Thinking about Thinking

A conversation with my son has caused me to think about thinking again. It took me a long time to realize that I think differently than the people around me. Ideas come to me as a whole or as I call it  an aerial view of things. I am not a linear thinker (you must start with A to move to B, to C to get to D) in a world that basically believes that there is only linear thinking.  I also married a extremely intelligent, linear thinking man (got his degree in chemical engineering in three years and graduated third in his class).  I have come to also realize that constantly being told that I was/am "wrong" in my approach caused me to have a poor self image, an uneasy feeling that I never deserved my accomplishments and often was looked upon as being "difficult" which of course just makes me angry and hence "difficult." Is this kind of thinking more of a woman's way? C Diane Ealy, Ph.D. thinks so. She actually calls it "holistic thinking." When I discovered her book the Woman's Book of Creativity in 1995, it was such a godsend and helped set me on a healing path of acceptance. My question to you is how do you think? In school when you had to create an outline for a paper, did you write the paper then create the outline? That's what I did. How does your way of thinking effect your creativity? Because I believe it does and it part I think that is why I love the process.