Episode 47: View Imposed Dumb-Down

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.

Last week, we walked together down the bumpy, put-hole-filled road of Mean Girl self-judgment and shame. We heard about George Land’s study of disadvantaged children of all personality types attending standardized schools. It revealed that upon entering school at about age 5, a full 98% of these children scored at an amazing, genius-level in creativity. In their first five years of school, about 66% of them lost that natural, creative genius, due to the social conditioning they received. As adults in their twenties, only about 10% still scored at a genius level in creativity. Knowing what we now know, we would say that this was due to the ‘norming’ influence of the Sensing-majority culture for whose purposes, standardized schooling is designed.

Some of our Sparkle sisters wondered whether the 10% of adults who retain their genius in creativity might be iNtuitive personality types. That is a question worthy of further study, but what we currently do know, is that adults who score as iNtuitive-Feeling types on Myers-Briggs indicators make up roughly 8% of the population, so there may be a correlation.

Whatever the exact relevance might be for us here, we can safely assume that once we begin to measure ourselves based on what other people think, we greatly diminish our ability to tap and trust our natural status as geniuses in creativity. It’s like our natural, organic, operating system gets reprogrammed. However, the five-year-old creative genius is still lying within our adult self, waiting to break free. An important part of the Sparkle School journey is to go back, take the hand of that creative little kid that got shut down sometime between ages five and ten. We can say to her, “Hey, you know what? There’s a world of possibility that’s still here waiting for you!”

As we have already discussed, an essential early step in that journey is to notice who has the microphone in our head, at all times, a Mean Girl voice, or our wise Whisper Woman voice. Today, we’re going to track what happens when we let a Mean Girl voice take charge.

Let’s begin with that moment when we’re wanting to decide about something, that will lead to a specific action. If a Mean Girl voice is running our inner show, we will immediately look to the outside world, for advice about what we should decide or do. And then, because as iNtuitive-Feeling women, we have so often met with disapproval of our self-directed thoughts and choices, we will make a judgment of some kind, often one that convinces us that we don’t have what it takes to choose or act on our own, with full confidence. The very second we allow a judgment into our decision-making process, we stop our creative flow and limit our possibilities. With culturally induced limitations in place, we become timid, and constrain our choices and actions to those we have made before. And then, we produce the same kinds of, often disappointing, results we have always gotten. Our creativity dies a bit more, diminishing our self-worth, like a tape worm, silently depleting us of all possibility for creating new and different results in life. In Sparkle School, we call this externally generated expectation of self-limitation the Mean Girl World View. Next week, we will explore its opposite, the Whisper Woman World View, but for today, we’re going a little deeper into understanding the Mean Girl World View.