Episode 46: Beware Mean Girl Shame!

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.

Last week, we began exploring the inner dialogue between our Mean Girl voice and what we’re calling our Whisper Woman voice. Today we’ll go a bit deeper with that conversation. But first, let’s recall that a few weeks ago we reviewed how standardized education likely impaired our ability, as rare, iNtuitive-Feeling type women, to identify our needs and develop our natural ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘acting’. At the same time, on our iNtuitive Conversations calls each weekday, we are seeing that as adult NF women, we have a hard time believing just how rare and wonderful we truly are, in large part, because of the conditioning we continually receive from our Sensing-majority culture.

Here’s a true story to build upon that point: A very creative general systems scientist and organizational strategist named George Ainsworth Land conducted a research study on levels of creative genius in children. George and his team studied 1,600 Head Start children between the ages of three and five, measuring their level of creative genius. These children were inner city kids from poor neighborhoods, what we might call disadvantaged kids. You might wonder, on a scale from one to one hundred, where they would score if tested for their level of genius in creativity. ….. The astonishing fact is that 98% of those children, between ages three and five, tested in the ‘genius’ category of creativity.

Those 1,600 children were given the same test five years later when they were somewhere between eight and ten years of age. There was an astonishing drop in the percentage of them that still registered at genius level in creativity, it went from 98% to just 32%. That’s right, in just five years of ‘norming’ in public school, 66% of those children had mysteriously lost their creative genius. Five years later the same children were tested again and this time only 10% retained their genius level in creativity.

The same test was administered to 200,000 adults over the age of 25. It was not the same population, but it was a substantial sample of people and it spanned a much greater socioeconomic spectrum. The study showed that only 2% of that adult population scored at the genius level of creativity. We can assume, from this, that about 98% of all personality types started out as creative geniuses, but 96% of t hem unlearned their creativity by the time they were 25 years of age. Again, those are the figures for the full spectrum of personality types; both Extroverts and Introverts, Sensing types and iNtuiting types, Feelers and Thinkers … and both Perceivers and Judgers!

Given what we’ve been learning about the highly unique minority we are, as iNtuitive-Feeling personality types in our Sensing-majority culture … and given the acute, multidimensional complexity and emotional sensitivities we are discovering together … we can conclude that the havoc that standardized education played in the development of our natural genius was, for many of us, absolutely devastating! Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.