Who Are You Meant to Be? (2 page)

None of the assessments available created a whole picture for the client. Each provided only a portion of the picture. We became aware of a gaping hole in modern approaches to analyzing personality. It was too disconnected. You could find out your type, your color, or even your conflict style, but that didn’t connect to your emotions. Or you could discover you weren’t empathetic and had little self-awareness, but not what it meant relative to your personality. We found existing personality tests to be inadequate: they simply failed to bring emotions, brain physiology, development, and brain specialization into the equation. And they lacked a system for development to help people go from knowing to experiencing to changing their behavior and developing their brains.

As new research about the brain emerged, we became fascinated by how it could be used to help people. For example, research in emotional intelligence was demonstrating that people who developed emotional intelligence by using both the emotional and rational parts of the brain were happier, healthier, and more successful than those who did not. In addition, single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging technology allowed us to observe the functional areas of the brain and their relationship with an individual’s personality type. We were excited about how these developments could improve our ability to help our clients.

We looked at the brain and personality the same way we would approach any other organ system of the body. We considered its structure, function, and purpose, and the idea that
psychological needs
are the driving force for behavior behind each of the functional areas of the brain emerged. What we found was that when employees’ needs were satisfied by the work they were doing, morale and productivity both increased. When leaders stopped trying to adapt to an ideal version of how they should behave and instead looked at their fears, their personality organization, and their own needs, they were able to more authentically lead their employees and teams. When individuals in therapy stopped blaming others and began putting their energy into meeting their own needs, they started achieving their goals and spent less time focusing on their emotions and their story.

Our Solution: The Striving Styles Personality System

It became clear to us that to really help our clients, we had to create something that was inclusive of emotions and personality styles to close the gap between knowing and doing, thereby moving clients from
inactive knowing
to
active knowing
to achieve greater results. In 2007, we began creating an assessment and development system with the same type of substantial reports we had been customizing for our clients. We combined the most up-to-date research on how different parts of the brain function and the role of emotions in learning and development with psychological type, needs, brain dominance theories, and mindfulness to create the Striving Styles Personality System, or SSPS. The SSPS blends new brain science with Carl Jung’s century-old personality system to show how the brain functions and how key areas of our brain operate in our personality. It shows why most people live in “survival mode,” using behaviors, thinking patterns, and beliefs that keep them there.

Having used the system successfully in our consulting business and personal lives for the past five years, we became increasingly excited about how successful and powerful it is when used as directed. We have had the opportunity to use it extensively with leaders and teams, in personal and relationship counseling, and to improve the mental health of our clients. Through our personal experiences with raising children and supporting their learning challenges including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), we have begun helping parents and teachers to put this practical framework to use. It has been invaluable to us as we navigated personal opportunities and challenges. It was our desire to bring our approach to achieving potential to a larger audience that led to the writing of
Who Are You Meant to Be?

Our book introduces you to the SSPS, which builds your understanding of how your brain is organized and how it is intended to be used. Most important, you will discover which of eight possible Striving Styles is truest to your brain’s natural makeup and how the other Styles function in your personality. Our book brings you benefits that are unique to the SSPS: you will learn how to harness the power of your emotions, enhance the functioning of your brain as a whole, and create a clear, step-by-step Roadmap for becoming who you are meant to be.

The Organization of the Book

This book is organized into three parts and takes you from learning how your brain functions to getting to know the eight Striving Styles, and then to building your personal Roadmap for becoming who you are meant to be. The book is filled with stories and examples to bring the theory and the Styles to life for you. All the examples have been taken from our work in clinical and organizational practice, as well as from our personal experiences. For the explanations of the brain, the Striving Styles, and other theoretical elements of the SSPS, we have tried to use simple, everyday language to make them easy for everyone to understand. The scientific foundation for the SSPS is built on a body of established knowledge and well-accepted theories that we touch upon here in brief; however, you will find a complete bibliography of those authors and theorists in the back of the book.

Part 1: Who Are You Meant to Be?

In the first chapter, we cover our current reality, the fact that we aren’t yet living consciously, and some of the reasons why. We discuss why our culture places little value on becoming acquainted with our selves, our needs, and our emotions, and therefore most of us receive no systematic training in how to do so. This chapter also explains how excessive adaptation causes us to live in survival mode and how that gets in the way of becoming who we are meant to be.

Chapter 2 introduces you to the theory behind the Striving Styles and the key elements of how they function. It also provides a brief description of each of the eight Styles and their predominant need. It shows why it is so important for needs to be satisfied and what happens when they are not.

Chapter 3 gives an overview of the anatomy of the four quadrants of the brain and the Striving Styles Squad, and how they work together. This chapter explains how the quadrants function so that you begin to understand the mechanics of your mind. In addition to providing information about the quadrants of the brain, the chapter lists the activities that each quadrant is most efficient and least efficient at performing.

Chapter 4 discusses how the human brain develops. It also introduces Dr. Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory and a very important component of the SSPS—the self-protective and self-actualizing systems of the brain. This chapter helps you understand how at birth, the brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the body, which means that it is still raw material waiting to be formed, molded, and developed during our childhood and adolescence. This perspective on brain development brings new awareness to the reasons for both growth-oriented, or self-actualizing, behaviors and defensive, or self-protective, behaviors. It also demonstrates how your brain’s development can get stalled and why despite this you can continue to develop your brain no matter what your age.

Chapter 5 contains the Striving Styles Self-Assessment. Taking the assessment lets you discover your own Predominant Striving Style. This chapter gives instructions on how best to answer the questions to pinpoint your Style and what to do if your results don’t match your idea of yourself. It also helps you narrow down what your three Associate Striving Styles might be.

Part 2: The Eight Striving Styles

The eight chapters in this section contain descriptions of each of the Striving Styles. As you will see, each style is represented as a character, and you will learn about its patterns of behavior in relationships, social activities, and communication. Each chapter highlights how each individual Style gets its predominant need satisfied and what happens if it is not. You will learn about each Style’s blind spots and what each can do to make sure they are using self-actualizing behaviors rather than self-protective ones.

Part 3: Becoming Your Best Self

Part 3 is the working, practical section of the book. It includes the SSPS Roadmap for Development, a comprehensive, step-by-step approach to achieving your potential based on your Predominant Striving Style. Full of exercises for you to complete, this part of the book gives you all the tools you need to understand your brain, chart a course for your development, and move to action.

Chapter 14 lets you immerse yourself in learning about your Predominant Striving Style and helps you figure out how often you get your predominant need met. It has a series of charts for you to fill in, which will help you reflect on your current state as well as determine which activities you can use to help you strengthen your Self-Actualizing System.

Chapter 15 takes you to the next step in the process and includes the Who Are You Meant to Be Planner. The planner leads you through the process of brainstorming your desired future state by identifying both the fears that will block your progress and the action steps required to achieve your potential. It also includes specific habits to incorporate to support your success as you move to action.

You Don’t Have to Leave Your Future to Chance

The unexamined life is not worth living.

—Socrates

Who Are You Meant to Be?
reveals an entirely new way of understanding human behavior and, most significantly, a way to help us realize our own potential to live a happy, fulfilled life by breaking free of behaviors that limit our growth. It provides insight into how we can use our natural abilities and inclinations to achieve what we were born for. It also invites us to get our hands a little dirty by becoming a mechanic of our own brain, learning how to fine-tune it for optimal performance. It teaches us to recognize and redirect powerful instinctive and emotional energies into constructive actions, which will help us shift gears from just surviving to becoming who we are meant to be.

This book emphasizes that the key to lasting change lies in self-awareness, which gives us the ability to make conscious choices about our behavior and how we react to the behavior of others—and the book also shows readers how to take these critical steps toward self-actualization. As the SSPS reveals, when we are able to acknowledge our internal motivation and then consciously engage our whole brain to move us to action, we feel in line with our best selves: we are becoming who we are meant to be.

We would like to give thanks to all of the people who have influenced the writing of this book, whose needs, behavior, and openness to following our advice and coaching have led us to deeper levels of understanding how the functioning of the brain affects whether we become who we are meant to be. In particular, we are grateful to our husbands, children, family, and close friends who have lived with us in our personal petri dish as we developed the Striving Styles. They gave us real-life experiences to experiment with and learn from, because we don’t just write and talk about our subject; we live it.

As our experiences shape and develop the structure of our brains, we altered our brains during the development of the Striving Styles. We brought the Styles to life through envisioning and imagining; structuring and building the system; sharing our emotional experiences and witnessing each other’s; and experiencing the moment of completion with a combination of joy, relief, and excitement. We hope that our story inspires you to step out of your comfort zone and take the challenge to live your own life as authentically as possible.

PART I

W
HO
A
RE
Y
OU
M
EANT TO
B
E
?

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

—Matthew Arnold

R
ESEARCH SHOWS THAT GREATER
self-awareness leads to increased fulfillment in life, and that this journey happens by looking inside of us. Unless we have first done the inner work, getting to know our inner landscape, we end up wandering through life forever in search of ourselves. In Western society, we are encouraged to look outside of ourselves for affirmation and approval. We then judge ourselves on the basis of these external standards or measures of success, good behavior, and societal values. We build an idea or image of who we are over time and constantly evaluate whether we are good or bad according to these mental constructs. We feel the need to protect ourselves, and we see ourselves as limited human beings who are merely surviving.

Part 1 of
Who Are You Meant to Be?
explores the reasons we tend to go searching for ourselves in all the wrong places rather than setting our own course to become our best selves. It provides insight into how both society and our brain development contribute to our living on autopilot without really understanding the mechanics of our mind.

The Striving Styles Personality System sheds light on how our brains work, marrying approaches from psychology with brain anatomy and physiology. Until recently, the brain has been ignored when it came to studying psychology, and our psyche has been treated as a mysterious terrain needing to be explored in the privacy of a therapist’s office and without reference to its functionality, composition, or purpose. Part 1 makes the brain and emotions less mysterious by providing a clear picture of how our emotions and needs affect our behavior. It explains how the brain is organized, how it develops, and what it needs to develop and perform optimally. This part teaches the basic mechanics of the mind, the functional areas of the human brain, and how each of the Striving Styles is most likely to behave to a model for becoming who you are meant to be.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

THE WAY WE LIVE