ENFJ

You Are an Extraverted Feeling Type

Of all the general personality types, yours is the most outgoing and friendly. Your chief concern in life is other people, and fostering harmony and cooperation, between yourself and others and among others. Warm personal interactions—strokes of approval and appreciation—keep you going in life.

You are more than willing to do your share in relationships. You try, always, to be friendly, sympathetic, cooperative and tactful. You make a consistent effort to say and do the right thing—so much so that conforming to others' expectations (or your notion of what others expect) is occasionally a problem for you.

You have strong ideals and a potent sense of loyalty, whether to an employer, a school, a hometown, or a favourite cause. One thing is certain: you do tend to idealize the people and things you value, and you like to be held in similarly high esteem.

You are a judging type, and disorganized situations strike you as chaotic.

You are distinctly uncomfortable when you're obliged to function without a schedule, a plan, or a clear idea of the objectives to be achieved.

If need be, you'll provide the necessary direction, but you don't insist on setting all the rules yourself. You accept authority. You mind your p's and q's, respect your should's and should not's, and it seems reasonable to you that the rest of the world should do likewise. You're patient and conscientious. You make a concerted effort to stick to a job until it's finished, and you believe it's important to pay attention to detail. Perhaps more significantly, you base your personal habits on a feeling of obligation to the task, your profession, your friends, family and co-workers, or to the institution itself.

You don't mind letting others know what your values are, and—given the authority—you may insist that others follow your code and your standards.

You tend to be a bit hard on yourself. When there's a discrepancy between your own performance and your ideal behavior, you struggle against guilt feelings which other personality types can't fathom. Whatever tendency you may have to be a bit childlike and flighty—to let a job sit unfinished or imperfectly done—clashes painfully with your feeling/judging characteristic.

The combination of feeling and judgment is also the fertile soil upon which righteous indignation flowers. You may find it helpful to temper your strong feeling with a less emotional thinking approach to judgment and to balance your judgment with more open-minded perception.

Without some attention to your perceptive abilities, you may find yourself fighting a never-ending battle against jumping to conclusions or acting— always with the very best intentions—upon poorly founded assumptions.

Your desire to please others is so strong that you may occasionally gallop off on some noble mission you think you're undertaking on someone else's behalf, only to discover that your gesture isn't needed, and may, in fact, be quite unappreciated. Then, look out! Your feelings get hurt easily, and you may have been known to pout in such situations.

Try to remember to ask people what they want before you undertake projects or make sacrifices for them. Then your good deeds will hit their proper target. Otherwise, it may be important for you to remind yourself constantly to take full responsibility for your own behavior—especially when you take action with the intention of pleasing other people.

Pleasing others matters to you so much that you have a hard time taking criticism as anything but personal. When faced with an appraisal of your work or ability that frankly hurts, you may try to avoid the issue. It's nearly impossible for you to look at any criticism objectively, and that shortcoming limits your ability to learn from mistakes and to avoid making the same error next time around.

Again, it's that fateful pairing of feeling and judgment causing problems. Use your thinking ability to analyze criticism, weigh its value, and apply it to your future behavior. Use your perceptive ability to acknowledge that you might, in fact, improve your performance with help.

Your Auxiliary Process

As an extravert your strongest process—feeling—rules your judgment, and that is the part of you the world most closely identifies as "your personality." But extraverts have an introverted side, too, and, in your case, intuition marks your inner world of thoughts and ideas and guides your perception.

Let's consider how this intuitive preference interacts with your other personality features to shape your identity.

As an intuitive, you are always scanning the horizon for the possibilities in any situation, rather than keeping your eyes on the road ahead. That characteristic arms you well to be a discoverer, a visionary, but always with an eye toward the application of ideas to the world of people.

The gift of gab that comes naturally with your preference for feeling combines well with your intuitive ability and your natural extraversion. Your skill as a persuasive communicator is more likely to be dedicated to speech than to writing, but, in any case, you can use it to good advantage in your professional and private life.

The combination of intuition with feeling forms the very cornerstone of your personality: a temperament we call the EMPATHIST.

Taken together, intuition and feeling mold the idealist and truth-seeker, one whose main quest in life is directed toward achieving personal peace and integration. A goal for your personality type is acceptance, but more than that: acceptance as you really are—no mask, no pretense, no facade. Being genuine and sincere is what matters to you. Relationships are a crucial focus for the EMPATHIST. You seek to understand others deeply and to have that understanding reciprocated with loving acceptance. You invest your total self—time, energy, patience and sensitivity—in relationships. You often are disappointed, for few understand your concept of knowing another, and fewer still are capable of achieving the kind of interpersonal connection you want.

Significance of self, work, and relationships is the key to understanding the personality of the intuitive-feeling temperament.

In a judging-type extravert, the intuitive-feeling temperament expresses itself uniquely.

You are a natural leader, and you're at your best when your leadership is direct, face-to-face. In a formal or informal group, whether working or playing, you have the ability to take charge in a charming way.

Having any part of your life at loose ends may be so uncomfortable for you that you're willing to take on the chores of planning and programming, assigning tasks, developing projects and delegating responsibilities.

If someone else is in charge, you're perfectly comfortable following, helping and cooperating. You enjoy cooperative ventures, and you're at your best when you're working in a group.

You are good at organizing people to get things done—and keeping everyone happy at the same time! You keep in touch with the climate of feeling, foster cooperation and harmony, and you're not shy about making suggestions when there are decisions to be made.

You know the value of compromise and accommodation, admiration and appreciation, and you practice these skills with artistry. When you're forced to deal with thinker-types who don't share your sensitivity or reflexive diplomacy, you are probably uncomfortable.

When you're sufficiently annoyed, you may try to point out their shortcomings to them. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as you're in the company of more feelers than thinkers. If you're in the minority, you may find yourself labelled emotional and hypersensitive by the thinker-type majority. You go out of your way to make sure that human needs receive attention. You may even tend to take responsibility for others' feelings and for the emotional climate of your home, organization or office.

People know how much you care about harmony and comfort. They can sense the depth of your caring. You make it apparent that you are available to meet others' needs for sympathy and encouragement.

Compassionate folks like you are rare in the world—about five percent of the population, by some estimates—so it isn't surprising that you may often find yourself toting a heavy emotional load for many people. Do you sometimes get the feeling that everyone cries on your shoulder?

When people like you "burn out" it usually takes the form of becoming so involved in everyone's life and problems that you empathize totally and suffer vicariously. You can get strangled in a web of dependent relationships, in which more and more demand is made for your time and energy.

You have a hard time saying "No," and a harder time extricating yourself from the burden others impose on you, without feeling guilty or seeing yourself as abandoning those who need you.

Now that you understand the source of this behavior in your personality, you may be able to exercise more choice in this area to become a happier person, more in charge of your life and relationships.

You are an idealist, as are all intuitive-feeling types, but when extraversion and judging are added to the mixture, the idealism has a different wrinkle. You may feel obligated to make the ideal a reality. You take personal responsibility for the discrepancy between the status quo and the way things might be.

You give generously and work tirelessly to make things perfect: your mate, your children, your work, your home, your office. You may be taken advantage of on all fronts because, when others demand, you produce.

You are convinced that if you try hard enough, you can convert your fantasies into real life. That is a two-edged sword, for you also believe that you're at fault when perfection isn't achieved! You can be very hard on yourself. For you, the ideal is so clearly in mind that you are always a little dissatisfied with the imperfection of reality. Whether the issue is your mate, your family, your friendships, your chosen career, or your particular working situation, you are keenly aware of the "flaws" and you may feel more than a little restless at times. You can't help but wonder if the grass might not be greener elsewhere.

The Extraverted Feeling-Type in the World of Work

In the world of work, you'll find that your extraversion will arm you well to deal with both variety and action.

All other things being equal, you'll tend to work faster than your introverted co-workers. Depending on the job circumstances, that's a mixed blessing. In tasks that require quick decisions and quick action, you're supreme, but you must constantly be on guard not to act too quickly, particularly without thinking things through completely before you move. If the nature of the work itself is slow, or if it involves long-term projects, you may need to devise a few tricks to ward off boredom; otherwise, your efficiency may suffer.

You are interested in the results of your job, in getting it finished, and in comparing how other people tackle the same chore. While few people enjoy being a "small cog in the great wheel," passively performing some minor function that is swallowed up by a large complex operation, your personality type is especially distressed by losing touch with the over-all impact of your work.

Your outgoing personality prefers working with human companionship, so you may wish to think long and hard before accepting a job or work assignment which forces you to work in isolation.

Communication comes more easily to you than to your introverted associates. You're comfortable with words, and you communicate well. You may wish to consider ways to capitalize on this asset to further your career.

You value sentiment over logic, in the work place, as in all other aspects of your life. You are very sensitive to other people's feelings and needs. You praise others' accomplishments, lend a sympathetic ear to their problems, and you try to avoid being the bearer of bad news or criticism.

Your feeling side can make it difficult to be a supervisor. You care too much about being well liked and respected to be objective and impersonal in appraising others' performance on the job. Reprimanding an employee you like is painful, and the prospect of firing someone, without respect for the personal consequences to the employee's family, would be extremely difficult for you.

Even in situations which threaten your sentimental nature less directly, you may often have to battle your tendency to be tactful when the unvarnished truth is needed. Your need for acceptance may nudge you into acquiescence when your independent judgment is called for.

In an effort to get along with others, you may let your decisions be swayed by the group spirit, or by personal considerations which might better be ignored in the interests of impartiality.

You are so keenly aware of others' feelings that the ordinary politics of most business endeavours causes you anguish and concern. Your working ability—attitude as well as efficiency—can be crippled by an obvious office feud. You need harmony to work happily and well.

Your judging tendency will have a major impact on your behavior in the work place. Be aware that your personality type tends to set up psychological blinders, and that they can function both to your advantage and disadvantage.

On the one hand, you are good at filtering out extraneous information, so that you can focus on the critical issues to formulate plans, settle conflicts and wrap up deals with a minimum of delay.

On the other hand, you may restrict the flow of information too closely to what you consider to be "the essentials," and, by so doing, commit yourself too early to a solution. Worse yet, your tendency to be satisfied with yourself once you have decided on any course of action may make it impossible for you to recognise at an early stage when a mistake in judgment has occurred. It's not unusual for judging people to find it difficult to interfere with their own plans: to shift gears, to interrupt one project for a more urgent one which emerges. From time to time, this tendency may rear its head, as you fail to notice new things that need to be done, after you've already set your sights on some other objective.

Intuitive workers, such as yourself, are in their glory when the work is challenging and novel. When you're inspired, you fire up your furnaces and work with a level of energy and exuberance that staggers the imagination of your sensory-type co-workers. A new task at hand? A new technique or skill to master? No problem for you. You will find the time to tackle the most difficult problem and unravel the most complicated situation.

Then things settle down. You stifle a yawn, while your frazzled co-workers sigh with relief. While you yearn for the next crisis, they make no effort to disguise their earnest hope that routine (blessed routine) is re-established as soon as possible.

Then, one morning, sure as death, you wake up, staring blankly at the ceiling, and you know you've been stricken, once again, by the insidious dark side of the intuitive enthusiasm: boredom.

You try to fight it, and you deny it to your friends and enemies alike, but the fact is: you know you don't want to go to work. Your energy's gone, your spirit's flat, and, once again, you realise you've fallen into one of your slack periods.

Depending on the relative strength of your intuitive, feeling, and judging characteristics, you may be able to use built-in personality "checks and balances" to keep that intuition working for, not against, you. (For example, feeling-judging may keep you going by nagging: "You have to go to work! People are counting on you!")

But, maybe you can't. Maybe that intuition will cause you a little trouble from time to time. It's OK! That's part of your style, and you may as well accept it without embarrassment. You may always have a tendency to run hot and cold, up and down, just as a matter of personality.

If you understand this aspect of your personality and acknowledge it with the same acceptance you feel for the high-energy, problem-solving ability that also comes with intuition, then you may be able to devise some personal tricks to pull you out of your down-times with a bit more style and grace.

And, even if you can't modify your behavior, once you understand it as the natural "flip-side" of the part of you you love best, then maybe you can find a job that's short-project-oriented, an employer who understands your cyclic nature, and enough stable, well-grounded co-workers to cover those other segments of your personality which haunt you in the work place.

You know the parts I mean: your tendency to hop from hunch to hunch, your habit of not paying enough attention to detail-work, and your inclination to worry too little about completing projects or checking your work to be free from errors of fact.

If and when you find that job, or that employer, or those co-workers, you'll be valued for the glittering bundle of intuition you provide as a spark to the hum-drum of everyday work life. Otherwise, you may be regarded as a flighty nuisance: a judgment which shouldn't get you depressed, now that you know its origin.

You know, just because you're enlightened enough to appreciate both the "bright" and "dark" sides of your personality, that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the world will share your open acceptance. There will be times when you will have to face rejection, even open hostility, in order to remain your own best friend.

So, what career choices make sense for someone like you?

Professionally, you're happiest in work that combines face-to-face contact and human cooperation, especially if talking is part of the job.

If you find yourself in a job which doesn't involve talking—or doesn't permit some amount of socialising—you may find it a painful challenge to curb that gift of gab in order to get your work done. In any career area, you may have to pay attention to your chattiness. Brief, businesslike communication just isn't your style! Your intuitive characteristic may translate to tolerance for theory. Add to that some appetite and aptitude for formal education, and you may direct yourself toward one of several of the academic disciplines geared toward human service: teaching, counseling, medicine, the clergy.

Your intuition and feeling may combine to inspire artistic activity, whether as a career or a hobby. Art and various creative writing fields, including journalism and advertising are well populated by people with your personality profile.

You can use your gift of empathy professionally and aim for a career in drama.

In work fields demanding abstract or mathematical skills or a high degree of impersonal analysis (notably finance, accounting, commerce and technical sales work), you may find yourself continually out of step. The EMPATHIST temperament typically doesn't value cold, impersonal logic enough to thrive in such pursuits—and keep the personality intact!

Whatever field of endeavour you choose, keep in mind that your gift of organizing, motivating, leading and teaching people is not to be taken for granted. Build from your points of personal strength: verbal ability, empathy and harmony—and you'll be happiest in your working life. NF