Intuition and Personal Development

Many approaches to personal development / self-help / human potential / spirituality rely heavily on Intuition

From the standpoint of intuition, every interpretation leaves out part of a greater reality. Hence, intuition is a valuable heuristic for people who are stuck in a rut and need to see things in new ways (even if they do not have intuition as a secondary function).

An example of Extraverted Intuition in personal development is the idea that every cloud has a "silver lining." A negative experience or a mistake you made may look shattering in one context, but when viewed in the totality of your experiences, it really didn't turn out so bad after all. After all, you're still here. Maybe your negative experience catalyzed an experience of self-growth, or maybe your mistake turned into a valuable lesson. With this heuristic, you don't actually change your way of looking at your experiences, although your interpretation of them changes as you look at them in a broader context. This application of Ne has often been combined with Ji notions such as "everything happens for a reason," or "everything happens for the best." Some people may derive comfort from such beliefs, while others might find them naive and. Using the character Pangloss, Voltaire makes fun of this use of Ne in Candide.

Introverted Intuition leads you to change your interpretations of the world not by comparing them to other concrete events and experiences to see the "bigger picture," but by changing the way you look at the world and yourself in the first place. The way you perceive yourself determines your self-esteem and confidence in many ways, and those influence both your subjective feelings, and your performance in extraverted arenas. Futhermore, your subjective emotion states influence how you see the world. Hence, Ni becomes an integral heuristic for regulating these mechanisms.

One of the many examples of Ni in personal development is the work of Shad Helmstetter on "self-talk." "Self-talk" is the concept that your self-perception is based on the messages you tell yourself, and the messages you tell yourself have been "programmed" into you by parents, experiences, and your culture. Unfortunately, some of these mental "programs" are dysfunctional. If you want to change the quality of your life, then you must change your mental programming.

Another example: "The Work" of Byron Katie.

Unfortunately, Ni gets into trouble when it tries to monopolize personal development. Reconceptualizing and shifting one's perspective is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problems that people face. (I will explain this more later) This explains why self-help seminars often only have a temporary effect on people (aside from the emotional high wearing off). It may equip people with the introverted intuitive skills to see their life in a new way, but without the extraverted skills to actually start living their lives in a new way, they soon slip back into their old habits and self-image. Because your self-image is partly developed through interaction with your environment, you can't always change it in a complete, lasting, and resounding way through a simple act of the mind. Reconceptualizing your life through Ni is important for growth, but it is a complement to, not a replacement for, extraverted attitudes.

Also, in the extreme Ni can block other useful heuristics like Ji. Sometimes it is important to simply feel what you are feeling, without psychologizing and analyzing those feelings. Likewise, sometimes it is important to examine the world and figure out how it actually works, even though that examination might lead to beliefs that look "negative." A belief like "I am a failure" should be a legitimate target for Ni and probably shows that one needs to find a new way to look at one's life. In contrast, beliefs like "if I touch a hot stove, I will get burned" or "I need to get decent grades to graduate school," or "if I want to date someone, I will need to go through certains steps and meet certain criteria" are definitely "limiting." But in these cases, the limits are ingrained either in concrete reality in or social rules to an extent that one individual cannot really change or challenge them in any reasonable frame of time. Sure, there are probably times where people perceive social and concrete reality to be more powerful than it actually is, and blindly conform to limitations that they could overcome. But concrete and social limits do exist, and to believe otherwise requires solipsism.

Sometimes there are social expectations that one must go along with to have any chance at subjective happiness, and the socially-constructed nature of those expectations (and the way they are tied to happiness) doesn't make them any less immutable. Identifying the limitations inherent in reality is essential to learning how to orient oneself to them, even if you want to deny them. Yet understanding concrete and social reality requires more than Ni, or else all you are left with is solipsism and nihilism. By properly understanding the limits of world, you can "pick your battles" in an intelligent manner; you can decide what to go along with, and what to rebel against.