Most ENFJs share a common interpersonal style and set of challenges.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Gregory Park, Ph.D.
Author
Most ENFJs share a similar interpersonal style, and this style impacts most of their relationships, including those with friends, families, work colleagues, and romantic partners.
For comparisons between ENFJs and other types, jump straight to these personality type comparisons.
Your interpersonal style describes your social tendencies in terms of dominance, submissiveness, warmth, and coldness. This style impacts how you interact with others, and in turn, it can affect how they act around you.
The circular graph below shows the average interpersonal style of ENFJs. The vertical, up-down axis shows their style in terms of dominance, with a highly assertive style at the top (Assured-Dominant) and a highly passive style at the bottom (Unassured-Submissive).
The horizontal, left-right axis shows their style in terms of warmth, with a cold and impersonal style on the left (Cold-Aggressive) and a friendly, empathetic manner on the right (Warm-Agreeable).
The shaded blue area shows the average interpersonal style of ENFJs across eight dimensions. Notice the areas where the blue area extends closer to the outer edges of the circle. These are the aspects that most heavily influence ENFJs’ interactions.
ENFJs’ high agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion combine to create a trusting, reliable, and friendly interpersonal style.
Ready to see yourself clearly?
See an incredibly detailed analysis of your unique traits, strengths, and interests
To summarize the graph above, three aspects most heavily influence ENFJs’ interpersonal style:
Most ENFJs are both comfortable with themselves and in their general perception of other people. Their natural self-confidence and trusting nature yields an optimism about new relationships, and this positive outlook allows them to easily create and maintain close relationships.
ENFJs tend to view themselves with healthy positivity and tend not to be overly preoccupied about how others see them, enabling ENFJs to comfortably take risks in starting up new relationships or ending unhealthy ones.
ENFJs often support, openly sympathize, and actively offer help to others. At their best, ENFJs are gentle sympathizers, who are easily trusted and accepted
ENFJs may be overly revealing and have difficulty being alone. At their worst, ENFJs can require too much attention and admiration from others and be excessively involved in the affairs of others
ENFJs’ warm and friendly nature tends to minimize many common interpersonal problems, but these same strengths can create issues in heavy doses.
Some ENFJs may report that they feel overly responsible for others, and they may notice that they are overly involved in other people’s lives, albeit with the best intentions. They may need to occasionally restrain themselves from trying to change others too much.
ENFJs naturally want to engage and relate to others around them, and they may have a difficult time simply holding themselves back. They may sometimes regret being too eager to create a connection with someone and catch themselves revealing a bit too much. Sitting on the sidelines, observing, or just being alone may be a challenge for some ENFJs.
For comparisons between ENFJs and other types from the 16 Personality typology, visit any of the type pairings below:
