Who Are You Meant to Be? (23 page)

Being Ahead of the Pack

I’ve never reacted well to other people telling me what to do.

—Tom Selleck

Visionaries meet their need to be perceptive by being independent and aligning their actions with their vision. As people who see themselves “on the cutting edge” or “ahead of their time,” they like to show others the way, but they prefer to do it without getting personally involved. They don’t like a lot of attention on themselves and so exert their influence by allowing their contributions to represent them. They are strong individualists with a breadth of interests and abilities. They tend to feel most powerful when they are not limited by the confines of a group, instead observing a group from the outside so that they are able to envision what the group needs to do to achieve its full potential. They stay at the head of the pack, inventing new ways of doing things and championing a more enlightened way of living life.

Benjamin Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. He was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and in the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass “armonica.” He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.

Self-Protective Visionaries are like the Wizard of Oz.
Like the Wizard of Oz, the Visionary wants to be held in the highest regard and seen as the only one who can solve problems—the all-knowing, all-perceiving one who others must obey and who never needs to be taught or told anything. Keenly aware of their own limitations, Visionaries try to show the world their brilliance without revealing their vulnerabilities or humanity. Self-Protective Visionaries feel that they must keep demonstrating how wise they are so they won’t feel invisible. They feel compelled to show people how much they know and to hide the fact that they are not all-seeing and all-knowing.

Self-Actualizing Visionaries live in the real world.
They are aware that real perception, understanding, and wisdom come from experience, participation, and involvement with people and situations as they are in the present moment. Instead of hiding out in the pursuit of deeper awareness, they strive to live authentically with both feet on the ground. Like the Wizard of Oz, once the curtain is pulled back to reveal their mere humanness, they see no more use for the pretense. They show the same type of empathy, understanding, and kindness that the Wizard extended to Dorothy and her companions. They exercise humility in place of grandiosity.

Activators of the Self-Protective System

Visionaries are activated by situations and people who can’t, don’t, or won’t see things the way they do. When they can’t be the perceptive one, they feel attacked, ridiculed, or diminished. This is what they fear most, and they will do whatever they can to protect themselves from these feelings.

Absence of Meaningful Relationships

Visionaries’ SP System is activated when there is an absence of meaningful relationships. Because part of what makes relationships meaningful to them is finding the source of people’s problems, in both personal and professional life, spending much time in environments where they can’t fulfill this role makes them feel inconsequential and invisible. The SP System is also activated when people don’t listen to them and they struggle to understand why people don’t want to hear their insights or to seek deeper understanding through meaningful dialogue.

Feedback from Others

Visionaries fear being attacked or diminished by others. When they spend too much time on their own, their ideas can become quite far fetched, having little relationship to reality. When they actually talk to someone about an idea, believing they have perfected it, the other person may spot flaws. The very act of pointing out the flaws or telling the Visionary that the idea is too “out there” can activate the SP System. The Visionary feels she has been attacked or “shot down” by the other person.

When Visionary Terry’s brother Phil was about to turn sixty, Terry decided that she was going to host a birthday party for him at her home. She sent an invitation to her four siblings and their children, suggesting a date and asking what they thought about extending the invitation to some of their cousins as well. She also asked everyone to let her know if they thought another venue might work better, and her sister Mariel suggested that it might be less of a hassle to have the party at the Legion Hall.

A few days later, Mariel checked the party evite to see who had responded. She was surprised to see that the birthday party was now shown as a “Tribute” and that a number of Phil’s friends had been invited. Mariel (also a Visionary) emailed Terry because she was curious about the changes.

Terry, believing that her vision for the event was being attacked, sent Mariel a lengthy email telling her to “quit finding fault with everything I do.” In a separate email that was addressed to another family member but ended up going to Mariel by mistake, Terry lashed out even more. “Does she think that my house isn’t good enough? Or maybe she’s just worried that she won’t be able to hold court. She could be helping me, but instead she goes behind my back and trashes my plans.” Mariel was deeply hurt by these comments and had no idea what she had done to provoke such an outburst.

Making It Real

The fear of being ridiculed by others when they have to convert their perceptions into reality activates the Visionaries’ SP System. With visions of what might be, they have great difficulty translating what they see and would like to do into reality. They struggle to get out of their heads and into their lives. Having to move from their global, futuristic perspective to the factual, sequential steps required to build their visions makes them anxious because they can’t always envision the specific course of action to get them there, or they feel insecure about what the first step is.

Making Minor Mistakes

Visionaries think that making simple mistakes proves that they really don’t know what they are talking about. They think they are ridiculous and that everyone else probably thinks so too. Because their brains are wired to deal with a more wide-ranging global perspective, Visionaries are prone to making mistakes in things like spelling, grammar, or math. Realizing they have made these irritating minor mistakes, they become even more obsessed with doing things perfectly.

Thinking Small

Visionaries are normally adaptable and flexible in their thinking. It is like their minds are elastic, able to stretch and twist to accommodate all the random ideas inside. Their SP System is activated when others rein them in. Being told that their ideas are too far fetched, or that they can’t do something the way they envision it but have to do it someone else’s way instead is enough to raise their ire. For them, if their ideas are diminished, so are they.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row, I [knew I needed] to change something.

—Steve Jobs

Details, Details, Details

Having to deal with details of ordinary activities, such as housework, mowing the lawn, or even balancing a checkbook, is both frustrating and boring to Visionaries. They can have difficulty controlling their impatience when forced to attend to such matters, so they often choose to procrastinate for as long as possible. When placed in a situation where they must address mundane tasks, they become irritable and cranky.

Blind Spots

Sharing in Relationships

Visionaries are known for approaching others as if looking at a puzzle that needs solving; they are ready to start giving advice on how the pieces should fit together. They forget that they have their own needs and that a healthy relationship means not just giving help but also receiving it. They can think that helping someone is the same thing as having a close relationship, only to have the other person walk away when help is no longer needed. Their super-radar for discerning other people’s feelings doesn’t seem to work when it comes to knowing what others really want from them, or how their harsh words make others feel. When they accuse their critics of having malicious motives, they can unwittingly damage and even destroy relationships.

Addiction to Connection

Visionaries run the risk of becoming addicted to their pursuit of proving how all things are connected. They seek understanding through perpetual study and the pursuit of knowledge. They then create a complex synthesis of everything they have learned.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

—Carl Sagan

Visionaries need to keep making connections to create relational systems about how the world works. Carl Sagan, unlike some less fortunate Visionaries, was able to let his mind soar in this way while keeping both feet on the ground.

Perfectionism

Visionaries have a blind spot around how perfectionistic they are. They usually expect too much from themselves and from others. They refuse to settle for an average understanding, an average relationship, or a mundane way of living, so they set themselves up with unrealistically high standards. The standards of others are relatively unimportant, if noticed at all; SP Visionaries only care about measuring up to their own self-image.

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

—Anna Quindlen

Estimating How Long Things Take

Visionaries consistently underestimate how long things take. They can commit to doing things with or for others only to find that they have painted themselves into a corner. They leave things unfinished, keeping themselves in a constant state of frustration.

Upshifting to Their Self-Actualizing System

For Visionaries to upshift to their SA System, they need to become more self-aware and to redirect their striving energy by doing the following.

Learning to Share

Visionaries need to remind themselves that sharing involves both giving and taking. They become aware of when they are having one-sided conversations and are withholding information about themselves. They learn to make a habit of sharing something about themselves rather than jumping in and advising. They avoid alienating others with their impersonal approach and learn to express genuine intimacy.

Miguel thought he was a pleasant enough guy to be around, but he seemed to have a lot of first dates that didn’t turn into second dates. He was a great listener and was always relieved when he met a woman who liked to talk about herself, because it was so easy to get to know her just by listening. But when several of the women he dated declined to go out with him again, he finally asked one of them what was wrong. She said that she didn’t feel he was really interested in a relationship with her because when she tried to get to know him, he gave the shortest possible answers to every question she had asked. Miguel was stunned, because he thought that’s what women wanted.

Visionaries need to learn that conversation is not an exchange in which one person listens and the other only talks but more of a shared experience.

Stopping the Paranoia

Visionaries have to keep reminding themselves that others are not out to get them, and that this mind-set is only an excuse for retreating from relationships and for pushing others away. In the birthday party fiasco, had Terry held the imagined insult up to the light of reality by taking the time to consider all of Mariel’s possible motives for inquiring about her changes to the party plan, she could have saved both herself and Mariel a lot of suffering.

Being in the Present Moment

Visionaries need to remember to keep both feet on the ground, in the present moment. They need to stay connected with their physical bodies through meditation and exercise forms such as jogging, yoga, and dancing, which are grounding for them. The practice of mindful meditation can be particularly helpful for building present-moment awareness.

Stopping Their Dehumanization of Themselves

It helps Visionaries to remind themselves that they are human so they can recognize their limits and tolerate their feelings. It can be extremely helpful for them to explore their emotions and to gain self-awareness by seeing a therapist, coach, or counselor. Even talking to someone they trust about their insecurities can help.

Approaching Conflict Skillfully

Visionaries need to identify when they are afraid, and to accept and work through conflicts. Taking a course on conflict styles or alternate dispute resolution to learn an approach to conflict management that uses a logical system is very useful for them.

When introverts are in conflict with each other…it may require a map in order to follow all the silences, nonverbal cues, and passive-aggressive behaviors!

—Adam S. McHugh

Spending Time Alone