One of the great fascinations growing up was whether someone’s belly button (‘tummy button’ sounds so much more refined, doesn’t it?) was an ‘innie’ or an ‘outie’. You might like to check in case you don’t know, and any lint you find is deeply significant… keep it safe.

The whole ‘innie’ and ‘outie’ dilemma goes way beyond tummy buttons. We could argue that an introvert is an innie when it comes to where they get their energy from, and, an extravert, of course, gets their energy from outside – an outie.

When it comes to your identity, your self-image, self-respect, and even your self-confidence, the innie and outie issue is massively important. If you’re an outie in this realm, you’ll need feedback from those outside to confirm your self-awareness. This is no bad thing. Those who pay little attention to external feedback can miss vital information that keeps them in touch with reality. The downside is if this slips into an over-reliance on input from others. If your ‘bestie’ suddenly declares you to be less than you’d want to be, the feedback can be devastating. Another vulnerability is overly respecting the opinion of experts. Be they the Dr, a dietician, or one of the myriads of experts on social media, they need to be challenged occasionally. If you’re too much of an outie, you may choose to believe them without deeper thought.

Of course, an innie in these matters may not ‘hear’ the vital advice they need to pay attention to. Innies don’t necessarily know best. In a sense, they can be, “free from the good opinion of others,” but this freedom can also be a vulnerability.

What is best? Well, to answer that, I’d be the expert giving advice, wouldn’t I? What I will share is what I’m learning now – that it is a healthy thing to take every external input with a pinch of curiosity – knowing that everyone is different and the only time one-size fits all is when we put up with an ill-fitting onesie! 

I will declare with some confidence that if your innie-vision of yourself is not healthy, no amount of external feed-in will help. We must love ourselves from the inside out.

Now, press your tummy button and see what happens…

Lex

A Moodscope member