the moment demands: nothing can ever shake her composure because she can simply change her mindset to fit her surroundings.

When Se is poorly developed, and a TiNi loop results, the ISTP loses all desire to connect or exchange information with others in any meaningful way. He becomes extraordinarily self-centered, acting out his subconscious Se desires through increasingly impulsive (and possibly even dangerous or violent) outbursts, insistent that he is the only one who "has it all figured out", that all the small-minded fools surrounding him are running a pointless rat race for nothing, and that he does not and should not ever have anything to prove to such unworthy and insignificant creatures.

He may delve further and further into bitter cynicism and conspiracy theorist behavior, as Ni develops increasingly outlandish interpretations to justify Ti's all-important desire to view the self as the only remaining bastion of consistency and truth in a purposeless world that cares for neither. Nihilism and hopelessness invariably result.

Ultimately, tertiary Ni should grant the well-balanced ISTP a unique sense of worldly wisdom. Already generally subdued by nature, his calm, quiet confidence will be nearly unshakable, as he will find the ability to separate himself from the tribulations of everyday problems enough to realize that eventually, everything is going to be fine, so we may as well just focus on dealing with what's in front of us and trust that everything else will fall into place the way it's supposed to. Development of tertiary Ni often coincides with a time in the ISTP's life where he retreats into a period of serious self-reflection and emerges with a far more calm and stable sense of philosophic purpose and global awareness.

 Inferior: Extroverted Feeling (Fe)

As the weakest point in the ISTP's cognitive hierarchy, Fe presents some substantial issues for the "lone wolf" persona in which he so often finds himself entrenched. Insistent on figuring things out for himself and living life his own way, the ISTP is prone to ignoring his emotional and interpersonal needs as long as he can possibly get away with it. He may become increasingly stressed as he realizes that without some form of permanency or obligation, some sense of connectedness to a group or purpose larger than himself and his own personal needs and desires, he feels as though his life is simply running in circles and never reaching any meaningful conclusions.

Inferior F types (IxTP, ExTJ) tend, by nature, to be utterly clueless when it comes to expressing or even acknowledging their emotional needs, and may resort to displaying them through rather bizarre, confusing, and even childish behaviors. For most ISTPs, Se serves as the only comfortable link to the external world, the only way they understand how to bridge the gap between their internal ideals and the expectations and aesthetics of others. Thus, Fe is often expressed in a way that becomes slanted by Se's tendencies: ISTPs care a lot more about their family and friends than they are able to express verbally, and since actions speak louder than words, in moments of extreme stress, they may demonstrate their cultural and familial obligations by physically attacking or forcibly removing anyone or anything which threatens the sense of moral fiber upon which their families, social groups, or communities are founded.

This may simultaneously impress and disturb others, as friends and family are often surprised to see that the ISTP even cares enough about them to do anything protective in the first place, but also upset that s/he chooses such directly physical means of expressing the importance of his relationship to them. The ISTP may often be seen as emotionally unaware and even incapable of emotional expression, and while she may resent this suggestion, she often does little to nothing to counteract it until the perfect moment arises: in a flash of daring bravado, a selfless act of unexpected chivalry or intense but unexpressed loyalty will allow the ISTP to release the build-up of subconscious tension and guilt over her insensitivity to the collective needs and ethical expectations of her loved ones. She simply cannot respond to or consciously acknowledge these needs easily because they seem to threaten the sense of individually-defined identity and freedom that she holds so dearly.

The central conflict for ISTPs struggling with inferior Fe is their insistence upon absolute personal freedom at all times, and the seemingly disingenuous nature of participating in familial or cultural ritual when dominant Ti can't see any reasonable or logical purpose for it. Accepting objectively derived concepts of morality or interpersonal obligation threatens the prized ability to change or escape any undesired situation on a moment's notice. The ISTP feels threatened by expectations of others upon him to behave in ways he does not find reasonable; however, he must confront the fact that he does require some relationships with others to feel completely fulfilled, and that eventually most people will tire of his simultaneous expectations to be accommodated and refusal to accommodate their needs in return.

Again, it's most important to remember that for ISTPs, actions speak louder than words. Expecting them to verbalize their feelings on a regular basis is likely to meet with condescension and resentment; however, leaving them enough space to do as they please will almost invariably produce enough appreciation that, in time, their occasional shows of good faith will develop into a more complete awareness of the needs of their friends and family, as they will gradually realize that coming to collective moral agreements for defining and strengthening interpersonal bonds actually makes all the logical sense in the world.

Learning to accept and embrace some degree of cultural expectations will grant the ISTP both a more objective method of self-evaluation, and a much more balanced sense of consistent reliability. (It also doesn't hurt that, as they get older and social expectations change, accepting more responsibility actually makes them look a lot cooler and more aware of external reality!)

ESFP, or Extroverted Sensing Feeling Perceiver, is a label borrowed from MBTI nomenclature and now applied to the Jungian Cognitive Function set {Se, Fi, Te, Ni}.

 Dominant: Extroverted Sensation (Se)

"I'm the kind of person that feels most at home when I can get involved in a lot of different things, in a really hands-on way that connects me to lots of new people and situations and opportunities to explore. I tend to make a lot of friends wherever I go; somehow, people always seem to appreciate my charisma and my natural talents in lots of different areas. If I can get my hands on it and make a real impact or observable difference, it's probably something I'll be good at. I have to be engaged with my surroundings nearly all of the time--I think it's really important to be aware of what's going on around you, because something unexpected could happen at any time, and often that something will demand an immediate response. I don't tend to spend a lot of time on calculated preparation, but nonetheless I feel prepared to deal with anything because I'm so naturally adaptable and ready to respond to anything and everything as it happens. I think it's important not to take life too seriously or let anything slow you down--if I stop actively engaging the world around me, I'll lose my drive and enthusiasm, and I really dislike getting bored or running out of projects to work on. Some people need to learn to relax and just take life one day at a time--to pay attention to what's really happening, instead of trying to read too much into things. If you don't have real people and real connections to involve yourself in, how can you really live life to the fullest?"

Let's begin by dispelling some stereotypes, by explaining what ESFPs are not: ESFPs are not mindless party-mongers. While they are known for their vaunted people skills and personal charm, their psychological motivations run deeper than most type profiles and common renderings of the SeFi function hierarchy give them credit for. As Se dominants, ESFPs are extremely aware of the value of first impressions. Since their dominant attitude encourages emphasis on the immediate sensory impact of the physical world surrounding them, they're generally aware more than most of the inherent assumptions and interpretations the human mind tends to make based on the first sensory impression it's exposed to in any given situation. Continually vigilant of these impressions and the way they impact people and interpersonal interactions, ESFPs tend to place high value on presentation and style.

As with all extroverted functions, dominant Se depends upon objective, externally derived information (frequently involving other people) to orient its perceptions according to the collective perceptions of others. Who exactly those others are will depend on the particular ESFP and his idea of what groups of people are worth making an impression upon. It's worth noting that the common stereotype that ESFPs are always "trendy" is somewhat misleading: while this idea would imply that all ESFPs always keep up with the collective trends of popular culture at large, many do not. The only constant for dominant Se is a concerted effort to keep up with whatever will produce the most memorable and effective sensory impact: it just so happens that, in many cases, popular culture serves as a useful way to accomplish this goal in reference to large groups of people. But it's also important to realize that many ESFPs do not pay attention to or value popular culture in general, at least not for its own sake--their perceptual standards simply reference those of whatever groups of people they happen to consider interesting or worthwhile. One ESFP may find another ESFP's approach utterly boring and ineffective, based on differences in the perceptual preferences of their respective social and personal groups.

Even though ESFPs are often stereotyped as "performers", dominant Se may lead to all sorts of different "performances" even well outside the commonly expected manifestations of that practice or idea. Everything depends on the audience and what it wants to see, hear, or feel: Se is the soul of the audience, its perceptual expectations and responses, and our responses to them. ESFPs tend to see the world as a continually unfolding set of constant opportunities to take action and create observable change. They look around, they see an opportunity, and they act as soon as that opportunity presents itself. If nothing else, ESFPs know how to play to a crowd, adjusting their appearances and perceptual approaches to whatever it is that that crowd expects.

It's difficult to overstate how important continual action is to the ESFP's psychological needs. They frequently reference body language--especially eye contact--as a vital benchmark upon which honesty and integrity are won and lost. The ESFP must be interacting with her physical environments as often as possible, because she must collect as many different variants of new sensory information as she can find. Remarkable hands-on resourcefulness gives rise early on to boredom and routine's life-long branding as hated enemies of dominant Se's overwhelming desire for constant and consistent new experience. To restate a cliché (which is actually true to a certain extent), no one lives in moment--truly in the moment--more than an Se dominant. In Se's philosophy, the more we distract ourselves with imaginary second-guessing and time-consuming hypothetical analysis, the more we hinder our ability to direct our full attention to the imminent reality of the present moment. And if we're not paying attention to the reality of the present moment, we're surely missing whatever new information should be granting us the cues and hints that will lead us to stumble upon our next move--ESFPs rarely prefer to stay in any one place for too long.

 Auxiliary: Introverted Feeling (Fi)

"The image is one thing and the human being is another. It's very hard to live up to an image--I'll put it that way."

--Elvis Presley, ESFP

As with all EP types, auxiliary Ji (in this case Fi) imbues the ESFP's character with a sense of personal purpose and integrity, with a conscientious concern for the well-being of others, and a sense of purpose and identity amidst the chaos of constant change and exploration. Most at home in the heat of the moment, young ESFPs may have difficulty slowing down and soul-searching long enough to show any meaningful degree of self-reflection or evaluation. When they do, they almost invariably describe a sense of heartfelt empathy with the needs and feelings of others. Development of Fi allows the ESFP's natural ability to adjust to the expectations of his audiences to be uplifted and stabilized by a personalized vision and unique understanding of the universal needs of all living creatures, spanning the physical, spiritual, and emotional. ESFPs who command Fi will know where they're coming from, where they're going, and why--the personalized ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic vision granted by the auxiliary function will remind dominant Se of the real purpose of its endless search for new experiences: personal growth and development.

It's easy to see how many ESFPs become involved in creative pursuits--and that's not limited to just the arts. Any method by which they can involve themselves directly in the creation of something that reflects the reality around them, and interacts with and affects their perceptions and the perceptions of others, will likely be viewed in a positive light. The key is finding a personalized representation (Fi) of real events occurring in real life, affecting real people in tangible ways (Se). In art, ESFPs find both an immediately stimulating sensory impression and a hint of the weightier and more important personal values by which they will eventually learn to navigate their own sense of virtue and self-evaluation. Fi should ideally lead ESFPs to hold themselves up to the light of the truth, to keep themselves grounded by an unerring sense of private moral rectitude and widespread good will toward life in general: ESFPs will tend to treat most people as good friends until given an explicit reason not to, and it's difficult for most to resist their upbeat attitudes and straightforward, earnest openness.

If developed poorly, it can be difficult for the ESFP to harness Fi in a genuinely empathetic way. He may neglect concern for the emotional and spiritual needs of others in favor of ensuring that he fills his own quota for new experiential input: more than one ESFP has justified his constant (and potentially excessive) need for high stimulation as a simple expression of his individuality, insisting that others respect his right to behave as he pleases or risk threatening his self-experience. This can and does cause a variety of arguments with the ESFP's close friends and family: Where does my right to individual freedom end, and my obligation to the needs of others begin? While it is true that ESFPs must continue engaging themselves with new experiences in order to feel fulfilled, too much emphasis on dominant Se with not enough on auxiliary Fi can result in crude, directionless hedonism. With so much new information of so many different varieties constantly entering the cognitive sphere, ESFPs (much like all EP types) must be cognizant of taking time out to analyze their experiences in depth (via Fi) in order to grant coherent meaning or value to any of them. Left to its own devices, dominant Se will explore to the ends of the Earth, but never retain the importance of the many life lessons it happens upon in the process.

When balanced properly, Fi should provide the ESFP with a sense of personal vision and deeper understanding of her mission and purpose in life. Although her externalized creations often seek to represent physical reality in her own subjective terms, they never quite match the internalized sense of aesthetic and spiritual perfection that Fi leads her to continue seeking throughout her entire life. The more Fi is able to provide subjective ideals for Se to translate into tangible representations of the ESFP's identity, the more it will strike him that he must reflect and further and refine his own sense of self, his own idea of value and hierarchy of priorities. Fi provides, above all, a personalized counterweight to Se's constant attention to the outward expectations of whoever the ESFP may find himself "performing" for nearly every day of his life.

 Tertiary: Extroverted Thinking (Te)

Much like in their ENFP cousins, tertiary Te will ideally enter the cognitive picture to take on the role of adding externalized order and structure to the oft-disjointed and hectic world of the active ESFP. When balanced in order (assuming Se and Fi are differentiated and performing optimally), Te should strike the healthy ESFP as a somewhat difficult but necessary mindset to be able to access when the time comes for decisive direction, for the setting aside of personal sentiments in favor of the completion of a grander and more important goal. Contrary to popular stereotypes, tertiary Te actually assists in granting ESFPs their status as one of the most empirically-oriented types. Since Se and Te are the function attitudes most focused on direct action, the combination of the two can show outsiders a surprisingly aggressive driving force in the process of goal-setting and completion: while Se demands directly observable action, Te insists on consistent and predictable measures of progress and development. When Te is integrated effectively, the ESFP will not hesitate to take whatever action he needs to get the project back on schedule, nose to the grindstone. His desire for continual navigation of new challenges never subsides; however, proper development of the tertiary function will grant a sense of urgency and attention to objective detail that may seem to utterly contradict his usual disregard for formal rules and regulations.

Unfortunately, premature reliance on Te to the exclusion of the natural auxiliary Fi will result in some peculiar problems for the young ESFP. Already heavily focused on the objective expectations of others in terms of perceptual impact, the SeTe loop ESFP may become overly stressed and unable to genuinely relax. Because his only way of taking a "break" from the constant high stimulation of Se is to indulge in the constant high-priority organizing and correcting of Te, he may forget almost entirely to spend time reconsidering any of his decisions. The more Se demands immediate action and stimulation, the less patience Te maintains for anything deemed off topic or not imminently useful. Torn between the sensory expectations of those he finds interesting and the procedural expectations of those he finds knowledgeable and effective, the ESFP lacking Fi may become so lost in aggressive pursuit of his desires that he loses sight of why he really desires them in the first place.

Unable to satisfy all of the objective expectations he sees coming at him from all angles, the ESFP may wear himself out working too hard to ensure that everyone likes him, or considers his contributions worthwhile. If threatened or convinced that he is being ignored or undervalued, the ESFP in Te mode may even occasionally become territorially aggressive, insistent that every detail of every one of his preferred methods be followed to the letter--or else. The healthy presence of auxiliary Fi seems to be the primary mitigating factor in drawing the fine line between healthy and unhealthy Te use in the ESFP. Given time for the more important functions to develop first, tertiary Te should serve as a helpful reminder that some form of externalized structure must be had at some point, and that some attention must eventually be paid to the knowledge of people who know the subject in question.

As Te grows and develops into an important and regularly consulted part of the ESFP's cognition, her tendency to lose herself entirely in the immediately pleasurable sensations of reality will be tempered by a focus on dutiful consistency and objective reliability. Her personal ethics will come to balance themselves against the impending sense of immediacy that something measurable and empirically valid be done--drawn to the sensory stimulant properties of the object, the ESFP will learn to apply to his desire for exploration to measurable completion of legitimate, working objectives. He will find that he can apply his abilities to impact others toward useful and meaningful career goals, that his natural talents are valuable for many reasons beyond their inherent accessibility and sensory enjoyment. As much as Se would love to learn everything purely through hands-on experimentation, Te provides a vital balancing focus on the established methodology and evaluative standards of authoritative knowledge.

 Inferior: Introverted iNtuition (Ni)

The peculiar effects of Ni as an inferior function provide one of (in my opinion) the more fascinating parts of the ESFP's cognition. Directly at odds with dominant Se's broad focus on the vast quantity of different sensory information immediately available around us, inferior Ni seems to flood the ESFP's cognition with all manner of esoteric (and often incoherent) symbols of unstated and covert interpretations. First encounters with this poorly developed inferior attitude can be unsettling at best: forced to reconsider the true meaning of everything they've always seen as most obviously important, ESFPs in the grip of inferior Ni may feel everything they know is slipping out from under them. The unconscious world of subjective perceptual significance threatens the sense of empirical observability by which dominant Se defines its primary worldview.

In terms of practical manifestations, inferior Ni tends to lend itself to bizarre and unfounded suspicions of others, even close friends and family. Since all possible perceptual angles are now on the table, dominant Se must stay aware and responsive to its surroundings, even if that means taking on and connecting with the most outlandish or improbable suggestions and possibilities regarding the intentions and motivations of the people around him. It's not entirely uncommon to see unfounded accusations, perceptions of disloyalty, delusions of grand significance, and occasionally even conspiracy theories (see Glenn Beck) pour out from the stressed ESFP as he becomes increasingly convinced he possesses some sort of supernatural insight, one which renders the directly observable and quantitative evidence upon which he normally relies entirely obsolete. As inferior Ni takes over, the ESFP will feel compelled to peer into every nook and cranny for something he's missed--some secret interpretive value that will change the way he sees everything around him. Unfortunately, this is typically done in such a juvenile and unrefined manner that it tends to result in assumptions that are implausible at best (and paranoid at worst.)

Like all inferior functions, inferior Ni is most commonly forced out by situations in which the dominant function finds itself unable to handle the problem or complete the task at hand. It tends to surface when ESFPs lose faith in their ability to adapt to and handle their surroundings using their instinctive understanding of physical reality and literal surface impressions. Naturally distrustful of unspoken (and thus unobservable) information, they may become convinced that the only solution involves some sort of nefarious plot to obscure the truth or the real significance from themselves or their loved ones. Convinced that the truth can't be empirically observed but simultaneously painfully aware of his own inability to process information outside an empirically observable context, the ESFP may be forced to confront outlandish, cynical, and even totally unsubstantiated hunches or "gut feelings" about the true reality of the events unfolding around him. Determined to uncover the secret meaning that has been deliberately withheld from him (which is almost invariably perceived as a personal attack), the ESFP struggling with inferior Ni may seize onto strange and improbable accusations and implications, convinced that he must ignore the world of physical reality in which he most naturally thrives in order to see any genuine significance in it.

On the other hand, inferior Ni may be gradually developed and applied positively as the ESFP matures. While most internal reflection will be handled by Fi, occasionally the self-awareness of subjective perceptual expectations provided by inferior Ni will help grant the ESFP a more balanced impression of the world and a more reasoned organizational hierarchy of his priorities. It should help to produce the realization that sometimes there actually is some value in withholding judgment, in reconsidering the reliability of surface impressions, and even in looking for meaning that isn't even directly suggested by the concrete information available. Development of inferior Ni (in conjunction with the higher functions) should lead ESFPs toward more fulfilling lives, replete with the excited energy of continual active exploration, but offset and harmonized by the occasional ability to trust gut feelings about the intangibles in life with which we cannot directly interact. As this balance improves and gains consistency, the ESFP will bring himself both the capability to build and maintain the high volume of personal contact and activity upon which he thrives, and the wisdom to know when to back off and reconsider--the difference this can make will be subtle, but powerful and influential for years to come.