Gentle Souls Are Badass
By: Kendra Patterson
Tags: Mental Health, Introvert, Self Improvement, Personal Development, Highly Sensitive People

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.

Kendra Patterson is a writer and creativity coach based in north-central Florida. You can find her at www.kendrapatterson.com.