Who Are You Meant to Be?
Read Who Are You Meant to Be? Online
Authors: Anne Dranitsaris,
Copyright © 2013 by Anne Dranitsaris, PhD and Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dranitsaris, Anne.
Who are you meant to be? : a groundbreaking step-by-step process for discovering and fulfilling your true potential / Anne Dranitsaris, PhD & Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard. — 1st Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
(trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Personality. 2. Behavioral assessment. 3. Selfconsciousness (Awareness) I. Dranitsaris-Hilliard, Heather. II. Title.
BF698.D6773 2013
158.1–dc23
2012034698
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to everyone who strives to live their lives in the pursuit of their potential.
CONTENTS
Part I: Who Are You Meant to Be?
Chapter Two: Striving Styles Personality System
Chapter Three: Striving Style Squad and the Four Quadrants of the Brain
Chapter Four: The Biology of Becoming Our Best Selves
Chapter Five: Striving Styles Self-Assessment
Part II: The Eight Striving Styles
Chapter Six: The Leader—Striving to Be in Control
Chapter Seven: The Intellectual—Striving to Be Knowledgeable
Chapter Eight: The Performer—Striving to Be Recognized
Chapter Nine: The Visionary—Striving to Be Perceptive
Chapter Ten: The Socializer—Striving to Be Connected
Chapter Eleven: The Artist—Striving to Be Creative
Chapter Twelve: The Adventurer—Striving to Be Spontaneous
Chapter Thirteen: The Stabilizer—Striving to Be Secure
Part III: Becoming Your Best Self
Chapter Fourteen: How to Become Your Best Self
Chapter Fifteen: Planning on Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be
Conclusion: The End of the Beginning
INTRODUCTION
What Were You Born For?
The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.
—Brian Tracy
H
AVE YOU NOTICED THOSE
people who seem to have it all together? They look like they don’t have a worry in the world. After all, most of us are just trying to figure it out as we go. It’s not that we aren’t looking for ways to live authentically, as our best selves. We just get so caught up focusing on our faults, trying to figure out what’s wrong with us or being upset about the unfair advantage that other people have over us, that we fail to see our own gifts, our unique abilities, and our own capacity to experience the fulfillment of living life as who we are meant to be.
We tend to fill our minds with incessant, negative chatter that drives us down the road to depression and anxiety. We tell ourselves what we should be doing; what we didn’t do well enough; and how our looks, our bodies, our friends, and so forth, aren’t good enough. We have an underlying sense of impending danger and spend so much time worrying that we undermine our confidence. Feeling anxious, insecure, or indecisive, we don’t seem to have the skills and capacity to look inward for answers, or even reassurance. We often end up with some degree of persistent, unfocused anxiety about ourselves and a sense of hopelessness about what we can do about it.
We, as authors and experts in the field of human development, believe that each person has a potential to fulfill and a unique inner journey to take. We all hold the promise of who we are meant to be within us, just waiting to be embraced and manifested in our daily lives. Our potential has to do with living life authentically, as our best selves. Who you are meant to
be
does not mean “What are you meant to do?”
Being
is a state, not an activity. It represents how we feel and the quality of our experience as we go about the activities of our lives. So it’s not so much about what we do but about how we feel about ourselves as we do it.
Achieving your potential and living who you are meant to be is a process, not a destination. It’s not as if you realize one day, “Gosh, I think I have achieved my potential.” If that’s the case, what do you do then? Lie down and die? Regress so you can do it again? It is living each day with self-awareness, working at and striving to be your best self, that ultimately leads us to being who we are meant to be. Remember the old Zen saying, “
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
” Who we are meant to be is experienced; it’s not a utopian palace at the end of the road of life. You can start living it now.
We all have the capacity to fulfill our potential as human beings if we focus on our experiences and take care to produce the ones that support us to live as our best selves. For us to achieve our potential and to become who we are meant to be requires us to:
1. acquire self-knowledge and self-awareness
2. know our brains and the mechanics of our mind
3. create an inner state of well-being by observing our thoughts and feelings
4. know when we are creating disease with our thoughts, actions, and inactions
5. live from the experience of love, not fear
6. focus on the quality of our experiences rather than the quantity
7. care for and about ourselves
8. empathize with and share ourselves with others
9. do work that is meaningful and aligned with our authentic selves
10. be honest with ourselves and express ourselves authentically
We have written this book to show you how to fill the gap between what you know and what you do; to teach you how to live your life from the inside out; and to encourage you to experience your life instead of worrying or being afraid of what might happen if… We have written this book so you can achieve your potential and become who you are meant to be.
Getting Past the Aha Moment
We have all had it—that moment of insight and discovery, where everything suddenly becomes clear. We know what we have to do, and we get excited about the prospect of doing it and what we will look like, feel, and experience when it is done. Then, one of two things happens: we actively engage in making the insight a reality, or we go back to the way we were before we had the aha experience.
We have seen many lives changed when people get past the excitement of their aha moment and actively work on breaking the habit that has been limiting them or interfering with their experiencing real happiness and satisfaction in their lives. For some it has meant leaving a job or getting out of an abusive relationship. For others it has been realizing that they don’t have to feel or create distress for themselves; they can create the feeling state they want to live.
As lovely as an aha moment is, it is simply an endorphin rush that gives us a temporary high from the experience of making the discovery. We researched this extensively, looking for the reasons that caused people not to change despite a real desire to do so. Our answer emerged from studying the physiology of the brain and how it develops and changes because of its neuroplastic makeup—its ability to shape and reshape itself based on experience.
What we have found is that unless we make what we know into an actual experience, we can’t expect permanent change, as the brain needs experiences to build new habits of mind. Habits of mind and patterns of brain functioning change with repeated experience over time. Otherwise, we automatically revert to the behavioral patterns that the brain has always used. When we don’t realize that the work we are doing is changing the neural patterns in our brain, we give up and say things like, “Thinking positive doesn’t work—I tried it all week but I am still unhappy,” or “I tried meditation once and nothing happened.” Despite what we like to believe, we can’t just learn about something or try it a couple of times and expect our behavior to change. We have called the process of learning without changing
inactive knowing
. Inactive knowing happens when the area of the brain responsible for thinking and knowing (“I know I should get my taxes done”) is at odds with the emotional area or our emotional brain (“I hate doing taxes. I saw a cute pair of shoes on my way home today. I think I’ll go shopping instead.”). In a fully integrated brain, where both thought and experience matter (both sensing and emotional experiences), action follows thought.
Our Experience Exposed the Problem
After talking with thousands of struggling individuals over the past three decades in our roles as clinical psychotherapist, corporate therapist, and organizational development consultants, we discovered a serious disconnect between clients’ self-awareness and their ability to put into practice new modes of behavior that made the most of their innate skills and preferences. Although they wanted to know what was wrong with them and they wanted to change, they could not bring themselves to do it.
Most of our clients assumed that if they and other people had information about themselves and they understood what they had to do to succeed or develop, they would. In practice, we didn’t see this happening. Even when we gave our clients personality assessments that promised to change behavior, people learned about themselves, but their behavior didn’t change unless the change would somehow meet their needs. We were seeing inactive knowing in action.
Why didn’t these clients change their behavior? Suppose that you take a series of psychological tests, and one of the things the tests determine is that when you are emotionally upset, you tend to binge eat. You’ll probably agree that the mere knowledge of this fact does not stop you the next time you feel the impulse. If anything, now that you have a “reason” for your behavior, you may see the reason as a justification for remaining helplessly attached to bingeing as a source of comfort. It doesn’t draw attention to the emotions or frustrated needs that are causing you to act on your impulse to eat like you were never going to see another meal.
Nowhere could we find an assessment or approach to help our clients that would truly shed light on what was behind behaviors like this, behaviors that are seemingly counter to what is in a person’s best interests. We wanted a system that considered the full human experience—emotions, needs, behavior, and personality. At the same time, it had to have a clear Roadmap for helping people develop in order to sustain behavioral change.
How We Tackled the Problem
We have always been concerned with how we could best help people break through limitations to achieve their potential. We chose careers in which we could do this, both in organizations and in clinical practice. Heather first approached it as an organizational effectiveness and leadership development consultant, while Anne came from a clinical psychotherapy and executive coaching background. Our first business together was based on the integrated business model “People, Systems, Results.” The main scope of our work was with the assessment and development of leaders, teams, the organization and its culture, or a group of individual employees. Our approach included looking at the organization of an individual’s personality, using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) which determines a persons personality type and a four-letter code. The MBTI sorts people into sixteen personality types and provides insight into their strengths and weaknesses. We also determined an individual’s emotional intelligence, using the Emotional Quotient Inventory®, a self-scoring assessment that looks at emotional functioning on five different scales of emotional functioning. Various leadership assessments, such as the Leadership Skills Profile and our own Leadership Competency Profile were used in our leadership development programs. These predicted how well a leader was performing, using forty-two behavioral competencies.
