ISTJ and Self Reliance

 
ISTJ’s have a strong sense of responsibility and great loyalty to the organisations, families and relationships in their lives. They work with steady energy to fulfil commitments as stated and on time. They go to almost any trouble to complete anything they see as necessary but baulk at doing anyting that doesn’t make sense to them.

When we look to the archetypes of the ISTJ we find the Inspector, the Sentinel, the Caretaker, the Auditor, the Anchor, the Tatician. These roles are the guardians of right order and propietary action in society and culture.

The character of the ISTJ is methodical, respectful, objective, resilient and logical. These behaviours are indicative of their consistency, reliability, dependability.

ISTJ’s are driven by facts, dependability, standards, stability, and integrity. Facts and stated information or guidelines are gospel for ISTJ’s, for they form the boundaries of their action, their work, their goals and their outcomes.

Whilst ISTJ’s have an inferior function of Intuition, their creativity nonetheless takes the form of optimising, synthesizing, refining, mastery and systems innovation in their work, their objectives, their processes and their outcomes.

Human Values

Human values belong to human beings and form the order, structures and goals of human life. When individuals practice human values, their acts, their vision, their outcomes have a universal transcendence that affirms all that is good in human life. Human values create human flourishing wherein peoples might pursue their visions, passions, joys and hopes in a better today, tomorrow and in the future.

Human values are guides to action and behaviour which are found in all cultures, all societies, all times and in all places where human beings live out their lives. The five human values are Truth, Right Action, Love, Peace and Non-Violence. These five values are transcendental, eternal essences which elevate human life to its highest expression, its highest capacity, the fulness of what it means to be human.

Human values are our principles that guide our actions. Values are our codes of internal conduct, the guides upon which we live our lives and make decisions. Our first values are given to us by our parents. These are added to by those values modelled for us by our teachers, our community, our workplaces and our peer groupings. While the family shapes our morality and our values, these guides by the family are often sourced from our faith or belief. It is from these that we select the principles which guide our choices and our actions.

Right Action and Self Reliance

When we say self-reliance is a sub-value or expression of right action, we are intimating that right action can be identified by many of its elements or sub-values such as co-operation, consideration, conscience, dedication, discipline and initiative, to name a few. People who practice right action seek the welfare of the group, the village, the community, the country or the whole of mankind. Ideas, principles, laws, customs, codes, habits, actions—all are judged on the twin points of intention and consequence. In this manner humanity practices right action.

When we say someone is self-reliant, we acknowledge they are self-managing, resilient, reliable and independent workers. Self-reliant people are have authenticity, mastery of their skillbase, capacity for being a self-starter and are resourceful and people of integrity. Self-reliant people possess trust in themselves, practice critical thinking, are resilient and have accountability for their actions. The benefits of being self-reliant are steadiness, self-determination, capacity, confidence and autonomy. They may also be interdependent persons who share knowledge and skills with their peers.

The mindmap below illustrates the range and scope of what being self-reliant is, as well as what it is not, what the limits of being self-reliant are, and the challenges and the opposites of this value.
 

 

ISTJ Preferences

ISTJ’s use their sensing to gather the data, the facts. Their sensing laps up routine and consistency, they can be most accurate and have an extensive internal memory.

ISTJ’s use their Thinking primarily internally to see the logic underlying the facts. Their thinking revels in structure, efficient processing of the data producing the desired results. Their minds seem to work almost like computers, organising data, reasoning impersonally and objectively. They make rational decisions based on a great deal of data.

The Feeling function in the ISTJ is where we encounter ethics, morality, boundaries and loyalty. While the feeling function is not clearly visible to others, it nonetheless is present and an important internal guide to the actions of the ISTJ. Tread on any one of these and watch out for the explosion! ISTJ’s need to learn how to express their feelings, desires and values without obliterating other persons. It can come over a wee bit strong, you might say.

It can be hard for the ISTJ to see the sense in needs that differ widely from their own; but, once they are convinced that something matters to a person they care about, that need becomes a fact. They then go to great lengths to meet that need even while continuing to think it doesn’t make sense.

Intuition is not the strongest point of any ISTJ and can be a place of stress. Intuition produces imagined possibilities, catastrophes, awful outcomes and anxiety about what might happen. One ISTJ used his intuition to scribe about the Gospel of Horror!

Nonetheless, the human shadow is frequently the source of redemption, and so intuition can be open to change, can be a source of growth, if sufficient nurturance and objectivity can be kept within scope of thought, word and action. Self-control, openness to the night-sea journey of the hero, the rites of passage to maturity and becoming one’s own hero are all fruits of exercising shadow intuition with proper care and self-nurturance.

Summary:

• The values of the ISTJ are consistency and stability
• The roles of the ISTJ are custodian, steward, board member, caretaker and fiduciary
• The goals of the ISTJ are trust, confidence, accuracy, reliability, resilience
• The habits of the ISTJ are responsibility, steadiness, structures, loyalty, getting the results
• The needful feedback for the ISTJ are to not treat people with their Thinking function, but to pause and reflect that people have feelings, desires and aspirations and are are not compliant automatons. Ethics, morality, integrity and leadership all scope to include how people might feel about your decisions

 
We are all human, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and like the shadow development example, we do well in some parts of our lives, and in other parts of our lives, we do not have such well-developed skills. This is not any judgement, it is simply explaining that we are all different; we see the world in different ways, we live our lives according to our values, and that everyone has preferences in gathering data, evaluating and making decisions, and living out our their lives.