Episode 44: Dare To Share Who You Are

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 J and P personality preferences, the fourth letter in your 16 personalities code, which reflects how you prefer to organize your life. If your letter is a J, you likely prefer to plan things out in advance, and to bring projects to completion on time, and if your letter is a P, you probably prefer a more open-ended approach that allows for flexibility in how things are arranged in both time and space. If you are a J type, you are apt to feel a sense of urgency until you have made a pending decision, and then be at rest once the decision has been made. If you are a P type, you are more apt to experience resistance to ‘making a decision,’ wishing that more data could be accumulated as the basis for it. So, when you do make a decision, you may have a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness, while a J person in the same situation may have a feeling of ease and satisfaction.

We have touched upon the idea that friendships, romances, and families where there are both strong Js and strong Ps, might be quite challenging, because they require people with opposite preferences to agree on how to organize the simple activities of daily life, like when and how to go to the grocery store, or how to work smoothly together on any project. We’ve learned that there is a cultural skew that can be very difficult for people with a strong P preference, because they are asked from an early age, to be ‘organized’ in ways that just don’t make sense to them.

In school, a strong P might always slide in at the last minute to turn in assignments, or she might be consistently late. Her desk will likely be quite messy ... all of the time ... because this P operates best when everything is visible to her. She has a ‘file by pile’ approach to organizing. This looks to the J world, like there is no organization happening, at all. But ask that P where some scrap of paper is, and she will dive through the whole mess of things and grab that scrap without hesitation. The ‘organization’ is there, it just isn’t visible to the J world, and this creates tons of room for misunderstanding.

Because they don’t fit the mold, strong P children are repeatedly shamed by teachers and ridiculed by other students...and remember … that shame is touching in to who these children are, essentially, at their core, so it is easy to understand why some P preference adults have a hard time loving and accepting themselves. Think about it, in an average classroom, J types will be seen to comply with the basic standards for organization, and they will be rewarded. P types will be seen to resist those same standards, and they are often disciplined in some way.

Most modern school systems are remnants of the industrial age, when families were migrating from farms to cities in search of factory jobs. The purpose of public schools, then, became to prepare students to perform in assembly lines, and later cubicles, which could only happen, if there was an extreme level of order and conformity. In a very real sense, culture was shifting from the open-ended, P approach needed to adapt to constantly shifting forces of nature on the farm, to the highly structured J approach designed by corporations and governments to ensure the highest levels of compliance, productivity and profitability.

Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more about how the J and P type preferences impact us as iNtuitive-Feeling type women.