Disclaimer: These are all suggestions. Many people have multiple intelligences, some of which might cancel out each other’s deficiencies. Each intelligence type could be present but express itself differently in your character and behavior. We are not here to restrict but to guide. In the end, you can do whatever you enjoy.
Intrapersonal intelligence describes one’s ability to get insight into their thoughts and feelings, as well as understanding and using them effectively. These individuals most likely understand body language and can manipulate their appearance in the room. You can recognize such an individual by their glow — no, actually, these individuals seem like they enlighten your room.
Let’s have a look at these individuals’ strengths and areas for improvement, fitting jobs and hobbies, as well as everyday, personal, and broader impacts of this intelligence type on one’s life and society.
1. Strengths:
This type of intelligence focuses on insight into oneself. This drive towards getting to know yourself results in very strong self-awareness. This strength is crucial to efficiently understanding and navigating oneself in life. Knowing your strengths, weaknesses, problems, feelings, and everything else is the first step to using them effectively and evaluating upcoming situations.
To get to that highly aware place, you need to reflect on your thoughts and actions. Well, anyone can do that – how is that supposed to be a strength? Yes, anyone can, but being able to do something and actually doing something are two very different things, to say the least. Reflecting on yourself can reveal aspects you might not want to confront, making this an extremely difficult process. Individuals with high scores in intrapersonal intelligence hold the strength to not shy away when confronted with their deficiencies.
Another huge and useful strength of people with high levels of intrapersonal intelligence is the ability to effectively set and achieve their settled goals. Through their strength of reflection and self-awareness, these individuals are very good at managing and assessing what they are good at and capable of at the given moment, and which of their qualities need more training. Important for such individuals is to not let their mind discourage them from still pursuing things they’re not yet good at.
Lastly, people with high levels of intrapersonal intelligence are most often the ones you’ll search for when consulting or wanting to talk about problems or fears. As they have such good insight and are highly reflective, these individuals use up a lot of their time to try to understand emotions and the circumstances leading to them. This leaves them with a lot of empathy towards others’ feelings and thoughts. Being understood when talking about problems is sometimes enough to feel better, which is the reason these individuals’ emotional empathy can be very calming and relieving.
2. Areas for Improvement:
Do not mistake this intelligence type with weakness or being shy. It solely describes an individual’s focus, and that focus lies on themselves. This is not a bad thing, it can actually lead to great strength, as these people can manage a human’s most reliable and important resource. But, just as any other strength, this one has a weak spot as well. Individuals with high intrapersonal intelligence may struggle with tasks requiring extensive social interaction.
This is, once again, not necessarily due to being shy. If your main focus lies on yourself, your actions, your feelings, and your thoughts, you tend to forget to consider others, or you can easily start to overthink others’ reactions to your well-reflected actions.
Interpersonal interactions, even if inter- and intrapersonal sound very similar, describe two very different, in some aspects even contrary, human experiences.
Are you recognising yourself or some parts of you? Then congratulations to identifying your or one of your intelligence types. With that you’ve accomplished step one of your journey: determining your intelligence. But, even if that’s wonderful to hear, you may be asking, what should I do now? Let’s head over to step two: how to embrace your strengths and work on your weak spots.
3. How to Refine and Embrace Strengths:
To refine your strength, you need to get to know yourself. This means your number one tip is: engage in regular self-reflection. This will help you to effectively analyze your personal space and can even lead you to help or guide others on their way.
Actively setting and tracking your personal goals will, one, help you to move forward in your personal development and, two, give you information on the way you handle upcoming situations, tasks, and react to unexpected circumstances or in general your likes and dislikes. Everything you experience can give you more insight into yourself, and keeping track will help you to use that information perfectly.
Other good exercises for people with high intrapersonal intelligence involve practicing mindfulness and meditation. These two are focused on oneself and getting insight, the two things that dominate your intelligence type, making this the ultimate practice for you. Just as well, these can help to calm down and release stress after being confronted with social interactions and a demanding day-to-day continuously.
To refine your emotional empathy, an important practice is to train separating your own problems from the ones of other people. What exactly does that mean? You need to be able to understand that even if you are capable of imagining and understanding other people’s problems, they’re not your own. Understanding is helpful, but someone that listens and is just as overwhelmed as oneself is not.
Lastly, you might be focused on your self-reflection, but still, others can help you with that as well. Start to read self-help or psychology books and acquire more knowledge you can use in your analysis. Investing in different opinions and perspectives can be key to truly understanding one’s behavior. None of us knows everything, meaning relying on what others have identified sometimes is truly essential to moving forward.
4. How to Work on Areas for Improvement:
Now, very unexpected, but to work on your deficiencies in social interactions, engaging in them is the most blunt but just as well the most effective way to conquer them.
Participate in group activities. Working with a group and pursuing a goal as a unit can help you to understand social dynamics and forces you to interact with others. Knowing your own strengths can help you to involve yourself in the best possible way, which can lead to training one of your strengths as well. Secondarily, interacting with a larger group that tries to reach a certain goal can be a soft start into confronting yourself with social interactions. Everyone will have a task, which means you do not need to communicate with everyone at once; the group’s dynamic can form naturally.
When achieving such a set goal with a group, this will be a very rewarding activity, which can even lead to you learning to not only analyze, manage, and use your own qualities perfectly, but the ones of a group as well. This means you’ll also develop your teamwork skills.
Lastly, practice active listening to make sure you understand others talking to you and are able to evolve your empathetic skill. Active listening will also help you in further social interactions. When having trouble understanding certain social circumstances, that is nothing to be ashamed of. Listening and communicating are the only way one can overcome these problems. You need to listen first to understand afterward.
Now that we’ve evaluated your strengths and areas for improvement, let’s apply all that to the real world. First of all, want to make money? Want to have fun? Here are some jobs and hobbies that align very well with this type of intelligence.
5. Jobs Aligning with This Intelligence Type:
There are various jobs that require this intelligence type’s reflective ability. These include ones such as psychologist, writer, philosopher, researcher, or entrepreneur. As you can see, possible jobs cover a variety of fields you can engage in. Overall, anything that values high awareness of one’s strengths suits this intelligence type very well.
6. Hobbies Aligning with This Intelligence Type:
Besides jobs, there’s also a variety of hobbies that individuals with intrapersonal intelligence could enjoy or excel in. These include things like journaling or meditation for relaxation, or maybe solo sports or personal development activities for moving forward.
Solo sports can be relaxing as you can spend time on your own and move at your own pace, and personal development activities are a very unspecific definition as this could include literally anything depending on your current development state.
Lastly, artistic activities such as drawing can give you insight about your feelings while most often being solo activities.
Now you have a complete guide on what defines your intelligence, your strengths and areas you can improve, the jobs and hobbies you can engage in – but, what now? You can refine your strengths, but for what, a possible development you need to work on for years. You can improve areas you might have some deficiencies in, but how is that helpful? What benefit does this knowledge provide just here and now? Let’s have a look at the effect of intrapersonal intelligence in everyday life and its personal and societal impact.
7. Intrapersonal Intelligence in Everyday Life:
In everyday life, reaching personal goals is what drives us to wake up and conquer our day every morning. As you, as an individual, are very good at that, you definitely hold the key to motivation and development. Use your skill to manage your day-to-day life in a way that constantly evolves. Use journals or meditation to help you during that journey.
Besides helping, journaling and meditation can provide helpful insight while being a useful outlet. You most likely aren’t the type to splurge out or scream around; instead, you hold the power of peace and harmony in your surroundings.
We’ve mentioned your strength in evaluating your qualities numerous times now, but in everyday life, this can lead to great decision-making skills. You know what you’re capable of, and even further, you know what you want. Knowing what you want provides stability and direction, making this a very important quality.
As well, knowing what you want will lead to well-founded and thought-through career choices with promising prospects of great success.
8. Societal and Personal Impact:
To society, realize that you are key to understanding human nature. You are a guide, you are a role model, you are capable of sharing the path of self-reflection. If everyone knew their own thoughts and emotions, and the reason behind them, we’d live in a very different, more understanding world — a world of harmony and unity. Understand that you have the key to that world; you’ve opened the door and are now able to guide others through it.
For you personally, you are able to glow. As a company’s leader or a spiritual guide, you can enter the path toward reaching your higher self with ease. This is the path that correlates with your natural abilities — understand its power, and you’ll be unstoppable, able to handle everything and everyone.
Individuals with high intrapersonal intelligence are the aliens, the glowing ones who are able to develop decision-making skills beyond the ordinary, leaving them capable of managing anything with the best possible outcome. They’re capable of understanding and adapting. Understand that you have the ability to be the master of your emotions — the one and only thing we as humans can’t quite control or understand — well, you can.
You are different in the best possible way, so don’t let someone tell you that enjoying time on your own, getting to know yourself, or enjoying quietness is weak or, even worse, wrong! Make sure to use your intrapersonal skills in social situations as well, and realize that nothing can stop you.
Turn yourself inside out and receive strong insight into humanity’s greatest enemy: oneself.