Episode 51: Make It with Plus and Minus!

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 explored how incredibly easy it is for us iNtuitive-Feeling types, to have our complex, kaleidoscopic minds mushroom from a simple decision-making process, into what can feel like a giant catastrophe. When this happens, confusion rules, and it makes it nearly impossible for us to shrink our concerns back down to whatever, simple decision we were trying to make, to begin with. As vexing as this mushrooming can be at times, it also affords us a powerful opportunity. Let’s look closer.

Our kaleidoscopic, iNtuitive-Feeling minds mushroom quickly for a very good reason; we are ‘possibility thinkers’, born and bred … and possibility thinkers are natural creators. Constantly scanning our horizons for new data points, our minds jump from micro to macro, and from positive to negative, without us even noticing, until we begin to feel overwhelmed by this possibility-thinking agility. Here, in Sparkle School, we are learning that this mental ‘agility-ability’ doesn’t have to be a source of overwhelm. Instead, it can be a doorway to our full, creative potential, one that we can learn to open and close at will, with full mastery.

How do we get there? By understanding more and more how infinitely creative we are. By setting aside the sideways glances and self-doubts we have picked up from the Sensing-majority culture around us, which generally, does not have the mental capacity to follow where we go, creatively, and so, has kept each of us blind to our own strengths as a rare, creative creature.

Now that word ‘creature’ is a very interesting one, rooted in the Late Latin word “creatura”, which means “a thing created.” We know from Myers-Briggs Personality experts, that of all the personality types, we iNtuitive-Feelers are the most ‘self-actualizing.’ In other words, we are naturally predisposed to “create ourselves” throughout our entire lives, to become ‘creatures’ of our own design. Given that the Sensing-majority world view associates the word ‘creative’ with artistic endeavors, we can actually think of ourselves as living works of art. And that is a very helpful way for us to think about ourselves, because it supports us in becoming entirely conscious, intentional, and embracing of who we are as constant creators of ourselves.

From there, we can learn to use our natural creative abilities, not to just to make jewelry, pottery, paintings, or other original works … but to create our lives … to intentionally become consciously, self-evolving ‘creatures’ … that we ourselves are fashioning.

Perhaps one of the most unique gifts of Sparkle School, is our exploration of how creativity actually works. We highlight the idea that all creativity happens when there is an ‘energetic’ impulse to make something original, or innovative, and this energetic impulse always involves some unsettling moments that we call ‘creative tension.’

Artists, musicians, writers, actors, speakers, all know about creative tension. For the painter it is the white canvas syndrome, and for musicians and writers, white page syndrome. Speakers and actors know it as stage fright. These unsettling moments can easily convince us to give up before we even get started, as happens for us NF women, when we doubt our innate right and ability to be fully self-defined. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.