Hidden Personality Traits of ISTPs

The ISTP Man
Enneagram Type 8 With A 9 Wing
ISTP: Introverted, Sensing, Thinking, Perceiving Dominant Introverted Thinking with Extroverted Sensing.

ISTP defines his self-worth by his ability or inability to perform some tool-wielding task at home or at work. He don’t care as much to know what makes you tick because he’s too busy finding out what makes some practical machine work. He won’t stand for your analyzing him and trying to talk about it with him.
He’s a trouble shooter who loves putting out fires and crises symbolic or real on a moment’s notice. He is ready to bolt, batter, hunt and play with his weapons and cars. ISTP is so skillful with tools that he’ll design weapons (or run an interior design and drafting company_ so he can get his target practice and meet crises head on.

Under Stress: The Darkest Side of ISTP in Marriage
He’ll learn on his own hands-on, before he’ll read the directions in some book. The ISTP male flies his marriage by the seat of his pants and often tries to patch his wife’s needs like he does his symbolic tools and cars with a whack on the side and a paperclip.
This man secretly loves his freedom and often dreams of racing cars. Sometimes, like the ESTP, he sees women as interchangeable as peripheral computer parts-waiting for the right deal or new variation on a theme-a different twist, a different dance to a drummer.
ESTP and ISTP men sometimes like artisan or intuitive, perceiving belly dancers and other performing women who work nights-where they can meet their girlfriends after the performance in her nightclub. After marriage, they may become jealous and possessive, make her quit her job, and then restlessly go on to the next woman entertainer-or lady mechanic.
This non-talkative tool man, technician/repairer, computer programmer, pilot or weapons master is the man to fly off with into such projects as carpentry, kitchen remodeling, building fancy stables, designing the interior of big corporations which he sees similar to putting out oil well fires, and earning a million as a contractor. He has lots of exciting ideas for useful things.
If your interest is academic, and work with people instead of being interested in how things work, under enough stress he could say you are stupid, flighty and impractical.
He is good at computer drafting, building weapons, piloting or driving vehicles, and helping architects. So you might want him as your assistant if you are an architect or interior designer because he is so good with his hands.
The ISTP man works or builds by the seat of his pants on the fly, rather than by blueprints and plans and makes a neat computer programmer. Too bad he won’t use those skills on you except to whip you into submission if he senses that you are a self-mutilating masochist under his strength. This freedom-loving, world-traveling hunter wants more of his excursions away from home. He is a thinking man as long as it is practical and useful in the here and now.

The ISTP Woman
Enneagram Type 8 with 6 wing
The ISTP woman is a disobedient, insubordinate, optimistic woman, spending and shopping until it hurts someone else’s wallet. She is a risk-taking impulsive “lady driver” who prefers action to sweet talk. She wants no obligations. She exploits and capitalizes on her lover’s vulnerable points and on every opportunity to take charge of her man. Hers is a tool-centered marriage.
The ISTP woman is action-seeking, impulsive, and self-contained in her own world of purposeful insubordination. This woman knows no fear, and will just as soon fly a plane around the world to break a speed record as put herself against every casino in Las Vegas.
Her life is all about beating the odds, taking the risk, and thriving on an inner kind of excitement from sky diving to a new product design. Her action-hunger gives her an explosive temper if she is not obeyed, particularly by an NF child. ISTP mothers have higher incidences of child abuse than other types, particularly abuse of timid and fearful INFP and ISFJ children.
Some mothers of abused children with multiple personality disorder and other dissociative emotional illnesses had ISTP mothers who tortured them, locked them in closets, etc. without even realizing how their punishments affected their children’s feelings.
Impact-hunger surrounds the ISTP woman. To satisfy her thirst for making an impact on the world, she may go in for fast motion-in ice skating competitions, athletics, driving trucks or cars, or in any type of fast-moving competition with men or other women equally athletic or technically artistic.
ISTP women also make the best computer programmers, provided that they are dealing with concrete programs and not abstract theoretical analysis. Each day, the ISTP woman needs to get high on excitement of some type. Many become ski instructors or work with dangerous tools, or get a job washing high-rise hotel windows.
ISTP women frequently compete for jobs as firefighters or apply to work on the police force, or like ISTJ women, seek a military career, although rules bother them, and they may soon leave the military to open their own appliance repair business or go into computerized drafting careers or robotics technology.
In husband-hunting, the ISTP woman is a risk-taker, moving into the fast lane among the ski instructors, or others who need a faster pace to tune up an under stimulated nervous system.
Tools are what is most often found in the ISTP woman’s hands. The ISTP woman knows by the time she is in elementary school what kind of a soul mate she wants and what kind of work she will do.
The kind of man an ISTP woman wants is a male ESTP or ENTP, an adventurer and a promoter of her dreams. She may become a lady trucker, steer a tugboat, or drive a bus all day, but the man she comes home to must offer her adventure, excitement and risk.
The ISTP woman with a high degree of intelligence may become a surgeon and wield a scalpel like a warrior, fighting a battle against disease. She is a virtuoso in whatever she uses to get high-a career as an orchestra conductor, technical artist or world-class ice skater.
Every man she meets is bent to her impulse as if he were another tool she wields to manipulate her world of chance and game. She could be a sharpshooter who finds her soul mate in a promoter, bounty hunter or a physician, asking her mate for separate tours on her honeymoon so she can indulge in her desire to roam free.
She tires of a man quickly, even after marriage, and grows impatient with her children at times, if she sees no way to find excitement in them. Her search for the right man is performed as if she was an intelligence agent or spy, and often, she is. She is most likely to join the FBI in the hopes to find her man there, or in some substitute but similar organization.
Her pride is in her daring, bravery, and exceptional skills with tools and mechanical objects. This does not make a woman feminine in many men’s eyes, except in that of another ISTP or ESTP, who will promote her skills.
The best man for her is the restless ESTP or her own type. This man plays on her impulse to take off with him for Katmandu or Peru only because she needs to scratch where it itches to travel.
The ESTP man and the ISTP woman will both seek to get “high” on the excitement of whatever impulse of the moment titillates their prowess to manipulate some tool, design, plastic product or weapon.
The ISTP woman can be found as the single mother of five, who at any age, stands in a line all night to be first in putting in her application to work as a high-paying earthmover or crane operator. She is first to seek nontraditional work and nontraditional men.
She also can be an artist or a sculptor and seek her soul mate in her male mode. After all, Michaelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinvi have been said to display all ISTP characteristics.
If she works with computers as a graphic designer or programmer, the ISTP women is the first to sell modems to the man she’s romancing on her computer screen. This woman frequently seeks a mater through electronic bulletin board correspondence groups.
She looks to join groups where all her extroverted needs are taken care of. The ISTP woman, like the ISTJ, frequently joins the military to find a husband. She feels somehow the military will issue her a husband or make it easier to meet Mr. Right Personality by providing electronic mail pen pal clubs or job assignments where she will work with a male partner.
She frequently signs up to be trained as a helicopter pilot if she joins the military forces. Or she may work for a radio station as a co-pilot in traffic news broadcasting where she won’t have to speak, only drive the plane for the announcer.
The ISTP woman, if stereotyped, is the Harley-Davidson biker, the crop duster pilot, the gun collector or instructor of firearms safety, or the female hunting and fishing enthusiast, fencing teacher, coach or zoo breeder. Her life is about seeking thrills and chills in dangerous play. Any man “man” enough for an ISTP woman needs to meet her challenges and need to put risk and danger in playful fun.
She is a mountain climber because it is there. Her soul mate needs to be able to match her, maybe take her up Everest or Anna Purna while both are young enough to do the climb. Whatever she does during the day- from physician to deli-girl, on the side she will seek out thrills, risk and danger fearlessly.
She needs to meet her match and her challenge to keep her interest. An astronaut is about fine for her, or her equal in an adventurer. She is a loner who secretly sidles up to her own kind at the bar, at work, at play or at a sporting event, choosing the man who can move with her flawlessly through the tools she wields, with a minimum of small talk.
An ISFP man Is also appealing to her because he communicates more through actions than words. He shows rather than tells her where the action is. Forget the verbal approach to this woman.
Her man is as silent or as restless as she is. When she does talk, the conversation will be to the point and mostly about the tools she uses in her work, hobby or interest.
She also succeeds with the ENTP male, perhaps an archaeologist she can team up with to work on finding the missing link or a geologist or petroleum engineer she can work with out in the field. Let the ISTP woman lead with her realism. She seeks a soul mate who will join with her to seize the second and exploit that moment for whatever treasure can be squeezed out of the find.
The intelligent, trained ISTP woman makes a fine statistician, mathematician, or computer consultant dealing with practical matters. Her soul mate usually comes from the ranks of her job environment. Or she meets him on a climbing, surfing or ski vacation. The ISTP woman waits until her man has served out his usefulness to observe how useful he was to her. She has no time to figure out what makes her man work or what makes people tick.
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This woman is not above using physical torture on any man who hurts her, or destruction of property as a revenge technique. She is out to hurt and injure if she is hurt. She lives dangerously on the edge of her thrill-seeking play, and uses play as work.
Under great stress, the ISTP woman reacts like the ESTP man. The older she gets, the more she resembles the ESTP, and may even study to be a private eye in middle age, eventually using the techniques against her man or relatives that hurt her.
In her younger years, she may appear to be like the ISFP woman, loving to be out in nature, training animals, practicing her art and design or working with tools, perhaps as a sculptress. As she gets older and more hardened to a life of dangerous risk-taking, she uses her introverted thinking to plan ways to seek more thrills, to test her mate to his breaking point.
The optimistic ISTP woman, when put down by a pessimistic and controlling ISTJ or ESTJ mate, seeks her freedom, but not before the cat-and-mouse game commences. She is a great spender, getting even with a tight-fisted, miserly spouse. And she will get back at her SJ spouse first through his wallet, then as an avenger.
The ISTP woman loves to break the rules because they restrict her personal freedom and thrill-seeking. Any man or child who gets in her way becomes a rope and heavy stone around her neck to be discarded figuratively or literally.
The game takes precedence over life itself, over the tradition of home and hearth. She is a hungry huntress on the prowl, the cat-lady in a Batman-like movie out to defy her soul mate at every turn, except if he offers her the excitement and challenge of a new mountain to climb in the relationship and in reality.
With and ESFP man, she can create the special effects he needs to perform before an audience. Her good cheer, when not emotionally disturbed does not portray the possibility of a sadistic anger and unbridled rage lurking deep inside. She needs a man who is her equal in order to have any type of loyalty.
Love for her is a behavior consisting of having no obligations or laws that can’t be bent or broken on an impulse. Under stress, she will quickly leave the SJ man who confines her to duties.
The ISTP woman makes no promises to her soul mate that in any way restrict her freedom or make her feel boxed into a corner. Her life needs no man to complicate it and no complications coming from a man or children. However, as a mother of the family she plans and wants, the ISTP woman is trusting and generous, and in good cheer. She is receptive to friendship, as long as her soul mate fives her the longest rope ever woven by man.
An ISTP woman is shy and insensitive to her soul mate’s decisions. She is not aware of how her actions are affecting her lover’s feelings. Her undeveloped intuition pushes her to test her mate to see how he will hold up under the mass of facts and clues she has gathered about him. She is not so much cautions as she is ready to punish herself for not measuring up to her ability.
An extroverted man is seen as so prying and nosey, he gets on her nerves when he pries into her secret life of risk and dangerous moves. She holds back many secrets from her lover. Yet, the extraverted sensing man, an ESTP might be just what she needs to promote the visibility of her powerful inner strengths.
It is hard to get the ISTP woman to share her thoughts with her soul mate. She does not want him to judge her by her declining ability as she matures. She is so impersonal in love, that it is hard to tell when she is ready to walk out or about to begin a new, exciting phase of the relationship with action in another direction.
Usually, Enneagram type 4 with a 3 wing, also found in type 2 with 3 wing and type 6 with 7 wing or ISFP on the MBTI.


Anne Hart (2002). Tools for Mystery Writers: Writing Suspense Using Hidden Personality Traits. p. 250-255 and 257-258

Okay... I don't know about others out there, but this article really hit dead-on with my personality. I suppose if you turn all the "woman" to "man" in the second part of the article it would work for them too!

How did they know I dated strippers?

8 with a 6 wing? don't make sense.

I don't think ISTPs tend to spend a lot of money shopping, I find they prefer quality over quantity and act resourcefully.