INTJ Personality Type Guide

Why You Need to Know Your Personality Type 

Firstly, it’s important to understand that personality typing is not designed to pigeonhole a person or to say that one personality is better than another. Each personality has its unique characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. An empowering personal development tool, personality typing will help you to:   

• Understand your thoughts, feelings, and motivations 
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses  
• Make smarter education and career choices    
• Be confident in a job interview
• Become more productive at work  
• Maintain happy and healthy relationships  

Introduction to Personality Typology  

The road to modern personality typology was first paved by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. Based on Jung’s work, psychologists Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Briggs created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI identifies 16 different personalities, and it’s one of the most popular methods of personality typing today.  

To further explain how people differ in the way they use their cognitive functions/preferences, Myers and Briggs use the following preferences for their self-evaluation personality assessment. 

1. Introversion (I) or Extraversion (E). Where you get your energy from. Do you draw your energy from your inner world or the external world? 
2. Sensing (S) or Intuition (N). How you receive information. Do you prefer to use your senses to receive information from your surroundings, or use your intuition to interpret and add your meaning? 
3. Thinking (T) or Feeling (F). How you make decisions. Do you take a logical approach, or do you prefer to look at people and circumstances before deciding? 
4. Judging (J) or Perceiving (P): How you interact with the outside world. Do you prefer to have things decided and organized or do you like to remain open to new information and options? 

The letters that are assigned to each of the above preferences make up a four-letter code for each of the 16 personality types. This simple coding system shows you how each of the four preferences interacts, and which one you tend to use first.  

How you use these preferences can change over time and some of these preferences may be used more often than others.  

For example, the INTJ uses the following preferences in this order: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judging. 

INTJs are introverts 

As introverts, INTJs focus on and draw energy from their inner world, and they prefer a solitary life.  

Introverts are often misunderstood due to their reserved manner and others may label them as being too quiet or even shy. Don’t be put off by their apparent aloofness or assume they don’t enjoy being around people. They like to make meaningful connections with a small group of close friends and will need some time alone to get re-energized.

Personality Profile of the INTJ and Characteristics 

The INTJ personality is one of the rarest personality types, making up approximately 1 to 4% of the U.S. population. Like the INFJ personality, which is rare as well, INTJs have some contradictory characteristics that are opposites to each other, but despite this, INTJs put their traits to good use. 

INTJs are logical, analytical, and rational but also imaginative and creative. They are mild-mannered yet determined to reach their goals. Their view of the future is optimistic but sometimes pessimistic. While they prefer order and stability, they can adapt to changing circumstances when it’s necessary. 

The INTJ personality is also referred to as the Architect, Strategist, or Planner because these types of people enjoy thinking about theoretical data, concepts, and ideas. They possess an extraordinary ability to understand technical information and how complex systems work and are extremely organized. 

INTJs are perfectionists and they pursue excellence in everything they do. While excellence is important, meeting their unrealistic high expectations can put a lot of pressure on other people, and INTJs can be overly critical of others who make mistakes.   

Fear of failure can be a problem for INTJs, so they tend to procrastinate over things that are unfamiliar to them. However, they usually have more successes than failures as they like to improve themselves by learning new things, adding to their skill set, and thinking about future possibilities.

While they are optimists, they can get pessimistic about what may happen in the future, so they need to have reality checks. 

INTJs are task-orientated, they are uncomfortable expressing their own emotions and they can be blunt and even rude in their interactions with people. However, INTJs just want to bring out the best in others and they will be friendly once you get to know them.

Cognitive functions 

Intuition 

Intuition is very important for INTJs as it helps them to receive information from their surroundings and determine future outcomes. They interpret and add their meaning to this information by using their insightful impressions and perceived patterns they have picked up from the external world. 

Some INTJs will explain their intuition as having a ‘hunch’ or a ‘gut feeling’ about a situation or person and the astonishing thing is, they are usually right about their ‘hunches’. 

Their intuition may tell them that a certain person is not genuine or has suspect motives, and an INTJ may even warn you to stay away from that person.  

Thinking  

INTJs have sharp minds, and they make decisions based on logic and reason. 

They place great emphasis on intelligence and objective information rather than subjective emotions and they prefer rational explanations for events. INTJs have total confidence in their cerebral abilities which can make others view them as stubborn and dogmatic, but these ingenious thinkers just want to make the world a better place for everyone. 

Judging  

INTJs need to feel in control of a situation, and they value order and stability. By making careful judgments about situations and people, they can live the orderly life they desire.