The ISTJ personality type
"Practical Leaders"
Read a description of this personality type below.
ISTJs are strong but calm and steady personalities. You are thoughtful and traditional, work-focused and business-oriented. You listen to and respect your family and your closest friends. You radiate calm to the people around you, and you make your friends feel safe and secure around you. You tend to appear experienced and people think you have a strong work-ethic. You generally stay out of other people’s personal lives and give people the freedom to be themselves. You’re competetive and you like to win. You love to talk freely about your thoughts and to have open, serious discussions with others. You enjoy smaller and more intimate social gatherings, and there’s no place like home to you. You tend to become an expert at what you do and value efficiency and productivity highly. You’re very involved with your community and you want to be someone people can trust and count on.
You tend to take time to warm up to others. You’re a firm decision maker and you’re good at going with your gut. You enjoy to share your facts and to engage in logical discussions with others, and while you may struggle with a bit of a temper, you tend to be quick to forgive others. You tend to connect with others slowly, and you connect more about work and about traditions than on an emotional level. You pride yourself on doing favors for and helping your close ones out in times of need. You tend to drive your life slowly and meticulously, with great care during stressful changes. You pride yourself on living up to societal expectations, maintaining your health, being polite, being on time. You are a practical and fairly simple person.
Because of your respect for the system and for order, you tend to frown on unnecessary sentiment and misplaced kind gestures. You value strength and self-reliance. You find creativity to often be meaningless and erratic and would rather people just stick with the methods that are proven to work. ISTJs are driven and proactive and easy to be around. You’re the ideal supporter - a good family member, a reliable problem solver. As an ISTJ, you tend to be resistant to new ideas and to new suggestions. You’re firm about your beliefs and when you’ve made up your mind, it’s hard to lure you to the other side. Your ideal romantic partner tends to be the ESTP. Their love for logic, their ability to reflect deeply on things, and their thoughtfulness appeals to you greatly.
Leaders have a preference towards caution, distance, and long-term, big-picture thinking. Leaders lead with their dominant world-view, preferring not to intervene directly. They thrive when they can engage topics and problems with a set interest or perspective, and become uncertain if they can’t think of how to approach a topic. This makes them ideal leaders: they enjoy to be in the position of supervising a system or a group from a distance, but can become affective or detached if this mode is disrupted. They naturally prefer to direct: movies, stories, projects, people, research, or applications, but are also common in areas that require long-term devotion and focus.
They prefer to focus their attention towards things of their interest, controlling the flow of information and how things proceed, with a form of chess-board mentality. They are at their best, when they have thought several steps in advance, and become stressed when they are unable to execute these steps properly. Unanticipated events can get them out of their flow.
Leaders are more self-directed than Executives, and respond worse to supervision and outside control, becoming more affective. In these situations, they can become more choleric and aggressive. Leaders are more productive than Advisors, and feel a stronger desire to intervene and control the situation. If unable to intervene, they become more detached and disengaged, feeling a need to withdraw and pull back.
As a technical, you seek to find the common procedures and routines that are the backbone of everyday efficiency in society. You are interested in the established protocols and methods and how to efficiently keep using them to perform well in tasks, hierarchies and competitions in spite of new changes in society.
As a thinker you enjoy to cautiously consider what will happen in the future and avoid making misstakes. You have a distance towards the world, respond reflectively and take your time to evaluate new things before you try them.
As a realist you enjoy relating things to actual circumstances and see what is straight-forward and plausible. You have a strong sense of reality and prefer staying grounded in it.
As a technician you enjoy basing decisions on impersonal or formal principles. You enjoy evaluating whether things hold up to established principles and guidelines that are independent of social relationships, attachments and feelings.
As a judger you enjoy sticking to tasks until you reach a closure before moving on to anything else. You are quite autonomous and resistant to disruptions.
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