Episode 24: Think Possibility!

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, 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.

We’ve been exploring the metaphor of the Kaleidoscopic Mind for a while now, and finding that it does seem to be helpful to us iNtuitive-Feeling (NF) women, as we look for ways to manage our iNtuitive and emotional complexity. The idea is that if we can think of our iNtuition as steady, and reliable, like the stationary mirrors in the tube of the Kaleidoscope we can learn to trust it more and more, even though it provides us with a lot of ever-changing data points. Our challenge is that our emotions come in and tempt us to discount what we iNtuitively know to be true.

It makes sense that this would happen, because most of us have never, had a way to think about the interchange between our iNtuition and our Feelings, or emotions. So how could we expect ourselves to distinguish between the two in a way that helps us maneuver in the Sensing-majority world? Perhaps the greatest gift that comes from gaining some precision here, is that it helps us to open, more fully, to our amazing capacity for ‘possibility-thinking.’ How often have we glimpsed amazing ideas about what we could do and who we could be in life, only to quash those ideas before we even give them a chance?

Nowhere, is our possibility-thinking more important to us, than when we’re navigating Quadrant 1 of the You Are Here Map. Let’s remember, that in Quadrant 1, we are bringing new, fresh parts of ourselves into the world of ‘doing’, after having just focused intensely on who we are ‘becoming’ in some area of life. So, we are brand new and somewhat vulnerable. Our creativity has come alive in Quadrant 4, in the lower left area of the map. We have been learning to listen to our iNtuition, and allowing ourselves to dream of all kinds of possibilities as to what we might do, and who we might become.

And then, bang! As we move into Quadrant 1 and begin to ground our ideas in planning and execution, we are faced with that age-old energy of doubt that we learned in early childhood … doubt about our abilities, doubt about our worthiness, doubt about the viability of our iNtuitive ideas and ‘possibility-thinking.’ Our first response might be to pull back, as we have done all of our lives. Our second response might be to push ourselves forward, and soldier on, even though it has us feeling uncomfortable. And then, we remember, that ‘soldiering on’ is a skill we developed in order to move forward in Sensing-majority fashion, and we sense, however faintly, that it is not sustainable for the complex, sensitive creatures we now know ourselves to be. And so, our third response, is often to shoulder, once again, those tired, old feelings of failure, hopelessness, and shame, because we don’t consider ourselves to be strong enough, smart enough, daring enough, or worthy enough to actualize our fondest possibilities of self. So, what to do?

Let’s see what answers come as we move on to our journal prompts.