ISFP

You Are an Introverted Feeling-Type

Remember the tin woodsman in Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz? He was the fellow whose immense sensitivity and enormous capacity for feeling were hidden behind an armored shell. He complained that he didn't have a heart, but you knew, from the first time he appeared in the story, that he had one, all right. He just kept it well out of harm's way.

And his wasn't a perfect shield, for now he had to worry each time the tears fell, that he'd corrode his vulnerable armor.

Sound familiar?

You, too, shelter your feelings, and they are as formidable as those of the tin woodsman.

As a feeling introvert, your essential personality is hidden from view. Your facade may not be metal, but it's just as solid and just as vulnerable to misplaced trust. People have to know you well before you'll let down your guard and expose your warmth and sensitivity. Then you open up your trust and hope that the recipients are wise enough to appreciate your gift of admission to the inner sanctum of your life.

In general, your judging manifests itself within, as you guide your own actions and attitudes by a strong inner sense of values, independent of others' judgment. You have a powerful sense of faithfulness, duty, and commitment to the people and causes which attract you. You take your obligations seriously, enforced by your own internalized sense of morality.

The face you show to the world is a perceptive one, and you'll show your judging characteristic only if someone should trespass on your feelings by challenging you—or someone or something that you really value. At that time, your perceptive openness and flexibility and adaptability cease. Then, you become immovable.

You may care about fewer things and a smaller circle of people than your extraverted friends, but your caring runs deeper, and a violation of trust is crushing to you.

As an introvert, you naturally value inner processes over external signs. As a friend, you can go a long time without reciprocation of your feelings and still perpetuate a friendship. Your feelings are not diminished by time or distance. When a friend really needs you, you'll be there: this year, next, ten years from now. That's the way friendship operates among introverts.

You tend to form a kind of quiet, intense, devoted friendship which awes your extraverted friends. They can't understand it. Frankly, you do not understand the extravert's concept of friendship, either. To you, their affiliations seem shallow, fleeting, and devoid of long-term personal commitment.

When it comes to friendship and love, it's apparent that introverts and extraverts speak separate languages using common terms.

For the introverted feeling personality, disappointments relating to mismatched affection can be crippling, since feeling is experienced so deeply, so personally. For folks like you, suffering may sap your personal energy unless you find an outward focus for your feelings—some work or activity where you may have an impact.

The extent to which introverts are capable of adapting to life in a populated world depends on how well the auxiliary process is developed. Remember, as an introvert, you turn your most highly developed personality process inward. On a day-to-day basis, it's your less preferred mode which keeps you functioning. Your Auxiliary Process You are an intensely private person whose rich inner life of feeling remains largely uncommunicated.

But the feeling side is only half the picture. The part of yourself you show to the casual observer is sensing-based perception, and that is the cornerstone of a basically optimistic, here-and-now personality we like to call the REALIST.

The combination of sensing, feeling, and perception creates a practical, spontaneous, warm individual: one who knows how to play, one who resists confinement, rules and regulations, and others' expectations of what they should do. The sensing-perceptive person must be free to experiment with life, experience it 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. 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 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 people like you just do what needs to be done, moment by moment. You work the way a child plays, intensely, happily. The end and the means are inseparable. The sensing-perceptive person plays at work, deriving 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 look out when the "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.

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 great friend and loyal companion: unassuming and modest, unconditionally loyal, supportive, fraternal and generous with your group. Esprit de corps is the hallmark of sensing-perceptive types.

Many sensing-perceptive type people love the real world: nature, tangibles, gadgets, tools, things they can work with the hands. Machines seem to hold a special attraction for thinker-type REALISTS. For feelers, like yourself, earthy materials (wood, cloth, clay, marble) and instruments (guitars, pianos, etc.) figure more prominently in your affection.

Combine this love of the physical world with a life-long attraction for activity-for-its-own-sake, and you'll understand why people with your personality often choose jobs involving sculpting, throwing pots, weaving, playing musical instruments, dancing, performing, playing sports or doing anything that expresses the self in a direct, physical way. You are a sensitive realist, a deeply feeling person in touch with the world. You are of the earth and you are attracted to it. Of all the types, yours is the most likely to be a nature lover, the friend of animals. You enjoy being outof-doors, and, as an introvert, you may find your greatest moments of peace and contemplation walking alone or with a friend in the woods, along the beach, or across the countryside.

The Introverted Feeling Type in the World of Work

Your introverted nature needs peace in order to work most comfortably. Whatever the job, you spend a lot of time thinking before acting, and you're in your element when you find work which gives you plenty of time for contemplation.

You don't mind working long hours on a project without a break, and you take pride and interest in your job, especially if you are kept in touch with the ideas behind your assignments.

You prefer a quiet working environment, and—despite your generally fraternal nature—you do enjoy working alone. When you're at the peak of your concentration, you're happiest if the telephone never rings and no one ever intrudes or interrupts your train of thought.

If your introversion is extreme, you may tend to regard other people as a necessary evil of most work situations.

As a sensing-perceptive (REALIST) type you have a characteristic attitude about how communication should be: clear, understandable, direct, precise. But as an introvert you may find it easier to express yourself in writing than in person. If your introversion is extreme, you probably prefer to let others handle your face-to-face communication whenever practical.

Although sensing-perceptive types are usually good at spoken communication, the more they are introverted, the more they have trouble communicating fluently and associating names and faces. Your introversion may combine effectively with your sensing characteristic to ensure your attention to detail and your conservatism in drawing conclusions from your work. Those who make flourishing statements make you anxious, especially if they're referring to your accomplishments.

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.

You trust your senses. You're rooted in the real world, not fantasy, and—in the world of work—that translates to an amazing ability to remember data and details. You show 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 makes you enjoy shifting gears in life, 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 introversion and sensing characteristics, 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.

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.

So, let's look more specifically at some career suggestions for someone with your personality.

As a person who combines the sensing-type's attention to details with the feeling-type's concern for people, you'll do well in a number of fields that put you in day-to-day contact with people, helping them or selling them things— just so long as your introverted nature isn't overwhelmed by the press of humanity.

Teaching, nursing, counseling, care-giving and health-related professions, sales and customer relations attract many with your personality type. The personality combination of sensing plus perception often leads folks like you out of the education mill at an early age. Being such an experiential person, you probably prefer to learn by doing rather than by listening or reading or watching. If that's the case, the conventional school environment may not be well suited to your preferred learning style.

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.

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 ISFPs. The ISFP's nature-loving character is willing to make many work compromises to stay away from a 40-hour-a-week desk job. Work in the out-of-doors may be your calling as well. Forestry, wilderness guiding, "adventure-training" or youth leadership, wildlife management and "hot-shot" fire fighting are fields with disproportionate representation of your type.

The REALIST's attraction for adventure may express itself by drawing you into a career in the military, law enforcement or the merchant marine. Your competitive spirit may be satisfied by playing individual or team sports. The martial arts may attract you as a hobby.

If creative expression calls you, you are more likely to express yourself nonverbally. Words just aren't your best tools of communication, and the tactile and kinesthetic senses bring you a feeling of peace and security. ISFPs often enjoy performance (as in music, dance or acting) and the pursuits of the artisan spirit (culinary arts, photography, print-making, ceramics, sculpture, weaving, crafts or production-type art.)

ISFPs are rarely found at the highest ranks of corporate management, where -NTJs abound, and the introverted feeling-type's values are often in direct contradiction to the corporate culture created by that brand of leadership. In - STJ-dominated businesses, where rules, regulations, schedules, rigid job de-scriptions and bureaucratic order prevail, the ISFP may put up with the status quo for only so long before pulling a vanishing act. SP