ESTJ Personality Type, Strengths & Weaknesses

What are the traits of the MBTI, Extroverted, Sensing, Thinking Judger, or ESTJ personality type, including strengths and weaknesses? What are their ideal career paths? Also, listing famous and fictional ESTJ characters.

Sensing Judgers are traditionalists in temperament, and extremely practical. They like order and organization, and are quick to make decisions. With dominant (Thinking), the ESTJ types are blunt with their words, logical and rational. They are assertive and cut straight to the point, no messing about with theories or what is hypothetical. Being extroverted gives them an outward focus, they pay attention to people, and gain energy from being around them.

ESTJs generally act and dress in a conservative manner; they wear perfectly tailored suits or perfectly ironed and fitted clothing. Their extroverted side may push them towards wearing brighter colours. For entertainment, they prefer movies and books that are more realistic, and stories based on real events.

ESTJ Personality Type Careers

They like to organize people, likely to take up management roles, or roles in law enforcement or the military. They’re generally suited to jobs that involve being practical and analytical, and that require good attention to detail. Career examples: driver, pilot, judge, police officer, chef, sales, marketing, and engineer.

ESTJ Personality Functions

• Dominant – Thinking (Te)

• Auxiliary – Sensing (Si)

• Tertiary – Intuition (Ne)

• Inferior – Feeling (Fi)

ESTJ Personality Type Strengths

Positive & Outgoing

ESTJs are mostly friendly and talkative personality types, and generally positive in nature. They are energized in group settings and generally gravitate towards people.

Honest

With dominant thinking, honesty becomes a priority. They have a natural temperamental impulse to be straight forward and truthful, even if that truth is not always welcomed.

Decisive

Once a plan or decision is made, an ESTJ will stick to it until the job or task is completed or carried out.

Good Organisers

They have a passion for organizing and order, which makes them very dedicated, therefore very good at it. They have a psychological desire for things to be in order and symmetrical.

Hard Workers

Temperamentally, ESTJs often place work before play. Working or being productive actually calms and relaxes them.

ESTJ Personality Type Weaknesses

Rigid Thinking

They are not naturally creative; they could be described as linear in their thinking. This makes them focused and decisive, but not very open or flexible. They often have difficulty with change. This linear and rigid thinking also accounts for them being judgmental and generally quick to judge, and those judgments are often inflexible. They’re also more likely to follow rules and those in authority without question.

Excessive Status Seeking

This comes from extroverted thinking and sensing. They’re very outwardly and externally focused. Paying attention to others and generally being competitive in nature. They wish to climb up the social status hierarchy, and one way to do that is to be in direct competition with others.

Cold & Aloof

The ESTJ preference for being logical means they can seem unemotional and non-compassionate. They prefer to be honest rather than sparing somebody’s feelings. Generally, emotions take a back seat, unless they’re under stress or suffering in some way.

Emotional Imbalances

As feeling is their interior function, they can have difficulty with regulating and controlling emotions in stressful situations. They will also likely suffer more initially from relationship breakups, or the loss of someone close.

Other Traits

The ESTJ personality can be intelligent and quick thinking. However, their temperament is geared for the here and now, they are not likely to engage or be interested in deep intellectual conversation.

ESTJ Famous & Fictional Characters

• Judge Judy
• Frank Sinatra
• Sonia Sotomayor
• Miranda Bailey (Grey’s Anatomy)
• Boromir (The Lord of the Rings)
• Robb Stark (Game of Thrones)
• Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter)
• Sherlock Holmes
• Princess Leia (Star Wars)
• Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones)
• Homelander (The Boys)