Divergent Thinkers Have an On Switch

Misfits exist for a reason.

I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I’m doing it wrong. It’s like other people know something I don’t: they get it, and whatever “it” is eludes me. Growing up, I noticed my brain seemed to work differently than it was supposed to. The first time I took a standardized test I failed, because the questions didn’t make sense. I couldn’t pick an answer from the multiple choices because in my head I was thinking of all the contingencies, hidden variables, and alternative possibilities inherent in the question. What was supposed to be a problem of logic appeared anything but to me. I didn’t realize at the time that this was simply a symptom of my highly imaginative, non-rational (intuitive) way of seeing the world. My logic isn’t based on rational cognition.

When you grow up feeling like you’re doing it wrong, like you may even be a bit stupid because you just can’t figure things out the way you’re supposed to, you start to wonder what your use is. What possible role can you play in society when you can’t understand the rules of the game? Maybe you allow your difference to be pathologized: there’s something wrong with you, clearly. It’s not developmental, exactly, but it could be psychological and emotional. Therapy and meds may help you be a normal person who can have a normal life. You look at the people around you living out their normal lives seemingly happily, or happily enough, and of course you think that’s what you should want.

Or maybe you consign yourself to your fate. For whatever reason you just weren’t born for this world or this time, it sucks and it’s unfair, but you have to accept your alienation because what choice do you have? This is who you are. Therapy and meds don’t make much of a difference because your difference is more fundamental than emotions or psychology, or even a chemical imbalance. It’s about who you are. But still, there’s that question. What is your use? Why are you like this, what purpose does it serve? Because you know you’re not alone. There are others out there like you, and there has to be a reason this type of person exists, some evolutionary advantage to being out of step, of not seeing things the way others do.

I think there is. Divergent thinking may not be valued during times when maintaining a status quo is seen as paramount (which is most of the time), and it may even be feared and rejected during those times, but when the status quo is experiencing a great upheaval, divergent thinking is exactly what we need. Times of turmoil, when old ways no longer function well or are being outright challenged, are times that need people who can see opportunity in chaos, who even thrive in such circumstances.

Something interesting happened to me when the Pandemic of 2020 hit. It was like I had an on switch inside of me that got flipped. Even though I experienced the worry and sadness I saw leveling those around me – and I was cognizant that I occupied a relatively privileged position of being able to avoid many direct and personal effects of the Pandemic – that year was the most creatively rich and fulfilling of my life thus far. It was as if the confusion and disquiet of crisis awoke in me some kind of constructive response that I’m still not sure I fully understand. I had a distinct feeling of “this is my time.” I can’t explain it, but there it is. I’ve spoken to others who had a similar reaction, so I know I’m not the only one.

I think this is the reason divergent thinkers exist. We play an important role in society at all times, but in particular it’s those liminal periods of uncertainty and ambiguity where we can shine. Where other people may react with fear and grief, we sense the possibilities and may even feel excited by them. And this is one of those times in history. Maybe the Pandemic didn’t hit your switch, but something else might. One thing that holds misfits back from recognizing our potential is that while we are usually aware of how we don’t see things the same way as others, we aren’t as aware of how we do see things. Often we can feel guilty about our true thoughts and feelings because they aren’t the "correct” ones.

You’re not doing it wrong. In fact, you may be doing it right. Wake up to your potential by learning the value of seeing things differently. And you may find that you’re not that different from the many other misfits out there, looking for their people!

Do Intuition and Creativity Use the Same Cognitive Processes?

Enhance creative capabilities by learning how to stop applying the rules of rational cognition to your process.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

As an INFP and/or INFJ (I’m not sure which I am!), I’ve become used to using the terms intuitive and creative to describe myself. I always saw these two skills as inherently different from each other. As I’ve learned more about the workings of creativity, however, I’ve come to understand that the reason intuitive and creative abilities are often co-occurring is because they function in strikingly similar ways. In fact, creativity may be simply a variation of intuitive cognition. If this is true, we are repressing our creativity when we insist on rational approaches. If you are struggling to tap into your creativity, questioning your socialization into rational, analytical styles of thinking is a good place to start.

Both intuition and creativity rely on similar cognitive functions: pattern recognition and analogical thinking.* Intuition is an understanding you arrive at when your brain subconsciously compares many different past experiences and knowledge, pulls out relevant pieces of information, and synthesizes it all into a new understanding. This manifests as the “a-ha” moment intuitives often talk about. Creativity is the ability – often at least party unconscious – of being able to compare disparate pieces of past experiences and knowledge and put them together in unexpected ways to produce a novel understanding, solution, or product. You can see how the processes are similar, though their purpose and the conscious experience of them may differ.

Intuitive/creative ability is actually a kind of intelligence, though in our society we don’t really recognize it as such because we have a very limited view of intelligence. We categorize it as a facility with logical, deliberate, and conscious thinking. In this rational perspective of intelligence, the latter is particularly important: you must be able to explain how you came to a certain conclusion through a step-by-step, linear process of reasoning and/or evidence confirmation. Intuitive/creative intelligence does not allow for such explication, as it is unstructured and nonconscious, nor does it adhere to the rules of logic. It is therefore categorized as something other than intelligence.

Intuitive/creative intelligence is native to human beings just as is our capacity for rational thought, so in that sense we all have intuitive and creative abilities. But because we are taught that it is a “lower” form of cognition, untrustworthy, and irrational, we grow up discounting it as a valid way of experiencing and understanding the world. This can have profound effects on our ability to be creative. We can enhance our creativity by not applying the rules of rational cognition to our intuitive/creative cognition process. But how? Let’s look at a few of the big no-nos of the rational approach, and why they work directly against intuitive/creative thinking.

Centering yourself in the knowledge formation process.

The major tenet of the scientific approach, which represents our highest form of the rational process, is that you must remove yourself from your research. Your job is to be an unbiased conduit of knowledge formation and communication; to discover objective truths. The whole point of scientific study is to create universal knowledge that is verifiable through a replicable process, i.e. scientific experiment. Intuitive/creative cognition does not do this. It results in knowledge that is neither explicable (because you arrive at it largely through unconscious thought) nor verifiable or replicable. It is based on your personal experiences of being yourself in the world. You must center yourself when using intuitive/creative cognition – and the knowledge you create is valuable because of your personal bias.   

Using feeling as a method of knowledge confirmation.

It goes without saying that rational approaches to knowledge formation do not use personal feeling as a method of verification. A scientist does not decide which results are accurate based on their feelings. There is no “I think this is true because it feels right” in science! But in the intuitive/creative cognitive process, feeling is the measure that is used to identify what is true – true for you. What challenges us more than any other thing about using the intuitive/creative approach is that it results in knowledge that may only be true for us, and not match what is true for others. Our societal preference for the rational approach tells us we should distrust such knowledge because we are not able to validate it externally.

Trusting knowledge that cannot be verified.

In rational models, there is a correct (i.e. objectively correct) answer; in intuitive/creative models, there is no such thing. Exactness or accuracy are not evaluations that are relevant to intuitive/creative knowledge, but our conditioning in the rational approach causes us to use those evaluations anyway. This leads to second-guessing ourselves and what we know, and it can also lead to us losing confidence in our creative output. Think of it this way. How ridiculous would it be to think that getting an almost right answer to a math problem is totally fine if, say, you’re designing a space shuttle? Reverse that: it’s equally ridiculous to try to apply such rational precision to intuitive/creative thinking. We cannot judge a work of art, for example, by how accurately it represents reality or whether it was created in the “correct” way. Release your intuitive/creative cognition from such shackles! There is no “right” answer in any objective sense. Intuitive/creative intelligence is about trusting yourself.

We are trained to distrust and discount information and knowledge that come to us through a non-rational, i.e. intuitive, cognitive process. But if intuition and creativity are similar types of cognition, we are also inadvertently repressing our creativity when we try to apply the rules of rational thinking to our own understanding and experience.

*This essay is partly informed by a paper entitled Intuition and Creativity (Ul-Haq, 2015; open access). It cites a lot of the research on this and related subjects and is a good place to start if you want to delve in deeper.

Gentle Souls Are Badass

Our society may not appreciate gentle souls, but they are indisputably awesome.

Those of us who are gentle souls – introverted, highly sensitive types – understand early on that we have an undesirable personality in the eyes of society. Most of us grew up hearing that we needed to be “more”: more social, more active, more participatory, more talkative. Trying to survive in a culture that celebrates extroversion, aggressiveness, and emotional toughness is painful for gentle souls. And that pisses me off. You can find lists of our positive traits everywhere online these days, e.g. we’re good listeners, but it always feels like they’re a kind of disclaimer: Quiet loner, but good for something nonetheless, maybe. Enough of feeling like societal undesirables. So I did some brainstorming about what is indisputably awesome about being a gentle soul. What kind of badassery do we bring to the table because of, not despite, who we are? 

Two stand-out traits of gentle souls are their sensitivity and their capacity for deep thinking. Deep thinking is also known as conceptual thinking: understanding things through identifying underlying patterns and making connections among disparate ideas. I’m going to show you how these two traits make gentle souls totally badass.

Gentle souls are genius at problem solving

Sensitivity is a detail-oriented trait because it means you’re reactive to more stimuli in your environment and are therefore more aware of what’s going on around you. This feeds right into deep thinking: gentle souls put details into patterns so they can better protect themselves from painful stimuli. Problem solving is their natural mode of existence because regular human activity can require a lot of prep work in order to do it. It’s not unusual for a highly sensitive introvert to plan out a shopping trip with all possible contingencies, including parking availability, possible amount of people, and where items are located in the store, before they even leave their house.

Think this sounds like a disadvantage or a handicap? Nope. It’s actually an incredible skill. Gentle souls have a well-developed capacity for visualization, not only of problems themselves, but of different solutions and the possible outcomes of these solutions. The inside of their brains is like a complex interactive flow chart. They can see problems arising before other people are even aware of them and are masters of predicting contingencies and coming up with work-arounds. Creative problem solving is just how gentle souls live their everyday lives.    

Gentle souls are society’s knowledge creators

A knowledge creator is someone who sees things other people don’t and then uses that insight to create new understandings. This is the next step up from problem solving, and involves systemizing knowledge into usable packages. If you are a gentle soul who’s struggling to figure out how to serve the world, this is a path to consider. You already have all the necessary skills: you’re detail-oriented and conceptual, a problem solver and visualizer. Introverted, sensitive people are intuitive, a skill that comes from their responsiveness to their environment – it’s what gives them the ability not only to see things other people don’t, but to see things differently, from diverse angles and points of view (what I call thinking outside of the outside of the box).

Knowledge creation can look like a lot of things. It could be helping other people understand themselves better and reach their potential: counseling, coaching, teaching. Or creating new systems: design, administration, software development. Artists are knowledge creators – they take in information from their environment, process it internally, and use it to create something that brings pleasure, enlightenment, and learning to others. Not surprisingly, these career paths are filled with gentle souls. But virtually any activity can be approached from a knowledge creation standpoint. Being able to see your role vis-à-vis society as knowledge creator can help you develop an identity based on internal confidence in who you are (because you are a badass!) rather than the job you do, which is something society assigns and is based on external valuation of your worth.

These are not by a long shot the only indisputably awesome things about gentle souls. So if you are a gentle soul, take heart. Being a gentle soul truly makes you amazing. If you aren’t a gentle soul, but know some, try telling them you think they’re badass because they’re highly sensitive and often quiet in group settings. See how they respond. I’m curious to know.

How Creatives Can Use Crisis to Overcome Blocks

We are designed to thrive in the liminality.

These days it feels like the world is experiencing a lumbering, unending crisis. The pandemic, political and social turmoil, and the looming threat of climate change…the emotional weight of all this is profound. For creatives, times such as these can be overwhelming because they feel everything intensely. Creatives often find themselves blocked during crises because the process of creativity requires openness and receptivity, and painful times cause people to shut down. But I’ll let you in on a secret: creatives are actually meant to thrive in crises. Crisis signals that big changes are occurring. This space of transition, between what came before and what will come after, is called the liminality. It is a time when old rules and traditions are breaking down, and it holds infinite creative possibility for new ways of being. Creatives are optimized for the liminality because they are able to sense and take advantage of this creative possibility. So how can creatives work through their blocks and access their creative potential?   

If you are a creative and find yourself blocked during tumultuous and unstable times, consider that the reason may not be the crisis state itself. Creatives are generally empaths, meaning they feel and absorb the emotions of those around them, including those of the wider population they live among. During times of crisis, people feel stressed, frightened, confused, grief-stricken, and angry. Creatives pick up on that; nor are they immune to these emotional reactions themselves. The difference is, creatives also have a deep intuitive sense of the potentialities of crisis, and they have access to the full range of emotions that crisis provokes – including excitement and inspiration. If you are experiencing a creative block, it may be because you are tuning in more strongly with your empathic nature than your intuitive one.

There are some steps you can take to reroute your perception through your intuitive, creative nature. The first is to accept that you are energized by things that others may experience as wholly negative. Crisis times are scary and depressing, no doubt, but you don’t have to experience them that way just because other people do. You can acknowledge the challenges of living in times of great uncertainty while also seeing that such times are full of possibility because of their uncertain nature. Things are changing in interesting ways. The old reality is falling away; we don’t yet know the contours of the new reality. As a creative, it’s natural for you to feel energized in unsure situations that cause many to react with caution or fear – embrace that without guilt.

Another step you can take to access your intuitive, creative capacities is to trust your own perceptions. While it’s good to stay informed, no viewpoint presented on media platforms has a claim on truth. We create our realities through how we perceive the world, and you possess sole sovereignty over your own reality. Pay attention to what you are seeing and feeling. Make note of those little sparks of interest and excitement that flare up, the ones that don’t jive with what anyone else seems to be experiencing or talking about. Explore your thoughts and feelings that seem out of sync. That’s your intuition working for you. Believe what your intuition is telling you. 

I’m going to get esoteric with this last step. Creatives experience reality as circular or spiraled, rather than linear. We live in a linear, rational society, but internally creatives reside in multiple and intersecting realities. Consequently, their feelings and thoughts are complex and multifaceted, and they can struggle with identifying which are “real” or “true.” Here’s the thing: they’re all real and true. Especially the ones that contradict each other. The ambiguity of liminality opens up creatives’ sensitivity to paradox, where multiple seemingly opposing things are simultaneously true. This is a very uncomfortable place to dwell in, but being able to sit with paradox is essential to the generation of creative work because it is where pure creative energy resides. As a creative, you are a channel for this energy – you manifest it in the world. Pure creativity energy imbues everything you think, feel, and do; it is your calling to recognize that and embody it. 

The era we are living in right now is one of liminality. It’s an extraordinary time in the literal sense of that word: we are outside of ordinary times, refugees from the familiar. But crises can also occur on a purely personal scale. It took me a long time to realize that throughout my life I’ve actually sought out and generated personal crises because I’m a creative – I just thought I was neurotic and unstable! But no, it’s because I require crisis in order to grow as a creative. Learning to deal with crisis, whether it be imposed or self-generated, in a constructive rather than destructive way is key to creative thriving. The in-betweenness of liminality is a threshold, a space where nothing is sure, and everything is possible.* So step on up: wonders await you. 

*Based on a quote by Margaret Drabble

Intuitive Creatives Are Optimized for the New World

Are you an intuitive creative? Here’s why it’s your time to thrive.

I’m a synthesizer rather than an analyzer. Analysts take things apart, breaking them down into components in order to understand them. I do the opposite: I cull evidence from disparate sources and put it together to tell a story. I understand the world by recognizing patterns and seeing the big picture. 

At some point in the first decade of this century I began noticing social, political, and economic trends that pinged in my mind. They started to form a picture for me that told a story about transformation. Nothing can hold forever; I believed we were experiencing the beginnings of a period of tumultuous change that would most certainly cause tremendous upheavals. Secretly, I thought we were probably entering a phase of history somewhat like a new dark ages.

Many people are recognizing that COVID-19 will change our world forever. It already has. Life as it was before is over. But in fact, this process of change has already been going on for some time in all areas of our public lives. The increased polarization we are seeing around the world is part of this. People are feeling more anxiety and suspicion. And right now, it feels like the world has gone crazy. 

We will emerge from this latest challenge, but there will be more ahead. Make no mistake: we are entering a new world. It will hopefully bring positive change, but the process will be (and has already been) painful. What can we do? How can we survive these tumultuous, frightening times? If you are an intuitive creative, it may seem that your high sensitivity, empathic nature, and unconventionality make you maladapted to dealing with all this. In fact, the opposite is true. You are actually made for times like this. Here’s why.   

You saw it coming

I don’t mean you saw this exact thing coming (though maybe you did!). But like me, you probably have been feeling subterranean shifts for some time. Even if you haven’t consciously recognized what’s happening, you’ve experienced increased anxiety. You’ve intuitively understood that what we’ve come to take for granted about the way things work in the world may not hold true in the uncertain future. It’s important to understand that your anxiety is more than just a reaction to the times. It’s information. As an HSP, intuitive, and/or empath, you pick up on energies all around you. You see and feel things other people don’t. Pay attention to your impressions, and learn to trust them. 

You know that the best information comes from within you 

Sure, experts in various fields have much to teach us, and we should listen to them. But no one knows you better than you do. You are the foremost expert on yourself. Intuitives who trust themselves are powerful, because they don’t waste any more time than absolutely necessary parsing the constant stream of information and opinions we are all inundated with. They are able to immediately grasp the important facts, understand what they need to do for themselves, their loved ones, and their community, and take action. One of the most interesting qualities of highly sensitive intuitives is that while they may suffer from sometimes debilitating anxiety in daily life, in a crisis they can be the most incisive, calm, and rational people in the room.

You think outside of the outside of the box

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only are intuitive creatives unconventional in their perspectives and approaches to life, they are true original thinkers. So much so that they can even appear, well, crazy to other people. Even other unconventional thinkers. What makes it so difficult for us to find a place in society and its institutions is exactly what makes us exceptionally suited to times that are not normal. People who thrive within the structures of society tend to feel disoriented to the point of panic when these are upended. While intuitive creatives feel disoriented, too, they may also feel strangely energized. Don’t feel guilty about this! You feel this way because you are actually in your element during times like these. When the binding, punishing structures of society-as-it-was fall away, space opens up for you to not only come into your own, but to be appreciated in a way you have never been before.

What does this mean for you during these strange times? If you haven’t been feeling very confident about moving forward into the uncertain future, I encourage you to begin by appreciating the qualities I discuss above. Treat your anxiety as information – anxiety doesn’t feel good, but instead of focusing on the discomfort, interrogate what it’s telling you about your situation. Trust what you discover! Work on developing a respect for the special personal knowledge you generate. Manifest that in the outside world through action. In crazy times, what we need are creative solutions. What we need are “crazy” ideas. In the new world that’s coming, there will be space for those ideas, and for you.