The ISFJ personality type

"Social Leaders"

Read a description of this personality type below.

Personalities

ISFJs are very humble and polite in their self-expression. You are open-minded and sociable, warm, and affectionate. You are friendly, but need time to grow to trust others around you. You’re kind and seek to be a positive influence on the people around you. You tend to have strong personal beliefs, beliefs well rooted in your community. You only share what’s on your mind when you’ve thought it through for a while. You keep your own thoughts to yourself, unless you trust the person you’re speaking with. You prefer smaller and more intimate social settings, where you can have more personal discussions with people you trust, but there’s no place like home. You’re playful and prefer fun and carefree social interactions over more work-oriented situations. You’re community oriented and want to be an integral, trustworthy part of society.

You take time to warm up to people around you, you want to know they can be counted on in times of need before you let them into your intimate sphere. You like to share and discuss your knowledge and your beliefs with others, and you’re diplomatic and well in touch with others needs and quirks. Your friends tend to think you’re a bit slow with making decisions at times, you’re always thinking things over, but that means, when you say something, people know you’re serious. You are sensitive to feedback and you listen a lot to your family. You trust and try hard to follow instructions and norms. You like selling your ideas and your opinions to the people around you, and you love to discuss your values and morals with others.

Because of your love for politeness, health, and tradition, you tend to distrust those who are in discord with society. You think everyone should work hard to respect their superiors and to adjust to the normal flow of things. ISFJs are passionate and slightly erratic about their values. You sometimes say and do things you regret, but your friends see this as a part of your charm and honesty. As an ISFJ, 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 ESFP. Their down to earth, thoughtful side, and their inner depth 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 popular, you seek to find the common themes and settings which are the foundation for the identity of your people. You are interested in the traditional narratives and symbols which have formed society so far and how to use these symbols to maintain the social identity of their people 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 value-based person you enjoy basing decisions on figurative or metaphorical feeling values. You enjoy looking at how things affect peoples motivation and how actions affect peoples momentum and well-being.

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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