Commander

What is the ENTJ Personality Type? All About the Commander

To recap our home page on the topic, ENTJs are:

• Assertive
• Forthright
• Highly social
• Aspirational
• Confident
• Logical thinkers
• Planners and organizers
• Mentors and mentees
• Future predictors

With these core traits in mind, let's take a deeper dive into the ENTJ (extraverted, intuitive, thinking, judging personality) with some of their more complicated qualities.

Quirks of the ENTJ personality

Hard and fast judgments

Some ENTJs can be prone to making snap judgments of both the situations they encounter and the people they meet. This can be a double-edged sword, depending upon the insight of a particular ENTJ.

If an ENTJ is excellent at reading people and situations, these judgments can be a great asset for themselves and others. This type of ENTJ can act as a compass of intuition, giving useful guidance in difficult or complicated situations.

On the other hand, if an ENTJ’s judgments are too often incorrect, this can have various negative impacts. For the ENTJ themselves, finding that judgments or decisions they’ve made are wrong can be destabilizing to their sense of control, which causes them emotional upset. For others, they may find themselves unfairly judged by an ENTJ and feel hurt by their outspoken and erroneous assessment.

Emotional engagement

There’s a common misconception regarding the ENTJ’s capability to emotionally engage in a healthy way. Because ENTJs favor thinking and objective rationality above feeling and subjective emotion, some assume that ENTJs aren’t particularly skilled at dealing with their own emotions and (even more so) the emotions of others.

In some cases, this is correct. An unhealthy ENTJ can be dismissive of emotions and come off as cold and calculated. However, if you find an ENTJ with a surplus of empathy and an interest in psychology (perhaps the kind of ENTJ who might be browsing this site!), you’ll find that they can be very well-tuned to dealing with emotional difficulty.

A healthy ENTJ’s intellect, assertiveness, and forward-thinking nature make them adept at unpacking ways to overcome emotional problems. In particular, they tend to be able to calmly break down the steps that one must take to get into a healthier frame of mind or situation.

Enthusiastic conversationalist

ENTJs are excellent at picking apart and debating ideas with others. These ideas will usually be practical in nature, like how to renovate a house, organize a company merger, or raise a child. Yet some ENTJs do gravitate toward abstract concepts, such as ethical questions or philosophical notions. Either way, if you like intensive engagement and can keep up with an ENTJ in conversation, you’re likely to have a stimulating time sharing ideas with them.

All ENTJs love to challenge others in conversation, though not necessarily in a negative sense. They enjoy changing others’ ways of thinking and, at best, finding a middle ground that neither party initially expected. Whether an ENTJ themselves likes to be challenged in conversation will largely depend on their level of respect for the style of discourse with which they’re being engaged.

Careerist spirit

ENTJs have a combination of traits that make them especially career-focused. Their aspiration and respect for hierarchy give them clear, structured goals to work toward in terms of promotions and esteemed positions. Meanwhile, their assertiveness means they’ll be good with heavy workloads and dynamic work environments.

As a colleague, most ENTJ will be an energized blast to work with. High energy and organized, a healthy ENTJ is an asset to any organization lucky enough to have them. Of course, an unhealthy ENTJ will bring problems into the workplace with their exceptionally high standards and insecure desire for control.

Signs of a healthy ENTJ

Friends

A healthy ENTJ will have a broad and stable network of friends and will be socializing regularly. A secondary sign of health you can detect from an ENTJ’s friend group is how varied these friends are in personality type. A more open-minded ENTJ will include many different types of people in their life.

Optimistic outlook

A healthy ENTJ will tend to look on the bright side in numerous ways. They will give more attention to people’s strengths than their weaknesses. They will look for the potential positive outcomes in stressful situations rather than fixating on negative fears. If it’s storming outside and the ENTJ has somewhere to be, most of the time they’ll grab their umbrella and push through the rain with a jovial attitude.

Working toward their potential

A healthy ENTJ may not have their dream life yet, but you can bet they’ll be making steps toward it on an almost daily basis. The nature of their ultimate goals is immaterial—the important thing here is trackable progress. Because this is so crucial to an ENTJs sense of well-being, and because they tend to have a focus on career, dead-end jobs are particularly harmful to an ENTJ. A healthy one will be looking for the exit very swiftly.

Good listening skills

The ENTJ who listens with patience, consideration, and empathy is almost always a healthy one. Listening well can negate some of the downfalls many ENTJs fall into, such as unfair judgment and self-absorption. If you meet an ENTJ who asks you a lot of questions and is genuinely interested in your perspective, then you’ll be smart to keep in contact with them.