Profile of the ABCD

What does success Mean to You?

ENFJs are motivated by external human situations, primarily by other people; their talents, needs, aspirations, and cares form the world in which an ENFJ lives. They thrive when able to “make things right” for others, to enable and empower their co-workers, friends and family through valuing their human strengths and abilities.

When gifted with the added ENFJ ability to iNtuitively adapt their feelings to how they are affected by others, the ENFJ has a positive drive to find cooperative pathways leading to the best possible outcome for all, including themselves. Success for an ENFJ comes through involvement in the process of making things happen for people, through the accomplishments and satisfactions of those they have helped to enrich the human world with more excellent value, and through finding that their efforts on behalf of others have fulfilled their own life as well.

Allowing Your Strengths to Flourish

As an ENFJ, you have gifts specific to your personality type that aren’t natural strengths for other types. By recognising your special gifts and encouraging their growth and development, you will more readily see your place in the world and how you can better use your talents to achieve your dreams.

Nearly all ENFJs will recognise the following characteristics in themselves. They should embrace and nourish these strengths:

• Making others feel valued and important
• Quickly seeing the positive and negative aspects of a human situation
• Expressing their feelings clearly
• Offering loyalty and commitment to partners, family and workmates
• Trying always to find the solution which works for everyone
• Encouraging humour and self-expression in others
• Finding ways to help others fulfil their needs
• Affirming positive community values
• Naturally, falling into leadership roles in their community

ENFJs who have developed their Introverted iNtuition to the extent that they can see the possibilities within their perceptions will enjoy these extraordinary gifts:

• Understanding and empathising with the feelings of others; realising “where they are coming from”.
• A talent for creative expression which can turn ordinary things and situations into something magical.
• An enhanced feeling of connection and sensitivity to the world around them.
• The ability to see many facets of a problem and how it might be resolved for the best.
• The ability to make creative and valuable use of time spent alone.
• Openness to the spiritual connections between all things
• They become increasingly creative, visionary and empathetic and are, therefore, effective and kind managers of businesses, people, and various situations that life presents.

Potential Problem Areas

With any gift of strength, there is an associated weakness. The strong expression of any function can overshadow others, whilst at the same time, its own associated and unexpressed inferior function can mine the unconscious mind and throw up annoying resistances and disturbing emotions.

We value our strengths, but we often curse and even more, limiting to our potential development, can ignore our weaknesses. To grow as a person and get what we want out of life, we must not only capitalise upon our strengths but also face our weaknesses and deal with them. That means taking a hard look at our personality type’s potential problem areas.

Most of the weaker characteristics found in ENFJs are due to their dominant Extraverted Feeling overvaluing what they see as objective values in the external world and thereby judging too much by the needs of others or by appearances. This is primarily due to the ENFJ having not fully adapted their Introverted iNtuitive function sufficiently for them to be able to discern the vast range of ways in which they might be missing the underlying needs within themselves and being misled by such appearances.

The ENFJ naturally looks outward to find value and satisfaction, and whilst this direction must be taken to fulfil their primary needs of relation a& comfort, without the supportive balance of a well developed iNtuitive function, ENFJs can overvalue the external world to the point where they lose sight of themselves, becoming fixed in their judgments about people and the world. In such cases, the ENFJ will tend to live in a rigid – and, to others, somewhat surreal – the world of definite values, which often seems “overstated” or obsessively connected to other people or human situations.

Explanation of Problems

Nearly all of the problematic characteristics described above can be attributed to the common ENFJ problem of wanting to find the “proper” value in everything. Suppose the ENFJ does not learn how to see beneath the appearance of what they quickly judge as good or bad about the people and situations in their external environment. In that case, they will only use their introverted iNtuition to support those judgments they feel are good for them and disregard not only other possibilities but their quality of inner life as well.

The consideration of these less apparent possibilities & their own needs requires that the ENFJ recognise that their value judgments are indeed subjective and that it is not appropriate or practical to apply them across the board to all civilised people. The practice of standing back & looking objectively at their own value system is not something the ENFJ is accustomed to doing; trying to avoid abstract rationalisation of problems & the feelings they engender is a natural survival technique for the ENFJ personality.

The main driver of the ENFJ personality is Extraverted Feeling, whose purpose is to find and discriminate the values in people and human situations. If their ability to find a specific and excellent value in a person or situation is threatened, the ENFJ shuts out the sinister force. This is natural, but unfortunately, the individual who regularly exercises this type of agenda protection will become more rigid in their judgments and expectations of people but even less concerned with the effect such conditions have upon themselves. Where the unbalanced ENFJ does acquiesce to the images of iNtuition, these will generally be skewed to support the subjective agenda of dominant Feeling. In this way, they always find justification for their determinations and their self-sacrifices to people, things and situations, and they will be unable to locate the reality of another’s true feelings nor be interested in discovering that their seemingly objective judgments miss the reasons and subjectivities underlying both their own and others lives or worldly situation.

Petulance, pensiveness and a sense of being let down by others can often be the result of this one-sided approach to the world, whilst if the ENFJ is in a strong company or relationship position they might become driven to manipulate others and situations to conform to their own feeling needs and value judgments, irrespective of any actual value to the situation or for the other persons involved. In this case, the “big picture”, valued for its great worth to all, becomes a dominant drive which seeks to blot out or crush any opposition by claiming the moral high ground, even to the point where the ENFJ sacrifices their own life to the “cause”. The inability to recognise the plethora of subjective possibilities their feelings bring into their lives strip the unbalanced ENFJ of their access to both a deeper connection with others and the potential of refining and developing pathways to the kind of self-understanding and self-nurturing their more acceptable judgments might otherwise lead them to.

Solutions

To grow as an individual, the ENFJ needs to focus on their inner images. This means they need to be open to the possibilities that lie beneath their judgments & values rather than just accepting the appearance of values that accord with their sense of rightness. The ENFJ needs to understand that developing their ability to see the subjective possibilities within themselves and others does not threaten their ability to make correct judgments but rather enhances it and enhances their chances for achieving a measure of success in their lives.

The ENFJ concerned with personal growth will pay close attention to their motivation for accepting values that come to them. Are they trying to see the background of circumstances behind their own and others’ value judgments, or are they trying to maintain their own image of how things “ought” to be? The goal is to find a balance between what seems correct and valuable and the many possible ways such a judgment might be subjective and not necessarily the best for themselves or a situation. This is not entirely possible, but it is an exercise to keep in mind. They need to see the many divergent images of values and the conflicts which affect them without feeling threatened and without losing their sense of what is right and wrong.

Living Happily

As seen from the above, some strongly expressed ENFJs can have difficulty fitting into society. Their problems are usually due to their Extraverted Feeling function being so dominant that they are so firmly bound to what they see as objective values that they cannot relate to the world except via the objects of their feeling. In such cases, the intensity of their judgments can drive others away from them, and the resulting lack of close relationships felt

as a personal failing for which the ENFJ feels guilty. Such guilt can cause even more strongly affective behavior, leading the ENFJ to ignore their own needs entirely, or it can become a negative drive to manipulate others to conform to their one-sided vision of the world. The ENFJ, who consistently tries to see the underlying possibilities and the scope available in each situation will be able to see the right path to take with each person and situation in their life. This will always lead them toward closer relationships, happiness and outstanding achievements.

The key to personal growth for the ENFJ is competent execution of Introverted iNtuition. Because it is often hard to define what this represents subjectively to each person, here are some action-oriented suggestions that will help lead you towards more effective use of the Introverted iNtuitive function.

Specific suggestions:

• When confronted by a person or situation which seems to be rejecting or rebuffing your value judgments and your mind filling with all the arguments, images and alternatives to the situation, look closely at those you are immediately rejecting as negative or unsuitable ways to proceed. Within these images often lie paths to understanding and agreement if you look more closely. Some of these images hold the key to seeing another’s feelings and point of view more clearly. Remember, what seems positive to you may not be everything or even important to another.
• Behind everything of value that you see lies much potential. Try not to be satisfied with a good result, but let yourself imagine how a person might fulfil all the aspects; how a situation might become useful to many more than just what it was made for. Try to imagine everything as a source of untapped magic and creative power. Let your mind see all the things it might become. Above all, apply this exercise to yourself as if you were seeing yourself in a mirror: just as you would another person you love.
• When you are alone, try to become fully aware of how it feels to you, try to recognise the emptiness as a place of potential, try to imagine what you might be able to do for others in this empty time, try to realise that you are not genuinely alone but with this special person who is yourself. What would you do for this person if you could make their private world a better place?

Everything wonderful in life proceeds from the qualities which lie behind it. You can feel these drives and attitudes, which seem to come from a place outside, perhaps from the creator expressing himself within people and nature. Letting the sense of these background qualities permeate your drive to life will give you purpose & meaning. Allow yourself to feel the meanings and definitions of the world, and let them become a valuable gift which can be expressed in your dealings with others and in the things you strive for.