MBTI Type: ESTJ

Favor is a respected trail boss with a clear objective in each drive—to arrange to pick up cattle along the way (he expects people to be efficient and on time and keep to their word), to get to the sale yards in a reasonable amount of time, and to hire experienced hands to do their job without complaining. He can seem rather stern at times, but the truth is he expects everyone to do their job competently and without any trouble. If someone causes it, he lets them go. He also gets impatient and frustrated with people who don’t know how to get things done—such as new trail hands who run cattle in the wrong direction, or rush up to the herd on horseback and scatter them. His efficiency brings back his loyal employees year after year, and he makes individual decisions based on the facts of the situation—if someone asks for time off, he considers whether the drive can ‘spare them’ for the time they requested. He has a vast wealth of experience as a drover and relies on it, remembering things about the trails, the landscape, cattle, and his hands, although he says each drive is a ‘new one’ and he handles it like a ‘new job.’ In the episode where he causes trouble for himself by being too strident, he shows how aware of reality he is, by saying that as you get older, you start to ‘slip up’ more, and the chances of getting hurt or killed intensify. He knows that people follow patterns of behavior and that the time comes for the old men to ‘retire’ and leave this work to the younger ones. Favor often has a sense that ‘something is up’ when there are suspicious characters around, but will approach them and slowly gather details about them, rather than leap to any wild conclusions. He shows a lot of Fi in that he expects everyone to have the same strong work ethic as he does, but also cares about their lives. He can seem unreasonable when he’s being emotional; his desire to keep his men safe in one episode means treating them harshly to weed out the ‘weak’ ones, which causes him to be irrational—he fires the men who won’t submit to his authority, and tries to conduct a drive with greenhorns, causing a stampede in which he almost loses his shirt (since he invested in the herd). It’s hard for him to admit when he’s been wrong, or how much he cares about his companions in more than an indirect manner.

Enneagram: 1w9

One episode in particular shows how much of a 1 Favor is, because it revolves completely around his sense of ‘duty’ becoming a problem on a drive. He has gotten it into his head that some of the men are getting too old to do this job, so he decides to test and push them, to weed out the ‘weak ones.’ In the process, he creates a hellish experience for all of his hands—one in which they can’t sleep enough, don’t get a hot meal when it’s time (they get sandwiches), and are angry and tired. Several of them complain about his strident, even militant rules, and he tells them to either do their job or get lost. This causes most of them to quit, leaving him high and dry without enough hands to handle a massive herd, resulting in him almost losing everything when there’s a stampede, because he angrily fired his most experienced hands for standing up to him and telling him his standards were unreasonable. He thinks he’s doing right by them, that he has to be harsh on them, and he’s rigid and uncompromising. Instead of admitting he was wrong, he buckles down and reinforces his ‘god-like’ views. He does come around in the end, but in the meantime, he caused problems for himself and everyone else by being too judgmental, rigid, uncompromising, and unwilling to admit he did anything wrong. His 9 wing lends him a sense of calm; even in episodes where they face criminals, accusations of thievery, or problems on the trail, he remains calm, in charge, and unruffled, handling situations without undo emotionalism and taking a firm stance on what he believes.

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