ISFP – The Explorer | Cognitive Orientation Guidebook

You are ISFP –

The Explorer!

As the ISFP Explorer, you immerse yourself into the experience of every moment, finding joy in the little things and keeping them safe.

There are numerous stereotypes and misconceptions about personality typing, but here we’ll get to the root of it all: Cognition, the underlying thoughts and desires that make you who you are in your own individual way. You think the way you do for a reason. Your secret desires, interests, and fears make sense. Learning to understand how you think, why, and what you can do with it, naturally helps everything in life go more smoothly.

Cognitive typing is not a listing of simplistic limits or divisive caricatures. It’s a set of tools, an open-ended guide to help you better understand everything that’s already been going on inside you. This equips you to derive ever greater benefit, insight, and enjoyment out of being the incredibly complex and unique person you really are.

So, what does it really mean to be a cognitive ISFP?

You’ve probably run into the letters ISFP before, maybe online or in books you’ve read. Unfortunately, the way most sources define those letters is often a little shaky, focusing on behaviors instead of cognition. But behaviors change throughout a person’s life, and two people might do the same behaviors for very different reasons. This leads to a difficulty in really nailing down who is and isn’t ISFP, causing subjective arguments on the matter all over the internet. Worse, it leads to simplified misconceptions about what ISFP actually means. Getting back to the roots of cognition, your underlying thoughts and reasons why you do what you do, allows us to cut past all the simplifications and subjectivity.

Perhaps when you opened up this document and saw ISFP, you immediately remembered unpleasant stereotypes that certainly don’t apply to you. ISFPs are often portrayed as moody, naïve, reclusive, overly soft and sensitive, and even stupid, so you may have been tempted to think you couldn’t possibly be ISFP. Well good, because those sorts of oversimplifications are simply untrue. They’re stereotypes that have nothing at all to do with cognition, coming from shaky definitions of the letters that end up contradicting themselves and falling apart under the rigors of experience. Human thought is far more complex than that!

Being a cognitive ISFP does not place any limits whatsoever on your abilities, talents, career aptitude, behaviors, or attitudes. You can decide who you want to be. As you come to understand the way you already cognate, you’ll naturally end up getting out of your own way, striding forward as the person you’ve always been rather than sabotaging yourself by trying to hide who you really want to be.

These letters are merely a representation of the way you naturally approach the world. In every thought, every experience, and every interaction, we each make unconscious choices about what we’re going to focus on most. These unwitting choices display what matters to us the most. Being an ISFP means that deep down, what matters most to you is exploring and treasuring each moment and protecting the things you love. Your mind constantly chooses what to focus on first, based on this desire that reflects the core of everything it means to be you.

This leaves all behaviors, attitudes, and abilities open to you, yet you will always end up approaching them in a way that reflects your deepest desire. All the letters and all their effects are simply results of what your mind naturally prioritizes in life, based on what you want most. Now let’s get into defining those letters, so you can know what you’re working with, get past all the simplified limitations, and just be you!