ENFJs' idealism, reliability, and warmth make them compassionate friends, partners, and leaders.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Gregory Park, Ph.D.
Author
This series of short articles touches on several aspects of the ENFJ personality type.
You can jump straight to any section by clicking the links below, or keep reading to learn about the definition of the ENFJ personality type.
ENFJ stands for Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Judging.
In the popular Myers-Briggs or 16-personalities tradition, all personalities belong to one of 16 types. Each type is defined by preferences across these four dimensions:
Here’s how to understand the ENFJ’s place on all four dimensions:
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ENFJs have an extraverted attitude or orientation.
ENFJs tend to focus more on the objective world of people and their external environment, while an introverted attitude leads to a greater focus on the inner, subjective world of concepts and ideas.
ENFJs prefer to use the cognitive function of intuition over sensing when taking in information about the world.
This dimension, intuition vs. sensing, is known as the perceiving function in MBTI theory.
Intuition refers to perception from sources other than the sensory system. ENFJs prefer to use their perception of abstract patterns, connections, “gut feeling” about a situation, rather than relying more heavily on perception directly through the sensory system (sensing).
ENFJs prefer using their feeling function when judging information and assessing values and needs among people.
This dimension, thinking vs. feeling, is known as the judging function in MBTI theory.
By prefering feeling over thinking as their judging function, ENFJs lean on their acute understanding of others’ emotions, desires, and perceptions.
As a judging type, ENFJs tend to present their judging function of feeling to the external world.
Because they present their feeling function externally, other people see ENFJs as sensitive and empathetic.
The four-letter types from MBTI theory encode each type’s attitudes and preferred cognitive functions.
For the ENFJ,
From this, we can determine how the ENFJ prefers the four cognitive functions of intuition, sensing, thinking, and feeling:
Why? ENFJs have an extraverted attitude (E) and a judging attitude (J), so they present their judging function (F) to the external world.
Like all extraverted types, ENFJs prefer an orientation to the outer world, so they present their strongest cognitive function (F) to the outer world and other people.
ENFJs’ secondary function, intuition, is the one they rely on more heavily in their inner, subjective world. This counterbalances their extraverted primary function.
In MBTI theory, the tertiary function is the opposite of the secondary function, which for ENFJs is sensing.
Lastly, the inferior function is the opposite of the primary function, which for ENFJs is thinking. The inferior function in all personality types is the least developed function.
According to the MBTI, somewhere between 1% and 7% of all people will be classified as an ENFJ.
For comparisons between ENFJs and other types from the 16 Personality typology, visit any of the type pairings below:
