Episode 16: Do It New!

Good morning everyone, and welcome to NF Learning Lab, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique and self-valuing women, and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

Last week we talked about how the lower half of the You Are Here Map can be a place of great comfort to us as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, because our job there, is to learn about ourselves, and most of us enjoy knowing ourselves more and more fully, even when …. and maybe, even, especially when … we are navigating difficulties in life. It’s not that we are incapable of wallowing in self-pity and victim mentality, but we have a kind of pride-in-self that urges us to ‘get a grip’ and take charge of solving our problems. Doing so, inevitably, takes us on a wild-ride of self-discovery, and the You Are Here Map gives us a sense of direction on that ride.

In recent weeks, we’ve been exploring Quadrant 4 in the lower left part of the map. Here we emerge, at last, from a cocoon state in some area of life. We flex our new wings and get ready to re-enter the world of ‘doing’ in the upper left part of the map. Again, the two words we use in NF Learning Lab to capture the difference between the upper and lower halves of the map are ‘doing’ for the upper half, and ‘becoming’ for the lower half. ‘Doing’ is likely to be a comfort zone for Sensing types, and ‘becoming’ is often a comfort zone for iNtuitive types.

As we’re getting acquainted with new aspects of self in Quadrant 4, we can be proud of the progress we’ve made … ‘becoming’ new … in whatever area of life we’ve been giving attention to. In Quadrant 3, we let ourselves learn from our discomforts, grieved our losses, and transformed feelings of loneliness into a state of empowered aloneness. And then, in our cocoon, we let go completely of outcomes and expectations, long enough to notice and embrace new dimensions of who we were ‘becoming’ at the time. Now, in Quadrant 4, as we prepare to start ‘doing’ something, again, we want to be very intentional about making sure that we take the newly empowered parts of ourselves with us, and this sounds easier than is sometimes turns out to be.

Even though we possess the innate sensibilities of iNtuitive-Feeling type women, for decades and decades we have been ‘programmed’ by the Sensing-majority culture around us. We have learned the habit of ‘doing’ pretty much everything the way our Sensing cousins would. This might have included beating ourselves up when we needed a rest, or a diversion, because their process didn’t really fit for us. That habit of ‘doing’ we learned, doesn’t really care that we’ve been intentionally ‘becoming’ someone new in some area of our life. It will try with all of its might, to hook us back into whatever obsessive, push-push-push, should-powered, doing-doing-doing we were programmed to in our past. So, as we move from Quadrant 4 to Quadrant 1 of the You Are Here Map, we need to make sure that we consciously and stubbornly stay connected to our new wings and our evolving, brand new aspects of self. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.