About

Imaginative idealists, calmly raging within.

Do you feel you sometimes need less inspiration?

-May 11, 2016

A personality trait can be a blessing and a challenge. Especially challenging can be if two personality traits seem to contradict each other. One example are extroverted high sensitive persons who need the energizing effect of being around people but at the same time get easily overwhelmed by social interaction. Another combination with challenges is the scanner/Renaissance Soul/multipotentialite with HSP combination.

Imagine or just realize that you are interested in almost anything that crosses your path, as an imaginative idealist and highly sensitive person you immediately see all the poetic potential and interconnections of what you see. By at the same time the amount of inspiration can be overwhelming.

In a time where people are constantly looking for inspiration and so many people eager and able to show their skills and projects online it is hard to not get swept away. Twitter feeds, Facebook timeline shares, Pinterest boards, if you follow any of those feeds you might get more than you can handle. Adding to that are inspiration lunches, share your passion meetings. At some point I'm now saying that I'm inspired enough let me first process what's in my backlog. If i don't do that I find new inspiration to be depressing. A common problem for scanners is that we feel that we don't have enough time to do anything. While this argument is in principle not fully justified, packing other people's ideas next to your own will not help you set aside this unjust feeling.

Constantly feeding on a feed of ideas is a passive act just like watching tv is or playing addictive video games.

Regular scanner advice would be to turn analyzing the feed of ideas into the sciatica itself by writing blog posts on everything you see or to collect the inspiration on walls of ideas to help those who are in actual need of ideas and inspiration.

I would not recommend this to HSPs and imaginative idealists. We need the quiet time to turn the inspiration into something meaningful to us and meaningful to the world (not necessarily useful). We need to be able to enter a state of flow in which our mind can unload itself.