Hi Everyone! This is Day 12 of my video series, 20 Days, 20 Quizzes, where I count down the 20 reasons why my book, All About You: A Personality Quiz Book will make a great gift for your loved ones this holiday season! This book is aimed at preteens and teenagers, but adults can also enjoy it. Click on the link in the description below to purchase!
The twelfth quiz in the book is about whether you have holistic experiences. Now, the word holistic can be used to mean a lot of things, so let me explain how I’m using the word in this context. Holistic is about experiences being connected to each other. Do you have strong associations with certain music? Do any songs remind you of people or places or life experiences you had when you first listened to them? Do any foods remind you of special events? My family has special foods that we only eat at Christmas, and I often say that those foods taste like Christmas to me, and they remind me of being at my grandparents’ house. The quiz is about how strongly you have connections like this.
You can come out to be very holistic, not holistic, or in the middle. The way I explain the results is with an example. Imagine that you went to an outdoor concert, it was raining, and you weren’t dressed for it, so you spend the whole concert being cold and wet. Now imagine that someone asked you how you liked the music at the concert. Someone who’s not holistic would be able to give their opinion about the music itself, without involving the weather. But someone who is very holistic might say that they didn’t like the music because they were cold and wet. Or alternatively, they might like the music so much that they don’t even notice being cold and wet. The holistic experience is like a cake, where it’s been baked already, and you can’t pull out individual ingredients like flour and sugar and say how those individual parts taste. The non-holistic experience is like a fruit salad, where you can enjoy it as a whole, but it’s easy to taste the individual fruits and have separate opinions of them.
While it may be more subtle than some of the other topics discussed in this book, there is often pressure to be one way or the other. It’s less direct. We don’t explicitly go around telling people to experience things holistically or not. But sometimes we don’t accept the way people experience things. Examples like the outdoor concert have happened to me a lot, where someone was expecting me to have an opinion about the music, when to me, it’s all one experience, I don’t separate being cold and wet from the rest of the concert. One of the questions on the quiz asks, if you told your friends that you didn’t want to do something, they pushed you to do it anyway, and you find out you like it, would you be willing to do that activity with your friends again because you liked it? Or would the fact that you got pressured make it not something you want to do?
The same way it’s common for some of us to have happy memories associated with different things, it’s also common for us to have things that we don’t like because of a bad experience. The purpose of this quiz is to show that it’s okay to be either way, and to encourage everyone to respect each other’s differences, and respect people’s reasons for doing or not doing things, even if they’re hard for you to understand.
It’s also good to understand this quality about yourself in case you ever want to work up to doing something that you have a bad association with. Because if you’re someone who has strong associations between things, you want to respect those connections. Respect and validate your own feelings about the bad experience, work on understanding how that bad experience is different from now (like, maybe you’re doing the activity with new friends who respect your boundaries), and work on creating a new, positive association with the activity. While having stronger associations can make it more challenging to untangle bad experiences from things you’d like to do, it also makes it more rewarding when you create new positive associations.