ESFP

You Are an Extraverted Sensing Type

You see the world as it is, approach it with curiosity, observe it well, embrace it openly, and adapt to whatever life may send your way. You are flexible, spontaneous, and practical, when it comes to an experience you can process with your five senses.

As an extravert, you are effective at communicating your good-natured realism to others, and—because of your open, perceptive nature—you may earn the reputation of a diplomat or mediator. You do have a rare and valuable ability to encourage agreement and compromise, suggest solutions, but rarely try to impose your pet ideas or opinions on others, as a more judging type might do.

Being unprejudiced, accepting, considerate and "laid back" isn't the result of practiced effort on your part, even though others may look upon those tendencies as your strongest virtues. With your personality, it's just natural to behave that way, since that is the path of least resistance, and you like to take life easy.

Let others protest and campaign. Let the world's Don Quixotes tilt at windmills to their hearts' content. You're unlikely to get involved in fanciful causes.

You rarely get yourself worked up over a political or philosophical quest, and you're frankly bewildered by those dogged idealists who continually try to make the world over as they think it ought to be—in their own image. Your sensing characteristic makes you keen observer, and it endows you with a remarkable ability to integrate and deal effectively with enormous quantities of data—especially if the subject has something to do with the personal realm, since you are more interested in people than things.

When sensing combines with perception, the result is a basically optimistic, here-and-now temperament we like to call the REALIST.

The combination of sensing and perception creates a practical, spontaneous individual: one who is happiest living life as it comes along rather than walking the straight and narrow path defined by schedules, commitments, obligations, duties, rules, regulations and others' expectations of what they should do. The sensing-perceptive person must be free to experiment with life, experience it directly.

Activity makes the sensing-perceptive happy. If someone were to see you when you're at the peak of your productivity, totally absorbed by some project, an innocent observer might use words like goal-directed to describe your behavior.

Chances are, those words just wouldn't fit your real motivation. Sure, you may look goal-directed; you may look like you're practicing some skill in order to perfect it; you may look disciplined. Actually, most of the time you just do things.

That's the real secret to understanding why the sensing-perceptive combination makes great athletes, artists, craftsmen, musicians. When other personalities set out to learn how to do something complex, they have to think about distant goals: how good they'll be someday if they continue practicing, working.

Intuitive types may tend to justify what they're doing at the present by some hope or future expectation. Judging types tend to do a lot of things in their daily life because they should do them. But the sensing-perceiving person just does what needs to be done moment by moment.

The end and the means are inseparable for those with your temperament.

But people like you just do what needs to be done, moment by moment. For you the process and the product are one. The end and the means inseparable. The sensing-perceptive person plays at work, derives pleasure from the perfection of the movement, the perfection of the act, while it's still going on!

If you're like most people with your particular combination of personality traits, you can work long hours on a task. You can be tenacious and patient and persevering—that is, when you feel like doing what you're doing. But, when that "want to do it" wanes, then you may have a rough time finishing things.

You thrive on action, and you're good in a crisis. You enjoy dealing, moment by moment, with unknown situations—where the outcome is determined by your ability to apply your well-practiced skills to solve problems.

Many sensing-perceptive type people love gadgets, tools, things they can work with the hands. Machines hold a special attraction for thinker-type REALISTS. For feelers, like yourself, materials (wood, cloth, clay marble) and instruments (guitars, pianos, etc.) may take the place of machines.

Add to this love of the physical world a love for activity-for-its-own-sake, and you'll understand why people with your personality often choose jobs involving sculpting, painting, acting, dancing, throwing pots, weaving, playing musical instruments, or doing anything active that expresses the aesthetic self.

Now and then you may feel a real call of the wanderlust, especially when life settles down to boring, demanding, routine. As a sensing-perceptive, you're only comfortable when life is friendly: filled with good spirit and good times. When things get dreary, when too much anxiety clouds your horizon, when people start pressing you with too many things you have to do, you'll ignore the problems as long as possible, but eventually you'll move yourself out of the unhappy situation. You may have felt Gauguin's urge to leave everything and everyone behind and take off for Tahiti.

People with your personality do sometimes have to struggle with the ties that bind. Nonetheless, you're a good friend: loyal, fraternal, and generous with your group. Esprit de corps is the hallmark of sensing-perceptive types.

You have a keen zest for living, and you revel in the physical comforts of life: great food, nice clothes, good housing and quality entertainment. You don't mind directing your time, energy, and financial resources toward ac-quiring material possessions or buying good times. You place a high value on enjoying life, and—well-heeled or not—you'll always find recreation. It's no wonder that people genuinely like you and find your company a pleasure.

The challenge for a character like yourself is achieving some balance between the dominant perceptive side that rules your jolly, easy-going nature and your less-preferred judging ability. You must develop that capacity in order to direct that "good-time Joe" personality into areas of real accomplishment.

Learning to organize your time and developing plans and schedules to achieve reasonable goals will be well worth the effort you spend doing it. Otherwise, your flexibility may be translated into instability, and your adaptable realism can justify a life with no energy or direction toward change.

Your Auxiliary Process

As a perceptive individual, your sensory capacity guides your dominant process. Your judgment follows behind, guided by feeling, your non-dominant or auxiliary process.

When the REALIST (sensing-perceptive) temperament occurs in an extravert with feeling, the personality that results is an outgoing, sensitive, and playful person.

Your extraversion turns you toward the external environment, not inward reflection. Your sensing makes you a great observer, appreciator, sampler of that outer world. The feeling makes you mostly interested in people, rather than things or ideas. And your perception makes you open, accepting, and adaptable to whatever life sends your way.

When life gives you a choice between basing your decisions and actions on facts or feelings, your emotional side—your value system—shows through. You combine your feeling side with your other personality characteristics to greet the world with optimism, friendliness, warmth, compassion and sympathy. You are tactful and attentive to other people's needs and expectations.

You ignore bad news and refuse to let gloomy people have an effect on you. You prefer to see your impact on others as totally positive, so exerting any form of discipline is most difficult for those with your combination of traits.

You appreciate things. You may express your sense of aesthetics by developing the artist's or decorator's eye, the musician's ear, or the gourmet's appreciative palate, so make the most of your hidden abilities as a critic of the sensory sphere. If others should see you as a bit self- indulgent, consider that they may simply be jealous of your unconcealed enjoyment of life.

The key to understanding you is your relationships with others. You are a real people person. You hate to be alone. Life with you or around you is likely to be a three-ring circus, people coming and going. You have an almost insatiable appetite for companionship.

At home, that means that your mate had better be up to a lot of spontaneous socializing! At work, that means that your job had better involve working with others, if not face to face, then at least by telephone.

At the deepest interpersonal level, it means that you care so much about pleasing others that you may take on others' views for the sake of not causing trouble. You may hesitate to express your own opinions, in order not to antagonize.

Your generosity may go to excess, because you like to see yourself as a giver, and you like to make others happy. You may find yourself recruited—or seduced—by others, just because you don't like to say "No," and—more than you need your own identity—you like to get along.

These occasional pitfalls of your personality are merely the flip-side of your exceptional warmth and true enjoyment of other people. So, if you find yourself "performing" this way, from time to time, be kind to yourself and let your basic common sense guide you out of the situation. Your personality contains within it the necessary checks and balances to maximize your adaptive behaviors and minimize those that tend to get you into trouble now and then. Assertiveness—in expressing your opinions, asking that your needs be met, saying "No," when it's in your best interest, and focusing your generosity— may be a skill you need to develop, for the sake of your own happiness.

The Extraverted Sensing-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, straightforward explanations, simple and sensitive communication. You may wish to consider ways to capitalize on this asset to further your career. You trust your senses. You're rooted in the real world, not fantasy, and—in the world of work—that translates to patience with familiar tasks, familiar skills, familiar routine.

You work steadily toward your goal, and—with much greater accuracy than the intuitive sorts—you have a good idea of how long it will take to reach the conclusion of the task at hand.

While others may thrive on novelty, you are frankly uneasy with new problems until you settle on a sure way to solve them. You may lose some of your usual patience if work becomes too detailed and complicated.

Change which you see as unnecessary not only makes you uneasy, but sometimes disagreeable, as well. You have to admit that you sometimes drag your feet when someone turns the tables on you (new task, new technique, new schedule, new rules) after you were comfortably targeted on your original goal!

When you have to deal with intuitive sorts, you may find it difficult to trust their inspirations and adopt them as a basis for trying out changes. You may want to look at that resistance.

On the one hand, your well-expressed objections to their flights of fancy may help keep them from taking off—and taking you off—on joy rides that lead to nowhere. But, on the other hand, with their ideas and your ability to get things done, you may be able to accomplish great things as a team—if both of you give a little.

The perceptive in you tempers some of your sensing characteristics in the work place. Your perceptive side endows you with tolerance for diversity and with adaptability.

While your sensing side prefers predictability, it's your perceptive component that enables you to shift gears so well, switching from one assignment to another, one technique to the next, just so long as the work doesn't require a lot of decision-making.

When a task requires repeated revisions, your patient sensing side and your open perceptive side join forces to help you follow through with the necessary alterations. Without the stabilizing influence of your sensing side, your perceptive tendency may drive you to start too many changes without being asked, revising when it isn't necessary.

You'll need to be aware of this inclination. Otherwise, many of these selfstarted projects may wind up in a desk drawer, first postponed, then forgotten. Much of what you start may never reach completion.

Your perceptive quality ensures that you will always be curious, open, willing to hear all sides of an issue before deciding on a course of action. Of course, you may slip into a tendency to keep topics open excessively long. For some perceptive types, whose judgment is not developed, coming to a decision can be almost painful.

Many perceptives become masters of the delicate art of postponement.

As a perceptive you may lack patience with judging sorts when they jump to conclusions, point an accusing finger at your indecisive nature (which you generally deny or explain away!), and suggest that you're basically gullible to everyone's inputs, long after an issue should have been closed and settled.

Try to calm down when you hear those comments; try to weed out the judgmental indignation and see if your occasional critics might not have something worth considering. After all, you know that there are both positive and negative aspects correlated with every personality feature.

Let that perceptive openness lead you to personal revision when it's in your own best interests.

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 endeavors 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.

So what career direction is best for you? Your choices are diverse, and many of them are in fields which do not demand long years of formal education.

Sensing-perceptives often try to escape the schooling process before college. Education and sterile academic achievement are not particularly attractive or important for most people with your personality profile.

Actually, most people with your personality feel themselves to be somewhat out of step with the conventional educational institutions at a very early stage of schooling. The school system is simply not responsive to your learning style.

Since theories and abstract concepts are not your cup of tea, education from lectures, books and written exams strikes you as less relevant than laboratory-type experience or, better-yet, hands-on learning on the job. Given half a chance in a learning environment that really means something to you—to the way you learn best—you'll amaze everyone with the way you can master a difficult task, down to the most precise detail!

In learning as in life, people like you prefer to spend time actively: making things, fixing things, working with your hands, or otherwise expressing yourself physically.

With a foot in the door—a bootstrap entree, an apprenticeship opportunity— you may find great career success in the business world—especially if you can also capitalize on your people-oriented feeling side by choosing a career in sales, sales service, or customer relations.

You'll do well to capitalize on your sensing tendencies in choosing your work. At the very least, beware of any job that doesn't recognize the value of your realistic, here-and-now approach to life. In a job requiring intuition and thinking, you'll be frustrated. Theories, ideas and sketchy possibilities are foreign to the very core of who you are; and any reality based only on logic strikes you as sterile and unrelated to people.

Your feeling side would enjoy work in a helping career, such as nursing, physical therapy or elementary education—although sensing-perceptives tend not to last very long in the highly structured, schedule- and ruleoriented worlds of education and hospital administration (at least, not without rocking the boat!). Like many REALISTS you may have an instinctive understanding of machines and an attraction for driving, flying or working on the mechanical side of many work fields.

Carpentry, farming, horticulture, animal husbandry, diving, mining, construction and other hands-on activities are comfortable working activities for ESFPs.

Outdoor work, particularly with a social element, may be tempting: wilderness guiding, "adventure-training" or youth leadership direction.

The REALIST's attraction for adventure may express itself by drawing you into a career in the military, law enforcement or the merchant marine. Performance—whether in acting, dancing, or instrumental or vocal music— may be your ideal career: playing for a living. Competitive sports—especially team sports—may attract your energy. The tactile and kinesthetic senses may also bring you the feelings you seek: consider dance.

The most important thing to remember is to set your sights on a life and career that will satisfy the person you are—the needs you have. A "tinker-toy" approach to your personality isn't likely to be very successful—assuming you can act like a thinker and be a feeler, take a job that requires intuitivetype perception when your strength lies in sensing. Support yourself, believe in yourself and find your best place in the world.

SP