ESTP

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 any 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 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 a keen observer, and deal effectively with enormous quantities of data: facts, figures, parts and pieces—even if they are unrelated to each other! When sensing combines with perception, the result is a basically optimistic, here-and-now temperament we like to call the REALIST. Sensing plus perception creates a sampler of life, a sensation seeker: one who must be free to experiment, experience life directly. You are happiest when you can live life today, do things as the impulse arises, rather than out of commitment, obligation or duty. 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—a naive 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 is often the personality core of great athletes, artists, craftsmen and 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 future hope or expectation. Judging types tend to do a lot of things in their daily life because they should do them. 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 are 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. That doesn't mean you can't stick to a task, or can't improve that stick-to-itiveness with practice and effort, but it does take effort for you. You can set goals and commit yourself to long-term projects, but you may have to wrestle with an almost over-powering urge to move on, if life starts pressing in on you with too many commitments, too many obligations, too long a list of things to accomplish that aren't fun to do. 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. You have a keen zest for living, and you revel in the physical comforts of life: great food, nice clothes, good housing and good times. You don't mind directing your time, energy and financial resources toward acquiring material possessions and developing quality leisure time. You place a high value on enjoying life, and—well-heeled or not—you'll always find recreation. You have a child's gift for having a good time, really enjoying yourself. It's no wonder that people genuinely like you and find your company a pleasure. The challenge for a character like yourself is continually striving to achieve 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 channel that "good-time Joe" personality into areas of real accomplishment. Learning to organize your time and develop plans and schedules to achieve reasonable goals will be well worth the effort you spend doing it. Otherwise, your flexibility can be translated into instability, and your adaptable realism can justify a life with no energy or direction toward change or accomplishment. Another goal for your personality type is recognizing the value of intuition—both yours and others'. As a sensing type, it's quite natural for you to be skeptical of ideas that don't translate into observables, facts and figures, tangibles, and tried and true tactics. But, if you recognize that resistance as potentially maladaptive when new problems arise, or when new solutions to old problems are demanded, you'll improve your game-playing ability in life—and game playing is what life's all about to a sensing perceptive!

Your Auxiliary Process

As a perceptive individual, your sensory capacity guides your outer personality—your extraverted self. Your judging ability takes the back seat, guided by thinking, and it controls your inner world, your introversion. Thinking, then, is called your auxiliary process. As a thinker, you are far more likely to make your decisions on the basis of logic than feeling. This translates to respect for the intellectual process and attention toward the objective facts of any situation. Combined with your sensing-guided perception, your thinking ability will arm you well to grasp principles and comprehend theory: a valuable addition to your natural tendency to be a data-gatherer. Because you are a thinker, you have less trouble than the feeling-types in interpersonal situations calling for toughness. The sensing-perceptive person with thinking directs attention toward things more than toward people, and many folks with your personality hold a lifelong fascination for machines, toys, instruments, gadgets, gizmos, devices, tools, materials and other things you can work with your hands. Add to this love of machines the drive toward activity-for-its-own-sake, and you'll understand why people with your personality often choose jobs involving driving, flying, operating complex equipment and building. Historically, your type has been least frustrated in our society as a male animal. But now that many "males-only" active jobs in the world of machines are opening up to women, all that may change. It will be fascinating to watch what the ready availability of computers and other electronic wonders will do for future generations of sensing-perceptive types. If your hands-on spirit doesn't show up in the way you like to play! When it comes to recreation, your friends may regard you as an active person, someone who enjoys being out of doors, someone who enjoys sports—either as a participant or an observer. And, of course that makes sense within the framework of the rest of your personality. Who can deny the fact that admiring the functioning of a good machine translates into a real appreciation for the performance of a well trained body—whether yours or someone else's? Whether or not you're an athlete, the sensing-perceptive carries that mechanically inclined, physically involved, activity-for-its-own-sake characteristic into even the watching of sports. Wanting to know how things work means understanding new sports, new games, new skills. Being a data-loving sensing person may mean that you may know a lot of the statistical and anecdotal trivia of the sports you choose to follow, the games you like to play. In interpersonal situations, your personality creates some paradoxical qualities. First of all, as a sensing- perceptive type, you're a good friend: loyal, fraternal and generous with your group. Esprit de corps is the hallmark of your temperamental cornerstone. But, as a thinker, feelings just aren't your forte. You may seem to go through life almost unconsciously at times, particularly when you're in the middle of one of your favorite all-consuming activities. Especially at those times when every neuron in your nervous system is preoccupied with what you're doing (and doing, and doing!), it's not likely that your mate would call you a romantic. You are more comfortable giving things as tokens of affection than remembering the everyday small gestures of love: the apology, the phone call, the thank you, the passionate compliment. You may wish to examine what your "living in the moment" tendency does to your friendships. Chances are good that you're good at drawing people in to you. People probably find your free, jovial spirit to be attractive, even seductive. Then your attention shifts, and you're gone. People who deal with you on a daily basis have to get used to your "now you see him, now you don't" way of conducting your relationships. You're a great observer, but you don't use that natural skill consistently in your daily life, especially not in the interpersonal domain. As a sensing-type person, you are capable of making great strides in finetuning your emotional relationships, just by remembering to utilize your great skill as an observer to stop, look, and listen to the signals from those closest to you. As an extravert, you do not tend to form the kind of intense, devoted, selfsacrificing friendships which characterize the long-term affiliations of introverts. Frankly speaking, you do not understand an introvert's concept of friendship—or of love—and that is one of the major differences which decrees that introverts and extraverts are doomed, always, to speak separate languages borrowing each other's terms without understanding or appreciating what each other means. Introspection is not your long suit, generally speaking. You don't tend to ponder what may lie behind someone else's behavior—or your own, for that matter. You tend to be the ultimate empiricist, dealing with other people as they appear to be and never asking why. Complexities of motivation and feeling just don't strike you as very sensible questions in your world of the immediate and tangible. When life settles down to boring, demanding routine, when relationships become burdensome, when people stop being fun, you'll tend to ignore the situation as long as possible, divert yourself with other activities. Then you may just move on. From time to time, you'll feel a real call of the wanderlust, and, like Gauguin (a sensing-perceptive type, no doubt!) you may feel an urge to leave everything and everyone behind and take off for Tahiti.

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 descriptions, uncomplicated directions, and you communicate clearly. 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. While others may thrive on novelty, you may be 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! 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. You are good at precise work, and you seldom make errors of fact. Those who pay less attention to doing the job right strike you as unreliable: not the kind of people you like to see working beside you on any assignment. 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 may 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 self-started 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're a thinker, and if your thinking eclipses your feeling side, you may seem to be a bit mechanical and computer-like in the work place. When it comes to matters you assign to your thinking side, you probably tend to be unemotional: not so much uninterested in people's feelings as simply unaware. It's certainly not that you intend to be unkind, but—where work is concerned—thinker-types tend to make decisions on an impersonal, logical basis. Depending on the strength of your thinking tendency, you may inadvertently hurt people's feelings in the working environment. You can reprimand people when necessary. You can even fire them when you feel the situation really demands it. No one would deny that can be an asset: the ability to do what needs to be done, free from self-recrimination and guilt. You probably are aware that such impersonality may crush more feelingtype people, but you also recognize that separating your personal views from your work personality is an important ability to keep if you're to succeed in any number of highly competitive work fields. After all, you don't demand personal treatment yourself; you simply ask to be treated fairly. What's more, you understand that there may be adverse reactions to your impersonal stance, and you take some consolation from the fact that you are more capable than others of getting along without harmony. The thinker-type can go far in business, and often does. But, if you're a person whose head always rules the heart, you may wish to spend some time examining this part of your personality. If you suspect that most of your associates candidly consider you to be hard-hearted and insensitive; and if you find believable sympathy only among other "thinker-type" workers, you may wish to invest some time and energy in considering alternative points of view. Remember, there are no "rights" and "wrongs", "weaks" or "strongs" when it comes to personality. There are only differences. You may find added insight and sensitivity an asset, both in the practical and personal sense, when it comes to your co-workers.

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 conventional educational institutions at a very early stage of schooling. The school system is simply not responsive to your optimal learning style. Since theories and abstract concepts are not your cup of tea, education from lectures, books, and written exams may strike you as less relevant than laboratory-type experience or, better-yet, hands-on learning on the job. Many people with your personality type are better suited for jobs that entail figuring out the way things work—how they function—and chances are good that a bit of that interest will show up in whatever field of work you select. Whether or not you are one who derives satisfaction from the simple predictability of mechanical devices, you may notice that you have some fascination with tools, machines, grown-up toys (cars, stereos, videos, cellular telephones) or glittering gadgets. Many with your personality type manage to fit in their love for such things into their work, often by settling down in some mechanical field: the more hands-on the better. Construction, mining, lumberjacking, trucking, stevedoring, soldiering, and piloting—all hold some attractiveness for those with your personality. Whether these very physical careers appeal to you or not, you'll be wise 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 feeling, you'll be frustrated; for theories, ideas and the realm of possibility are foreign to the very core of who you are. As an extravert and a thinker, the entrepreneurial side of life may appeal to you. Yours is the personality of the promoter, the arranger of people to get the job done, the manager whose idea of manipulation is turning around a red-ink company into the black again. Finance and commerce are attractive fields for your type, also. You have the ability to be an architect of businesses, and your love of working in a crisis can be a real asset in the jungle of the business world. SP