Episode 37: Own iNtuitive Insights

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, where the invitation to each of us, is always to access our innate wisdom as a unique, self-valuing, and deeply feeling woman, and to share our emerging self-awareness in a safe, sensitive community.

Last week we began exploring one of our signature themes in Sparkle School; Perfect Practice. That’s the idea of building a set of life habits that we create ourselves, based on our individual needs and preferences. Perfect Practice sets aside hard and fast rules about what each of us should ‘do’ in life, or who we ‘should’ be. It’s based on the idea that each of us knows, deep within ourselves, exactly which choices and actions we need in order to become most fully expressed and fulfilled. Again … we say it is a PERFECT Practice, only when it fits like a custom-made glove.

We’ve explored Perfect Practice, using the E or I in the 5-letter code, you received from 16personalities.com. Today we use the second letter in your code, which for Sparkle School sisters will be an N for iNtuitive. It indicates that each of us is a rare, and unique personality who prefers to take in information using, not only our five senses, but also, our sixth sense of internal guidance, or iNtuition.

During the past year, we have gained a lot of new information about what it truly means to be part of a small, highly sensitive minority of iNtuitive-Feeling personality types. All four iNtuitive-Feeling types … INFJ, INFP, ENFJ, and ENFP comprise only about 8% of the population, and this is much more significant for iNtuitive-Feelers, than it is for any of the other type categories. In coming weeks, we will share what we have learned about why that is so, but today, we take a look at some of the ways in which iNtuitive and Sensing types differ when it comes to taking in information.

Sensing types are like Joe Friday, the Sergeant in the old Dragnet TV series, who says, “Just give me the facts ma’am.” Sensors rely on the sights, sounds, smells, taste and touch of the so-called ‘real’ world. They want simple, reliable information, and see no reason to question reality when it seems obvious that it is right there in front of them. They can easily write off an iNtuitive’s take on things as pure speculation; as fantasy, running out of control; ... or as ‘way too deep’. It might be said that Sensing types are the practical builders and organizers of our world, while iNtuitive types are the visionaries and innovators.

Unlike Sensing types, iNtuitives focus on bits of information from many different large systems, complex theories, and abstract ideas. Each of us iNtuitive people choose data points that have special meaning to us, as individuals, and we weave these sources together to form over-arching pictures of possible futures, all kinds. Such pictures are likely to appear, to Sensors, as though they don’t even exist. On the other hand, iNtuitives, might judge a Sensor’s take on reality as too obvious or simplistic, too problem-focused or short-sighted, too shallow or just plain ‘boring!’

All eight of the Sensing personality types comprise 70 to 75% of the population. All eight iNtuitive personality types (only four of which are iNtuitive FEELERS) comprise only 25 to 30% of the population. This means that Sensing and iNtuitive type preferences are the only pair of type preferences that are not evenly balanced in the population.