Ten Rules to Live By to Achieve ENTJ Success
- Feed Your Strengths! Give yourself every opportunity to show others your appreciation of a situation and how you could see it through to a good outcome. Take charge where you can make it count.
- Face Your Weaknesses! Understand you have limits too. Your careful world view is not the whole deal. How things look and feel may not concern you, but they concern many others. Try and allow such things to be and learn from them.
- Talk Time to Find Out How Others Really Think. You need to drive past your thoughts with others and let their appreciations of a situation reach you at a deeper level. It will then be possible for you to take account of their needs as real world objectives which if included in your ideas will bring greater harmony and quality to life and relationships.
- Take Time Out To Let The Whole Situation Speak To You. Don't dismiss those abstract and seemingly hard to understand or bothersome aesthetic and feeling judgments coming from others or from inside yourself. Drop everything for a while, stop thinking and worrying and just relax into those ideas and let them speak to you. Perhaps they can be accommodated, perhaps something is hiding in there which offers a new way
- When You Get Upset, You Lose. Your energy and rational understandings are strong assets, but can be very harmful if they turn against you and leave you with nothing but emotions you cannot deal with. Remember that others cannot always be expected to fall into your ways of seeing, and when your drive to make them do so fails you will suffer feelings of resentment and even abandonment. You cannot deal with the world like this. Moderate your ideas, allow others their spaces, and you will grow.
- Respect your Need for Intellectual Compatibility. Don't expect yourself to be a "touchy-feely" or "warm-fuzzy" person. Realize that your most ardent bonds with others will start with the head, rather than the heart. Be aware of other's emotional needs, and express your genuine love and respect for them in terms that are real to YOU. Be yourself.
- Be Accountable for Yourself. Don't blame the problems in your life on other people. Look inwardly for solutions. No one has more control over your life than you have.
- Be Humble. Judge yourself at least as harshly as you judge others.
- Take a Positive Approach to Differences in People. Don't distress yourself and others by dwelling on what seem to be their limitations. They need you to guide them and you need them to see things through. Try and recognize who can perform the most ably within certain fields outside your own competence. Let the feelings of others become a strength rather than a hindrance to you.
- Don't Get Obsessed! Recognize the value that personal world has to you, your friends, your family, your own inner selnse of self worth and life. Take pride in just being a good person and don’t allow external situations to control you. Try to relax and let the moment belong to the best things you can find in others and yourself. Nothing out there is more important than your own happiness.
What does Success mean to an ENTJ?
ENTJ people are realists, in the most basic sense of the word. Not only because their thinking is based upon a clear view of how things actually are in the world around them, but also because their ideas and strategies are structured around those unambiguous, “down to earth”, commonsense beliefs which sum up the obvious and undeniable in life. But while ENTJ’s might be pragmatic about the immediate situation before them, they are scarcely satisfied with it until it can be made more productive, useful or valuable. The ENTJ’s reasoning on such matters is always clear and generally unemotional. If action can improve an item or a situation then it ought to be taken, and the ENTJ will always be found in the midst of such action, organizing, planning and leading the way forward until the best result possible has been realized. This makes success for an ENTJ something that can be clearly seen, a real world result which can be measured. And whether measured in dollars, bricks, bread or just happy people, the successful ENTJ knows the result is due to their belief that it is just plain commonsense to try and make the best of every situation and get the most out if it for the most people.
Allowing Your ENTJ Strengths to Flourish
As an ENTJ, you have gifts that are specific to your personality type that aren't natural strengths for other types. By recognizing your special gifts and encouraging their growth and development, you will more readily see your place in the world, and be more content with your role. Nearly all ENTJs will recognize the following characteristics in themselves. They should embrace and nourish these strengths:
- Able to cut straight to the chase in any situation and not be sidetracked by non-essential issues.
- A propensity for leadership which follows naturally from their ability to control and manage real time/real world situations.
- A talent for factual analysis unbiased by prejudice or emotion.
- A “can do” approach to life which makes the working environment a positive place for them.
- A strong regard for positive social and economic institutions, structure and government.
- Second to none time and space management skills, everything organized and in its place.
- Able to constantly synthesize and adapt new ideas and concepts into strategies for business, social, financial or environmental development.
ENTJ’s who have a well-developed Introverted Intuitive function to complement their dominant Extraverted Thinking will enjoy these very special gifts:
- A talent for creating great benefits through the addressing of social justice issues.
- The ability to recognize and mediate their potentials in accord with the expectations of others.
- An approach to life which includes an awareness of the differences between their needs and those of others.
- Able to know when to stop and take stock of life and recognize the qualities of the moment.
- A talent for showing others the way to get past difficulties in their outer life
- A broadening of their own ambitions which includes rather than excludes others from the decision making and the benefits which flow from their achievement.
Potential Problem Areas
With any gift of strength, there is an associated weakness. Without "bad", there would be no "good". Without "difficult", there would be no "easy". We value our strengths, but we often curse and ignore our weaknesses. To grow as a person and get what we want out of life, we must not only capitalize 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.
ENTJ’s are strong, right minded and rational people. This should be kept in mind as you read some of the more negative material about ENTJ weaknesses. These weaknesses are natural. We offer this information to enact positive change, rather than as blatant criticism.
Most of the weaker characteristics in the ENTJ stem from their dominant Extraverted Thinking function overtaking their personality, stifling the natural expression and balancing value of the other personality functions. In such cases, an ENTJ may show some or all of the following weaknesses in varying degrees:
- May be unable to understand other people’s needs where these differ from their own.
- May unwisely assume their ideas are the only right ones and are therefore being fully implemented by others.
- May become childishly petulant or angered when confronted by situations which require feeling judgments.
- May become so engrossed in a plan or ambition that personal needs and the needs of others are forgotten.
- May take every decision not made in agreement with their rational beliefs as a personal rejection.
- May be easily taken in or manipulated by others via agreement with their rational attitudes.
- May become obsessed with small obstructions and difficulties to the point where the overall plan is forgotten
- May believe natural limitations are actually ailments which ought to be eradicated
- May assume others are ever plotting against them.
- May believe only their own view of the world or a situation is correct, even to the point that they make it into a kind of dogma which must be followed by those around them.
Explanation of Problems
Most of the problems described above can be seen as a direct result of a too dominant Extraverted Thinking function ruling the personality. In most cases this is exactly what is happening, but it is also worth recognizing that some of the weaknesses in the ENTJ’s personality that are more apparent to other Types, flow not so much from the excesses of the ENTJ’s dominant function, but from the natural inferiority of their feeling function and its lack of adaptation. We must also recognize that the level of expression of all functions in all people is variable and that some of the problems discussed here apply only to strongly expressing ENTJ’s, where the attitude which flows from using Extraverted Thinking exclusively to guide them through life creates its own particular problems.
The over dominance of Extraverted Thinking leads to an intensely intellectual way of seeing the world, where values such as right and wrong, good and bad, useful and useless are judged only by their applicability to an almost mathematically exact - and to the ENTJ - always rational, attitude to life. Without the balance provided by other ways of seeing or judging, the ENTJ is unable to account for actions based upon the inner views or feeling behavior of others, hence such things are always judged negatively, either as irrelevant - or at best - as being of small consequence. Additionally, with their thinking attitude always turned outward and totally subject to the world beyond their senses, without the balance of some internally felt objectivity the ENTJ will often follow their ideas and ambitions without consideration for their own physical and emotional needs. Indeed, the ENTJ often feels that if only his project, his work, his outer reality would just fall into line with his own rational views then all would be well within his world and all his needs would be met. Unfortunately such an attitude can never be satisfied, for the world is not only rational, but also full of situations and human behavior which must be appreciated and understood by quite different, and again - to the ENTJ – often seemingly absurd criteria.
A healthy personality needs to have a good balance between its dominant and auxiliary functions. For an ENTJ, dominant Extraverted Thinking needs to be well-supported by their auxiliary Introverted Intuitive function. If Introverted Intuition exists only to support the intellectual rationale created by Extraverted Thinking, then neither function is being used to its full potential.
Introverted Intuition is the ENTJ’s access to their inner world, to the information that could tell them how the world is affecting them. Because it is introverted, its images arise from the subjective depths of the mind, and contain all that the ENTJ has not considered within their strictly rational and object oriented view of the world. Introverted Intuition provides the personally biased information the ENTJ needs to balance this world view and protect the ENTJ from being totally swallowed up by their selfless and yet single minded attachment to facts, figures and a rationale they accept only from the world outside themselves. Because this inner information is often opposed to the ENTJ’s strongly held ideas it is often rejected, or if accepted, turned outward to make negative judgments about external situations or the behavior of others, rather than seen as a corrective balance to the ENTJ’s own attitudes and behavior.
Solutions
To grow as an individual, the ENTJ needs to recognize the role Intuition plays in their life, and learn to understand its language. In particular the ENTJ needs to realize that their intuitive function is not directed outward to the world, that its images are personal, subjective and relate directly to the way the ENTJ’s inner self is being affected by both the outside world and their own behavior.
Introverted Intuition is not an obvious process to understand, and quite unlike the rational, straightforward thinking the ENTJ is used to. Nevertheless, if understood and fully utilized to support thinking, it can make the ENTJ the most outwardly effective and productive of all the personality types. For this reason it is essential to allow this gift to become what it can be, rather than limiting its talents and allowing it only to speak when it seems to agree with the ENTJ’s outwardly focused thinking. Below are a few specific suggestions to help you apply Introverted Intuition.
·When confronted by a situation which requires an important decision, try to put it off for long enough to be able to sit quietly with it. In doing so allow yourself to feel and see the images which arise in your mind regarding this situation. Try to set aside those which appear immediately as the products of your own beliefs and thinking, and regard the others closely. If these images and ideas were the opinions of people whose judgment you trusted implicitly, try to question them in your mind and find the reasons why they consider things in such a way.
·There are some people around you who always seem to know just which way to go or how things work or what the outcome of a certain situation will be without them seeming to have sufficient information to be able to do so. These people are intuitive types and their world is full of possibilities which they can immediately recognize as apt to certain situations. You also have this talent, but you have a habit of not following it, rather you prefer to think it out and find the options which “ought” to be correct. I placed ought in quotes for a very good reason here, for you know yourself how often things have developed in the direction you had an inkling of, but refused to accept without thinking. Try to let these immediate impressions have their moment and recognize them as true possibilities which ought to be examined more closely. Understand that they are not baseless images and ideas but rely upon valid sources of information which you simply screen out of your life by habit.
Living Happily in our World as an ENTJ
Some ENTJs have difficulty fitting into our society. Their problems are generally associated with a strongly dogmatic and overly rational approach to life, coupled with an almost total lack of ability to understand the needs of others. Where such a strongly expressing difficulty arises, the ENTJ finds themselves constantly embattled by a world which refuses to conform to their ideals and creates situations in which the ENTJ is out of their depth. Such situations are often met by the ENTJ with such a childish emotionality that others are put off and isolate the ENTJ emotionally. Such ENTJ’s often find themselves without friends, and with business partners or employees who are unwilling to engage the ENTJ upon any matter other than strictly task related questions. Such behavior in others only serves to bring out underlying sentiments in the ENTJ which, via their badly adapted intuitive function, speak to them of plots, nastiness and covert obstructive behavior on the part of others. Suffice to say, such suspicions and childish sentiments coupled with dogmatic demands to conform to the ENTJ’s own way of seeing the world can soon destroy families and close relationships.
It is incumbent upon the ENTJ to break the circle of such behavior by allowing their Introverted Intuition a place in their life. Through attention to this function the ENTJ can discover a path to understanding and recognizing the effects not only their own behavior has upon others, but also the greater possibilities which lie within themselves for not only a harmonious relationship with others, but also a greater sense of what might be best for themselves.
Understanding the feeling needs and judgments of others is not an easy task for the ENTJ, but through their Intuitive function they can find images and ideas which - whilst not speaking directly to the feeling judgments of others – might allow them to see outside the strictly rational circle of their world view in such a way as to recognize that there is indeed a different perspective which must be taken account of.
Written by Robert G. Heyward. Original article.