Innies do like to contemplate their own navels, it comes as natural to them as breathing. An Innie prefers to go inwards to discovers how they feel about events around them, their families, communities or the news. When Innies make a discovery it is carefully filed away for future reference. This isn’t just an adult pastime for the Innies; this has always been a natural instinct for the Innie, as natural as breathing. If you have spent time around babies perhaps you’ve noticed the Innie babies, gazing mid-air seemingly somewhere deep inside the thoughts of their forming brains exploring themselves and how they feel. While their Outie counterpart is more likely deeply in the coos and babble of early conversation with the family dog, their favourite stuffed rabbit, sibling or even their own foot! The Outie just adores a good chat.
Due to all this past internal reflection, the Innie has a pretty good idea about what they think about many things they have encountered before. They will rarely have let an experience pass them by without having turned in over in their minds to the nth degree until they have extracted as much meaning from it as they can and filed it away.
Regardless of whether you are an Innie or an Outie, we all store away previous conclusions or assessments of past events and feelings to draw on when we hit a familiar or novel experience; if we didn’t we’d never be able to cross the road even or manage the myriad of complicated situations we come across every day. I am suggesting that Innies may spend more of their time doing this contemplation, and this, in turn, gives them more internal data to sift through. No snap answers from an Innie I’m afraid.
Pose an Innie a question, you’ll often see them looking down to the tip of their nose or up to the left. Not that the answers lie up in the spidery corner of the ceiling of course, but it’s the signal that tells the asker to ‘hang on a mo while I have a flick through all that I know and all that I feel on the subject before I answer’. Thankfully Innie’s brain works with lightning speed allowing the Innie to answer before the asker draws their retirement pension and goes to live in Spain, leaving the Innie alone with a colossal cobweb problem. But without doubt, the Innie will contemplate and answer in their own good time. Of course, in an election, or in the decision to picnic at the park or on the beach, the votes are cast, and the decision made before the Innie has answered. But the great thing is, the Innie can live with not eating their sandwiches with, or without sand whichever was their preference, as long as they know what their preference is, which seems to be the most important thing to an Innie.
So what happens when the Innie looks up at the corner of the room. What are they doing? Well, thankfully this has all been explained. We are talking about the Locust of Evaluation? Yes, like the Octopus that predicts the world cup winners, this is the internal bug that informs you when you make a judgment of the world or yourself.
Yep, I was joking, to give it its correct term it is the Locus (Latin for the location I believe)of Evaluation. Put Innies in a problem-solving group and their first port of call will be to their Locus of Evaluation, meaning their internal self-referring behaviour, so that they can have a shift through what they already know. As Innies, our first instinct is to decide what we think the problem, solution or remedy is; then we’ll come to the group and share our conclusions. All the while our Outie colleagues are collaborating with each other, trying out scenarios and building prototypes. You see how different we are, not wrong, just different?
What does this mean to Innies working as Counsellors – can we be so reliant on our own Locus of Evaluation that we can’t hear what the client is saying, that we are not fully present. Do they walk through the door and we have decided – who they are, what they need, and how to make it happen? No, clearly the success of the many Innie Counsellors lies in their need to understand clearly and deeply any new experience.
The fantastic thing for the Innie working as a counsellor is that you are walking with your client into entirely uncharted territory. A world of the hitherto unknown. As Innies, we cannot help but focus our attention on our client when it is like discovering a rare book to be prized. A client sharing their inner world is felt as a privilege for the Innie, the Innie’s inner self is all but silenced, we listen, with metaphorically held breathe, and we wait for as long as it takes, we watch prizing the person and their journey and stay steady with the client on their discoveries. This, on some level, feels like the baby we were, gazing and absorbing deeply the world around us, no judgements, no snap solutions, just a desire to deeply understand. And there it is just a snippet of the rich and complex work and drivers of the Innie counsellor.
And now a word to the Outies.
Dear Outies, again I apologise for not waxing lyrical about your great and many attributes in your work as Counsellors, it is just that as an Innie I am least qualified to make any comment I only know I prize the Outies in my life.
Thinking of differences, I sometimes imagine thinking of all the individuals in the world, with their thinking matter nestled comfortably inside all those heads; might we for a moment picture one rather large brain made of all those individuals. For those techie readers, you could imagine them all joined in the world wide web, a sort of universal brain. Wouldn’t it be silly to decide to disconnect certain parts, say have the contemplative area removed, or unplug the decision-making areas, trip the fuse on practical skills, the loving side, the scientific or the spiritual? This one big brain would be the less for having any of its components removed, just as we are less if we disregard the traits and skills of any one of us.
Vive la difference!
Lois Marshall
Counsellors.rentamum.org