Soft Skills, Personality Traits, and the INFJ Type

Soft Skills: Essential Attributes for Success

Soft skills are a set of interpersonal and personal attributes that are not necessarily quantifiable or measurable, but significantly determine work performance and career success. They encompass how you interact with others and manage yourself.

Key Soft Skills Categories

• Self-Management Skills:
  • Self-awareness
  • Emotional management
  • Self-confidence
  • Patience
  • Stress management
  • Resilience
  • Critical thinking and problem-solving
  • Persistence and perseverance
• People Skills:
  • Communication skills
  • Presentation skills
  • Facilitating skills
  • Interviewing skills
  • Selling skills
  • Ability to think/work under pressure
  • Influence (unintentional) / Persuasion skills (intentional)
  • Teamwork skills
  • Leadership
  • Interpersonal relationship skills
  • Negotiation skills

Valued Personality Traits in the Workplace

Personality traits are a set of identifiable characteristics that embody an individual. They represent your habitual patterns of behavior (how you act in a specific situation), temperament (the way you react), and emotions (the way you feel).

Companies highly value the following traits:

• Proactive
• Open-minded
• Disciplined
• Flexible
• Honest
• Service attitude
• Responsible
• Creative
• Energetic
• Independent
• Organized
• Good attitude and appearance
• Punctual
• Ethical
• Innovative

The INFJ Personality Type: Vision and Practicality

INFJs are distinguished by both their complexity of character and the unusual range and depth of their talents. Strongly humanitarian in outlook, INFJs tend to be idealists, and because of their preference for closure and completion (J preference), they are generally "doers" as well as dreamers. This rare combination of vision and practicality often results in INFJs taking a disproportionate amount of responsibility in the various causes to which so many of them seem to be drawn.

INFJs are deeply concerned about their relations with individuals as well as the state of humanity at large. They are sometimes mistaken for extroverts because they appear so outgoing and are so genuinely interested in people—a product of the Feeling function they most readily show to the world.

Usually, self-expression comes more easily to INFJs on paper, as they tend to have strong writing skills.

Key INFJ Functions

• Extraverted Feeling: Expresses a range of emotions and opinions of, for, and about people.
• Introverted Thinking: Turned toward the subject. INFJs may appear most aloof when this function is operative.
• Extraverted Sensing: INFJs are twice blessed with clarity of vision, both internal and external. They possess inner vision drawn to the forms of the unconscious and external sensing perception, which readily takes hold of worldly objects.