Episode 41: Get Your Feelings Heard!

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, 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.

Today, we sum up our exploration of the third letter in our 16 personalities codes which, for us in Sparkle School is an F for Feeling, and for many others, a T for Thinking. This preference reflects how we prefer to make decisions, with T types referencing logic and THINKING, and F types referencing how our decisions will make us, and others around us ...FEEL, emotionally.

Let’s recall that these two very different preferences for making decisions seem to create the most misunderstandings between different types, and often foster personal slights and judgments. We’ve also learned that the T and F preferences are skewed along gender lines, with 7 out of 10 women preferring Feeling, and about 7 out of 10 men preferring Thinking. We’ve explored how that gender skew contributes to a societal expectation that all men should be thinking types, and all women, feeling types. We’ve looked at the pain and confusion these expectations create for both men and women who have preferences that are counter to society’s assumptions. We’ve seen how gender stereotyping of the T and F preferences is so old and deep, that we have passed it down from generation to generation.

We’ve explored how schools add to the confusion, because they teach that logic is the only valid basis for making decisions, for both personality types and both genders. We’ve seen how this bias in educational environments can give us Feeling types the message that our natural Feeling preference is somehow bad, or wrong, and how this is especially painful for boys who are Feeling types. They don’t fit the cultural norm that says boys should naturally be Thinking-type problem solvers, and these boys are often mercilessly teased with names like ‘sissy’ and ‘wimp’. This can lead boys to judge THEMSELVES harshly and to hide their natural preference for ‘feeling’, a sad state of affairs in a world that could use more Feeling type men in positions of power. However, that same bias in schools could, actually, work out pretty well for Feeling-type girls, because we are forced from a very early age, to learn to use our non-preferred, Thinking ability when making decisions. This serves us well, when, as women, we are expected to solve problems in professional and corporate settings, which are Thinking-oriented.

So, the T and F personality preferences give us a lot to think about as we learn more and more about who we are and who we are becoming, as unique, iNtuitive-Feeling type women. Maybe we have felt judged at school, because of our preference for Feeling. Maybe there have been men in our lives who are Feeling types, and we have expected them to be Thinking types who could solve problems when solutions eluded us. Maybe we have unwittingly judged men who prefer Feeling as the basis for decision making. Maybe we have judged other women who were Thinking types, because their logical, Thinking-based decisions felt cold or heartless to our compassionate, Feeling natures. Let’s move on to our journal prompts for one more look at how the Thinking and Feeling preferences might impact our lives.