You are introverted, intuitive, feeling and perceptive. Your dominant process is introverted feeling.

Your auxiliary function is extraverted intuition. Extraverted thinking and introverted sensing are your least developed functions. Let's take a look at what this combination of characteristics means in the day-to-day reality of being you.

INFP
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

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

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 youor 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 overt 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. You may be described as the ultimate idealist, often a suffering one. You are almost afflicted by your sense of how you and the rest of the world could be, and you're painfully aware of how sorely reality differs from perfection. It is unfortunately true that many with your personality type have to struggle in order to find an outward focus for their feelingsa work or mission where they may have impact. Failing to do so can leave you forever look-

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

ing inward, alienated and disappointed by the shallowness and superficiality of the world. 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 with a rich inner life which remains largely uncommunicated. Your world of feelings belongs only to yourself. The personality you permit the casual observer to experience is molded from your intuition, which guides your perceptive process. The combination of intuition with feeling forms the very cornerstone of your personality: a temperament we call the EMPATHIST. Taken together, intuition and feeling mold the idealist and truth-seeker, one whose main quest in life lies within and is directed toward achieving personal peace and integration. A goal for your temperament is acceptance, but more than that: acceptance as you really areno mask, no pretense, no facade. Being genuine, sincere is what matters to you. Relationships are a crucial focus for the EMPATHIST. You seek to understand others deeply and to have that understanding reciprocated with loving acceptance. You invest your total selftime, energy, patience and sensitivityin relationships. You often are disappointed, for few understand your concept of knowing another, and fewer still are capable of achieving the kind of interpersonal connection you want. Significance of self, of work, of relationships is the key to understanding the personality of the EMPATHIST. You are always searching for hidden meaning and motivation in others' behavior. That can be a tremendous benefit if you choose a career in a ministe COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

rial or counseling field. In persuasive writing, too, you know instinctively how to reach people, how to communicate your vision with clarity. You are better able than any other personality type to express sentiment and to move people with your communication. There is a strong element of the mystical in your personality. It has been said that parapsychological phenomenaESP, clairvoyance and the like occur most commonly with intuitive and feeling people like yourself. Perhaps the key is that your personality is attuned to sources of knowledge others commonly ignore. You have a sweeping awareness of time and history in all you do. You have respect for the past, for tradition. You experience the moment. You look toward the future. And you sometimes can do all three at once. Yours is the personality of the visionary. You trust your intuition, and you are willing to act at an instinctual level. You somehow sense good and evil in people and situations, and you are willing to make value judgments on the basis of ethereal data which totally baffle other personality types. You rarely can trace by a clear, logical, welldefined sequence how you derive your insight about life, but your experience validates your judgment more often than not. Creativity is your hallmark, and you are a true perfectionist when it comes to your work. You see what you do as an extension of who you are, and just as you strive toward the perfection of yourselfyou are almost driven to do your best at any task you undertake. You envision a perfect job, an ideal design, a perfect document, an excellent interaction. You believe that your ideal is attainable. As an introvert, functioning in a sea of people may be exhausting and draining. But, as a feeling person, living a life of isolation would be unimaginable. You will find your greatest comfort by compromising: interacting with others, closely, intimately, mostly in small cooperative groups or one-onone. In either case, the personal element will always be important in all you do. You work for your fellow man, and you write for people to understand your thoughts.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

Your empathy is so great that you can recognize the physical and emotional ups and downs, moods and cycles of people around youeven those you do not know well. In close friends, you may sense their pain and frustration before they do. When you wish, you have the ability to penetrate another's shell and move into their reality. This almost psychic ability to try on other identities is the key to your interpersonal power, as well as the secret of great acting, and you may use this talentconsciously or unconsciouslyevery day. As a writer or performer, this chameleon ability arms you well to become the characters you deal with. Harmony is essential for you in your personal environment, and you endeavor to promote peace and cooperation around you. You know the value of appreciation, and you are the consummate master of the well-placed compliment and the encouraging pat on the back. You are responsive to praise yourself. You can feel worn down when you find yourself in a working situation which forces you to contend with continual hostility and criticism. If your working world becomes a miserable place, you may experience personal paralysis, lose your usual enthusiasm and self-confidence, and even succumb to stress-related disease. Your personal relationships manifest your desire for deep intimate human connection. If you had to make a choice, you'd probably favor depth of friendship in a few relationships that will span the years and decades, rather than a breadth of shallow relationships with a large assortment of people. You do not reveal yourself to people casually. It takes time and trust for you to open up completely andonce exposed you may find yourself vulnerable to hurt if your caring is not reciprocated. When intuition and feeling meet in the perceptive introvert, your unique personality is formed. You fall into an exclusive personality category which contains only one percent of the population, and you live in a personal world which is foreign to other types: sensitive, artistic and imaginative above allfar removed

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

from the here and now and definitely disinclined to make decisions on a logical basis. Thinking types may call you illogical, but you know that you simply march to the beat of a different drummer: one that your critics either cannot hear or refuse to trust. You come to knowledge by an internal route of intuiting and feeling which is not only foreign to sensing/thinking types but often frustrating to them. They see your road to understanding as a mystical one, wholly beyond their comprehension. Carl Jung, the great analytical psychologist whose theory of personality forms the basis of Type-Temperament Theory, saw Joan of Arc as the classic representative of your personality type: mystical, devoted to a cause, always mid-way between an inner world of righteous conviction and an outer world cast in the sharp black and white simplicity of evil and good forces. The challenge you must face is to keep that tremendous sensitivity as an asset: to let your vision inspire and not cripple you, to find a mission in life where your special qualities can blossom. Those with your personality type must be on guard against turning inward, brooding that the world is as it is and not as it might be.

The Introverted Feeling-Type in the World of Work

Your introverted nature needs peace in order to work most comfortably. Working in concert with your feeling nature, your introversion will lead you toward work which has a measure of tranquility and personal harmony. When your intuitive and perceptive tendencies combine forces to tempt you to change courses in mid-stream, starting some new project before the current one's finished, you can count on your introversion to slow down the process, and make time for contemplation.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

When a project demands working long hours without a break, your introversion may override impulsive, impatient intuition and provide you with the patience and tenacity you need. As an introvert, you will tend to take pride and interest in your job, especially if you are kept in touch with the ideas behind your assignments. More so than an extravert, you'll tend to pay attention to details and avoid drawing sweeping conclusions from your work. You prefer a quiet working environment, anddespite your feeling-side's attraction for human companionshipyou'll often find you work best when 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. Don't be surprised if you sometimes feel overwhelmed when your work requires you to deal superficially with a large number of people. You may observe yourself reaching a kind of social exhaustion when your verbal fluency declines and your ability to associate names with faces is impaired. 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 employe'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.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

Your need for acceptance may nudge you into acquiescence when your independent judgment is called for. In your 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 abilityattitude as well as efficiencycan be crippled by an obvious office feud. You need harmony to work happily and well. Intuitive workers, such as yourself, are in their glory when the work is challenging and novel. When you're inspired, you fire up your furnaces and work with a level of energy and exuberance that staggers the imagination of your sensory-type co-workers. A new task at hand? A new technique or skill to master? No problem for you. You will find the time to tackle the most difficult problem and unravel the most complicated situation. Then things settle down. You stifle a yawn, while your frazzled co-workers sigh with relief. While you yearn for the next challenge, they make no effort to disguise their earnest hope that routine (blessed routine) is reestablished as soon as possible. Then, one morning, sure as death, you wake up, staring blankly at the ceiling, and you know you've been stricken, once again, by the insidious dark side of the intuitive enthusiasm: boredom. You try to fight it, and you deny it to your friends and enemies alike, but the fact is: you know you don't want to go to work. Your energy's gone, your spirit's flat, and, once again, you realize you've fallen into one of your slack periods. Can you use your introverted feeling to temper these downswings? Some with your personality constellation manage to do so by reminding themselves that others are counting them to do their part. If not, you may just have to accept the fact that your intuitive nature makes you cyclic: hot and cold, up and down. It's OK. It comes with the territory. If you understand this aspect of your personality, acknowledge it with the same acceptance you feel for the high-energy, problem-solving ability that

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

also comes with intuition, then you may be able to pull out of your downtimes with a bit more style and grace. And even if you can't modify your behavior, once you understand it as the natural "flip-side" of the part of you you love best, then maybe you can find a job whose nature is short-project oriented, an employer who understands your cyclic nature, and enough stable, well-grounded co-workers to cover those other segments of your personality that haunt you in the work place. You know the parts I mean: your tendency to hop from hunch to hunch, your habit of not paying enough attention to detail-work, or your inclination to worry too little about completing projects or checking your work to be free from errors of fact. If and when you find that job, or that employer, or those co-workers, you'll be valued for the glittering bundle of intuition you provide as a spark to the humdrum of everyday work life. Otherwise, you may be regarded as a flighty nuisance: a judgment which shouldn't get you depressed, now that you know its origin. You know, just because you're enlightened enough to appreciate both the "bright" and "dark " sides of your personality, that doesn't necessarily mean that the rest of the world will share your open acceptance. There will be times when you will have to face rejection, even open hostility, in order to remain your own best friend. The perceptive in you likes diversity in work, has no trouble shifting gears from one assignment to another, one technique to the next, just so long as the work doesn't require a lot of decision-making. Your perceptive side is open. Together with your introversion, it enables you to be patient with changing situations, patient when a task requires repeated revisions. On the other hand, your perceptive side may endow you with a tendency to start too many changes without being asked, revising when it isn't necessary.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

Without some awareness of this potential problem, many of these selfstarted activities may wind up in a desk drawer, first postponed, then forgotten. Much of what you start may never reach completion. 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 also tend to keep topics open excessively long, since coming to a decision is almost painful to you. You'll have to keep in mind that you have what it takes to become a master 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, how can we translate the work characteristics which come with your personality into sensible career guidance? First of all, it's apparent that you'll work at your best only in a job you truly believe in. It's vital to you that your work be meaningful: that it be important to the worldto humanity at largeas well as to yourself. In whatever field you choose, your style will be marked by sincere enthusiasm, born of your deep commitment to your calling. When you're well-suited to your job, you are a true perfectionist. Actually, it's only in the work setting that you truly compete. In other aspects of your life, the impulse to impress or dominate others simply doesn't occur to you to be worth the effort.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

10

You'll be wise to chose a career niche which lets you explore the possibilitieseither for people or for a cause that moves you. You'll may find your work in the arts or the humanities, the ministry, counselling, teachingor even the sciences, if the situation is right. Needless to say, a career in a tough-minded -TJ-led corporation or other organization may be a strain on your gentle sensibilities. It follows that INFPs who opt for medicine and law are sometimes asking for trouble. In the former case, diagnostic specialties will stress you less than surgical practice with its often-brutal decision-making. In the latter case, youll be wise to shun inherently hostile courtroom law in favor of more humanistic areas of the legal profession, including research or writing. The introverted feeling-type with intuition often shows an impressive literary bent. Theatrical writing, in particular, is a natural area for those with your personality. Your empathy and understanding of human emotions lets you portray characters vividly. Drama and performance draw their ranks disproportionately from INFPs. Reflect on your favourite actors, directors and other theatrical greats and you'll recognise their kindred spirit.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Martine J. RoBards, Ph.D.

11