The ISTP personality type

"Practical Advisors"

Read a description of this personality type below.

Personalities

ISTPs may not seem much, but they are smart, expertful, and practical problem solvers. You are calm and a good listener, methodical and task-oriented. You are fairly quick to engage and work with others. You enjoy a good debate and you like to be around the stage, near the center of everything happening, where you can help make sure everything is perfect. You tend to have a strong urge for new experiences and mastering new skills. You’re actually rather competetive and you like to win by being completely unflappable. You love to talk freely about your thoughts and to have open, serious discussions with others, but you don’t talk unless you feel strongly about the subject. You enjoy smaller or more intimate social settings, with people you trust. There’s really no place like home to you. You’re an expert at what you do and you value efficiency and productivity highly.

You tend to be hard to truly get to know. You like to test people and see what they can and cannot do. You enjoy to share your facts and engaging in logical discussions with others. You tend to connect with others unusually quickly, but you connect more about work and about traditions than on an emotional level. You take things slow and one step at a time, careful not to make any mistakes. You’re passionate but quiet and it’s sometimes hard for you when people push you aside or don’t give you the attention you need.

Because of your need for power and order, you tend to frown on sentiment and kind gestures. You value strength and self-reliance. You find politness to often be an obstacle and would rather people just state their opinions openly. ISTPs are meticulous and take things one step at a time. You rarely speak out unless there is something important to be said, and then you want people to listen. As an ISTP, you tend to be open to new ideas and to new suggestions. You believe the idea that people are the most passionate about is always the best one. Your ideal romantic partner tends to be the ESTJ. Their love for tradition, their ability to reflect deeply on things, and their thoughtfulness appeals to you greatly.

Advisors enjoy distance, caution, and reflection in adaptive, free-flow environments. They lead with silent curiosity, enjoying to meticulously study a topic or interests various details or viewpoints. They prefer not to intervene in things directly, instead offering advice or running trials from a distance. This makes them ideal teachers or analysts: they enjoy the position of answering questions and informing people on a topic, but prefer to do so in a less direct and controlled manner than the leaders. They have the most fun in relaxed, informal settings, with little pressure, and a lot of free-flow brainstorming.

They prefer to analyze conditions and possibilities, and tend to have more of a line-dancers mentality, often juggling and revising their positions on various issues and problems, offering the most in-depth, thorough and careful decision makers. In optimal environments they are given ample time for reflection and brainstorming in collaboration with others.

In situations that are too fast-paced and reactive, they become more affective and emotional. They also tend to become more distanced and cool in situations that require them to assume a position of authority and control.

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 perceiver you enjoy quickly changing tasks and exploring new possibilities in the moment. You are quite collaborative and open to changes in plans.

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