Episode 36: Recharge Your Energy!

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

In recent weeks, we have been exploring the ten areas of life that we work with in NF Learning Lab, and using, as our lens, the idea of ‘family of origin’. Hopefully, we have each gained new self-awareness about the impact that the beliefs and habits we learned in our first family have, on our current choices and behaviors in the different areas of our lives. If so, we become more and more discerning about the aspects of our family-of-origin legacy that we want to keep active in our lives. This helps us to honor our own, unique qualities, and to more powerfully embrace our individual sense of passion and purpose.

This week, we shift our gaze away from family-of-origin and begin exploring a different theme to foster self-awareness, the theme of Perfect Practice. The idea of Perfect Practice is unique to NF Learning Lab, because here, we do not suggest or impose hard and fast rules about what each of us ‘should’ believe in life, or what we ‘should’ do, or who we ‘should’ be. Instead, we explore the idea that each of us is entirely unique, and that we each know, deep within ourselves, exactly which choices and actions we need in order to become the most fully expressed and fulfilled versions of ourselves. Rather than prescribing habits and routines, NF Learning Lab offers to iNtuitive-Feeling women, a process of discovery that has each of us building an ever-adjustable ‘practice’ for life that is uniquely our own. Basically, we say it is a PERFECT Practice, only when it fits like a kid glove, in a smooth, perfect blend of ease, grace and healthy, self-chosen challenges and rewards.

Starting today, we begin exploring Perfect Practice through one of the NF Learning Lab lenses that best highlights our uniqueness, the lens of personality type.

When you register for NF Learning Lab, you take the personality assessment at 16personalities.com and receive your 5 letter code. The first letter in your code is either E, or I, and these letters show you whether you prefer Extroversion (E), or Introversion (I) as a part of your personality.

Most of us think that an Extrovert is someone who is very out-going, someone who is always the life of the party. We think that an Introvert is more of a wallflower, someone who is shy, and retiring. But Myers-Briggs-based personality assessments are not meant to measure how out-going, or how shy we are. They are designed to measure how we prefer to RE-ENERGIZE ourselves when our energy begins to drop. This is not something we ‘decide to do’, it is a preference that is automatic for us … something we were born with.

The Extroverts among us gain energy from being around other people. They might be either very out-going or more reserved in a group of people, but they will increase their energy just by being in the group. For instance, when a party is over, an Extrovert might want to move on to another party, just to stay energized. When Extroverts spend too much time alone, they lose energy. This can show up as boredom, frustration, ‘cabin-fever’, impatience, depression, and surliness.

The Introverts among us get their energy from being alone. They might be reserved in a group setting, or they might be quite talkative and engaged, maybe even, the life of the party … for a while ... but depending on how strong their preference for Introversion is, they will begin to get tired or overwhelmed, and want to withdraw. They might do that by simply going into another room for a time, getting out of the center of the action, or they might feel the need to leave the group and go home ... alone ... and take a hot bath! If they can’t find the space and time to re-energize by being alone, Introverts can become exhausted, snippy, emotional, antisocial, even physically ill.