Episode 42: Plan It Your Way

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.

In recent weeks, we’ve been exploring the meaning in our 16personalities codes, and today we turn our attention to the fourth letter, the J or the P. This letter captures our preference when it comes to how we organize our lives, in terms of things, timing and even thinking. The J stands for ‘judging’ and the P stands for ‘perceiving’. Of all the letter sets we’ve explored, this duo is perhaps, the most difficult to understand. The names we use, ‘judging’ and ‘perceiving’ do not really reveal their meaning without looking more closely. We can start with the question that the J and P preferences seem to have us ask ourselves, “Do I prefer closure and the settling of things, or do I prefer to keep my options open and fluid?”

Of course, we all use both J and P preferences at times, but we each have a stronger comfort level with one or the other. About 50% of people prefer J and about 50% prefer P, but our Sensing-majority culture is skewed toward J, which impacts us all. If we choose closure over open options, we are likely to be ‘judging’ or J types. J types are apt to feel a sense of urgency until a pending decision has been made, and once it has, then relaxation can come in.

If we prefer to keep things open and fluid, we are probably ‘Perceiving’ or P types. We are apt to experience some resistance to making a final decision, wishing, instead, that more data-points could be accessed as the basis for doing so. So, when a P-preference person does make a firm decision, there may be a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness, while a J-preference person in the same situation may have a feeling of ease and satisfaction.

J’s tend to establish deadlines and to take them seriously, expecting others to do the same. P’s tend to look upon deadlines as mere alarm clocks that buzz at a given time, but can easily be turned off or ignored, in favor of catching an extra forty winks. P’s tend to treat a deadline more as a signal to start a project, than part of a timeline for completion.

As iNtuitive-Feeling women in Sparkle School, we are especially interested in how the J and P preferences inform us when it comes to our ability to honor our uniqueness as the precious gift it is. We tend to hold that everyone is creative––that we are all creating, all of the time, every time we make decisions, and take actions. However, we live in a Sensing-majority world, where creativity is seen as a kind of ‘sideline specialty’ to life. This is part of the reason why we NF types can feel unseen and unheard in our broader culture. We learn to equate being creative with being ‘artistic’, ‘inventive’, or just ‘brainy’ like Einstein. We often do not have the support we need to fully develop and express our unique, creative insights! But doesn’t it make sense, that the way we organize our lives is directly related to the way we organize our thoughts? So, the more we know about how we organize life, the more the world of creative thoughts opens up to us, and nowhere does this become more apparent, than when we explore our J and P preferences.