About the Author
Jolie Tunnell is an author, freelance writer and blogger with a background in administration and education. Raising a Variety Pack of kids with her husband, she serves up hard-won wisdom with humor, compassion and insight. Jolie is an ISTJ and lives in San Diego, California where she writes historical mysteries. Visit her at
jolietunnell.com
ISTJs are aptly described as the “
Inspectors
” of the
Myers and Briggs personality system
and if you can remember that, everything else makes perfect sense.
Our thought process, our behaviors, our decisions, all come from a place that looks at the world as a whole and constantly places individual pieces into their logical positions therein. In general, we inspect things in order to improve and maintain them.
Personality isn’t something we change; it’s something we embrace. It’s a tricky proposition though, if we let the stereotypes of others define us instead of using our own personal understanding of ourselves to remind us who we are.
Type A Personality. It looks good on a resume. It sings of straight A’s on your report card. And, like it does in the alphabet, it implies good things to come while standing at the head of any line.
As a matter of fact, if you’ve tossed the phrase “I’m a Type A personality” out as a brag at your latest job interview, the implications are clearly defined in your mind: you are a multi-tasking, hard-working, results-driven individual who will put the job first. In your eyes, there is no “second”. You are driven to succeed and win.
If you’ve been caught singing in the shower lately, cheering on The Great British Bake Off, or out with a girlfriend at one of those “sip n dip” enterprises where you paint a scene on an actual canvas with actual paint while drinking wine, then you, my fellow
ISTJ
, could be in actual denial. Or tears. Either way, you have discovered that somewhere inside your tidy, alphabetized life, you have room for a little creative flair.
Loyal and loving, cupcake-baking
ISTJ
smart girl seeks educated gentleman for romance and adventure. Must appreciate traditions and family values. Ethnicity irrelevant. Kindly submit recent photo with reply. Grammar and punctuation will be evaluated.
“I need your help,” she said over the phone, “What should I do?”
My hesitation is staged, as is the question I ask her in return, “What do you think you want to do?”
I’m a Thinker/Judger with a healthy dose of Sensing thrown on top. My girlfriend is doing something I almost never do: ask someone for help with a decision I have to make.
Professional communication is vital in the business world. Sensing-Judging types -- the SJs of the 16-type personality system -- are adept at communicating important information clearly and concisely, and use it as a tool to move tasks along or educate others. Analyzing the overall goals of projects, we are quick to spot and fill in any gaps in information and use it to make sound, quick decisions.
The Sensing-Judging or “SJ” personality type is ideal for certain career tracks and vocations that involve the practical application of knowledge in a structured way. Libraries, laboratories, spreadsheets and engines, call to us like sirens. We are masters at pulling together vast amounts of minutiae and arranging them into cohesive and efficient wholes. When we focus in on a profession, we tend to become “Masters of One”.
Categories:
ISTJ
,
ESTJ
,
ISFJ
,
ESFJ
My husband and I were married in 1988. While you do the math, I want to mention in passing that we had not taken any personality tests at the time, so we were blissfully unaware that we were both TJs. The fact that he had firmly decided against getting married before we were both twenty years old should have raised a flag, but at the time it seemed like common sense.
Categories:
INTJ
,
ENTJ
,
ISTJ
,
ESTJ
It’s scary that my kids are so radically different from me. For a person who lines up her cans alphabetically in the pantry, it’s pretty harsh. This ISTJ submitted identical genetic samples at conception, then raised them all in the same house with the same rules with unvaried routines…and they are from five different planets. And that’s only if Pluto counts. What you need to know is that your little one was born with a complete personality. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
THE FINE PRINT:
Myers-Briggs® and MBTI® are registered trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc., which has no affiliation with this site. Truity offers a free
personality test
based on Myers and Briggs' types, but does not offer the official MBTI® assessment. For more information on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator® assessment, please go
here
.
The Five Love Languages® is a registered trademark of The Moody Bible Institute of Chicago, which has no affiliation with this site. You can find more information about the five love languages
here
.
