Who Are You Meant to Be? (13 page)

Understanding Your Results

Sometimes we live our lives like puzzle pieces turned upside down—only showing the world our gray sides. Then along comes life, and it starts flipping them over, showing to us and the world more than just the outline of who we are—it shows us the colors. If we can start to turn more over and put them together, we can see the picture of who we really are emerge.

—Manifest

The results of your Self-Assessment provide you with a starting place to understand how your brain is organized. However, the results might not be what you expected or fit with how you think of yourself. While everyone has four quadrants in their brain and is a mix of four Striving Styles, one Style is our main base of action. Not everything in the description of your Predominant Striving Style will apply to you all the time, because in various situations, you will use your Associate Styles. If you feel that your results don’t match how you see yourself, you can redo the assessment, but first consider a few things that may have influenced your responses.

When you were completing the self-assessment, did you do the following?

• Respond on the basis of how you have to behave at work, or how you are expected to behave because of your role in your family, rather than how you naturally prefer to behave?
  
• Think about what you wish to be like versus how you currently are?
  
• Respond according to your first impulse, or override it after a lot of thought?
  
• Answer on the basis of what comes most naturally, or what you have learned to do to override your natural instincts? For example, did you rate yourself as being self-critical “Occasionally” but think to yourself, “Well, I do criticize myself a lot, but most of the time I catch myself and stop”?
  

Your results may not reflect who you think you should be, or similarly, they may not reflect the attributes you most value. Reflect on the way you are thinking about your results:

• Are you interpreting the results in terms of what is desirable versus undesirable, judging them good or bad, right or wrong? Have you thought to yourself, “I don’t want to be that kind of person”?
  
• Were you thinking about which responses would be most desirable to others, or how others might perceive your results?
  
• What would have been your desired results? Which Style(s) do you think describes you better?
  

When we respond authentically, it takes much less effort and energy because we don’t have to think it through or take the time to evaluate how we respond. Take a minute to go back through the section(s) you are unsure about, review your responses, and reflect on the amount of effort it took to answer the questions and whether your first instinct was overridden. If any of the above scenarios apply, reflect on your answers to see whether you might respond differently with a second look. Ask someone you trust to offer an opinion about whether the results seem to fit how he or she experiences you based on observations of your behavior. Read the description of the Predominant Style that your scores indicated, and of those that you scored strongly on, to see whether another Style is a better fit—not one you like better, but one that is a more accurate description of who you are.

If your score was tied between two Styles, read the chapters on both of the Styles to see which one sounds more like you. Often we will use two of our Styles together and with greater frequency because they are near each other in the brain. They may be in the same brain hemisphere, which causes us to use one side of our brain almost exclusively—a situation commonly referred to as being left brained or right brained. When we often use two Styles together, it can be difficult to figure out which is our Predominant Style with the Self-Assessment.

You can also ask someone you trust to answer the Assessment on your behalf. It is certainly an interesting exercise to see how someone else answers about you. (My husband and I did this.) The viewpoint of a trusted partner or friend can be a valuable part of self-understanding and can give you some insight into what Style you use when interacting with others as compared to how you tend to see yourself.

Most important, read the chapters on the eight Striving Styles. This will give you more detailed knowledge of the characteristics, behaviors, and tendencies of each of the Styles. After you have finished reading the chapters, review your responses to the Self-Assessment statements to decide which Styles are most like you. Remember, none of the Striving Styles is better or worse than any other. They all have their own value and function in your personality. Some tend to be more valued for one gender or circumstance or a particular type of society or family arrangement than others, but each has its unique abilities and potential when applied within the Self-Actualizing (SA) System, and each works to our detriment when we live from our Self-Protective (SP) System.

Remember that you are not your Striving Style. This means that you don’t have to identify yourself as a Leader or an Artist. Instead, you can learn to recognize when you are using your Leader or Artist function so that you can shift easily from one function to the other when necessary.

This Self-Assessment gives you a general idea of your Predominant and Associate Styles and is meant only to introduce you to what your Striving Style might be. For a more accurate result, or to validate the results you came up with, you can complete the Striving Styles Personality System Assessment available at www.whoareyoumeanttobe.com.

The online SSPS Assessment is a more comprehensive assessment, with a greater number of statements. It therefore collects more detailed information about your preferences and is better able to distinguish the finer points of each of the Striving Styles. It will tally your scores and compute how your brain is organized on the basis of your Predominant Style, and it will identify the Associate Styles that go along with that Predominant Style. The results of the online SSPS Assessment will also reflect the degree to which you are using your Predominant and Associate Styles, so you can see whether you are using all of the quadrants of your brain optimally, over- or under-utilizing your Predominant Style, or relying too heavily on your Associate Styles.

Beyond identifying your Predominant Striving Style, the online SSPS Assessment provides you with a foundation for understanding how your brain works as a whole, as well as the information you need to proceed on your path to becoming who you are meant to be.

PART II

T
HE
E
IGHT
S
TRIVING
S
TYLES

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

—Abraham Maslow

E
ACH OF THE EIGHT
Striving Styles has its own unique attributes based on the quadrant of the brain it resides in. These attributes are recognizable by the way a Style behaves, communicates, and relates to others. (It may sound odd to talk about the Styles as if they are people, but often that’s the best way to understand the concept.) The distinct talents, abilities, and behaviors of each of the Styles ensure that they get their predominant need met. Understanding the function of the part of the brain each Style originates from, and what its predominant need is, enables us to identify how each Style will behave at its best, how it will behave when it feels threatened, and what its blind spots are. Looking at the Styles in terms of the brain quadrants also shows us which situations will satisfy the Style’s need and which will thwart it. Having this information about your Striving Style gives you the ability to identify behaviors that will ensure you stay on the path to achieving your potential.

The following chapters provide descriptions of each of the eight Striving Styles. For each Style you will find the following:

• An overview and highlights of the Striving Style, which provides its general characteristics
  
• What makes each Style tick, including information on the part of the brain the Style is located in, and what types of activities it is therefore oriented toward
  
• Its relationship style, which includes aspects of its communication style, and its social and emotional orientation
  
• Its need satisfiers, which includes the “must-have” activities that satisfy the Style’s predominant need, how it is likely to behave if it is self-protective, and how it behaves if it is self-actualizing
  
• A list of the types of situations and activities that activate the Style’s Self-Protective System
  
• What the Style’s blind spots are likely to be—the things it is often most unaware of and how these can affect other people
  
• Recommendations for the types of activities and behaviors that will enable the Style to upshift to its Self-Actualizing System in order for you to become who you are meant to be
  

C
HAPTER
S
IX

THE LEADER—STRIVING TO BE IN CONTROL

I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway And more, much more than this, I did it my way.

—“My Way,” Paul Anka

W
E ARE ALL FAMILIAR
with Leaders, those take-charge individuals who seem like they were born to lead and who expect others to follow. They need to be in control, they know what they want, and they go after it. Leaders are perhaps the most self-confident of the Striving Styles. They enjoy taking the helm, and the ease with which they do so makes them seem like naturals for the role. Undaunted by the challenges of responsibilities that others shy away from, they often end up in leadership positions at work and in their communities.

Leaders are outgoing, gregarious, direct, and upbeat people. Working and being productive gives them a sense of their own power and authority. Their goals energize them and they have a passion to turn ideas into reality. Their need is satisfied by introducing order to people, activities, or the environment. As they need to be in charge of their own destiny, they seek careers in which they have the authority to create and implement whatever they think is appropriate to get the job done. Goal oriented and ambitious, they want to climb the ladder to the top, where they are “king or queen of the castle.” They look for ongoing challenges that provide a feeling of personal mastery. The following quote from
Elle
magazine describes the Leader Style that’s predominant in the young actress Emma Watson:

There’s something efficient about her, as though life is a big to-do list that needs to be addressed…Being Emma Watson is serious business.

Leaders are compelled to be the authors of their own lives. They tend to live by the motto “I think, therefore I am.” This is a tremendous boost to their confidence, because all it takes to instill a great self-concept is to think of oneself as great. Leaders are the people who believe they can’t fail, who channel all of their energy and determination into making things happen. These strong-willed individuals are compelled to fashion the world the way they believe it should be. When this doesn’t work, they can resort to more aggressive tactics to force their will on the environment and everyone in it.