Who Are You Meant to Be? (41 page)

If you answered yes to any of the above, write down the fears or underlying beliefs that might have contributed to your resisting these activities as well as the impact on your behavior in this step of the Roadmap (e.g., “I avoided doing all the exercises”; “I did not write down everything that came to mind”). Getting more familiar with the way your brain resists these activities can be extremely useful, as your resistance is a part of your SP System and activated by a fear. The good news is that becoming more aware of the way you tend to resist things will make this behavior easier to spot the next time it comes up in your daily life. Remember that change is “the devil we don’t know,” and even when the change is something that will result in getting your needs met, your SP brain will still wave the red flag indicating a potential threat. It’s up you to recognize it for what it is.

By becoming conscious of these emotionally driven, instinctual habits of mind that keep you living from your SP System, you can choose to shift to self-actualizing behaviors. By doing this, you will keep moving in the direction of your potential, seeing resistance for what it is—a barrier to becoming who you are meant to be. Resistance will fall away over time as you learn to simply acknowledge that it is there and, without judging it or focusing on it, keep doing the exercises!

Thinking about the impact you noted in the chart, go back through the step 1 exercises and complete them, staying in your SA System. Once you have finished this final look at where you are today, you are ready to move on to step 2.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

PLANNING ON BECOMING WHO YOU ARE MEANT TO BE

“Would you tell me which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get,” said the Cat.

“I really don’t care where,” replied Alice.

“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, Lewis Carroll

T
HIS CHAPTER INCLUDES THE
Who Are You Meant to Be Planner. It provides a highly effective approach to helping you articulate, stay focused on, and then achieve specific goals for your development (step 2). By following all of the exercises laid out in the Planner, you will set out a clear Roadmap for becoming who you are meant to be based on your Predominant Striving Style. It will guide you, step by step, in defining the experiences that will build your Self-Actualizing (SA) System and chart a course for fulfilling the needs of your Predominant Style in all areas of your life.

Writing down your plan, rather than just thinking about it, ensures that you will work through all the elements of the planning process, including how you will stay with your plan despite the frustration, fear, anxiety, and other emotions that may arise during the development process. It provides you with a means of checking your progress as well as for celebrating your successes along the way. Your written plan allows you to move from intention to action and ensures you shift from inactive knowing to active knowing by providing your brain with the experiences it needs to create new neural pathways and live from your SA System.

Achieving your potential requires a well-defined plan that starts from where you are now and gives you a clear Roadmap to follow based on your Predominant Style and how your brain develops. If you don’t have a plan of what you are trying to accomplish and how you are going to accomplish it, you can end up expending energy in many different directions. Or, you can end up not doing anything at all.

Step 2: Chart a Course for Development

Who Are You Meant to Be Planner

He who fails to plan is planning to fail.

—Winston Churchill

Step 2 in the SSPS Roadmap for Development uses the Who Are You Meant to Be Planner, a comprehensive planning approach that builds on the insight you gained about your Predominant Style and your current state in step 1. The Planner is divided into four sections that engage your whole brain in the planning process as follows:

Section 1: Envision Your Desired Future

Right rational brain:
Where do you want to go? What does it look like when you get there?

Section 2: Confront Your Fears and Underlying Beliefs

Right emotional brain:
What fears do you need to face? What underlying beliefs do you need to challenge?

Section 3: Define Your Plan

Left rational brain:
What needs to happen for you to move to action? What barriers will you encounter?

Section 4: Sequence Your Specific Steps

Left emotional (experiential) brain:
What are the specific steps? How are you progressing against your plan?

The Planner will remind you which part of the brain you need to be using as you work through each section and provide tips to help you complete it based on your Predominant Style. You need to make sure your Predominant Style doesn’t take over when you need to be using one of the less developed quadrants of your brain. If you just use your Predominant Style to complete your plan, you may end up with a plan that is sure to get the one need met at the expense of exercising the other functions and therefore limiting your development. For example, if you only use your Performer, you will envision your future state without setting the specific steps you need to follow to get there. You’ll probably tell yourself you don’t need to bother, because you are excited and you just want to get to work. Or, if you only use your Artist, you could easily get caught up in thinking about why you are afraid and lamenting the fact that you are and always have been. You think about all the times that fear has gotten in your way. By now, you are totally overwhelmed and can’t possibly finish the exercise because you are too upset. You don’t make your way to Leader so that you can define your course of action.

Also, check to ensure that you are responding from your SA System and not your SP System. For example, a Self-Protective Intellectual may want to skip the step of using the right emotional brain to explore his fears, insisting that there is nothing he fears. Or, a Self-Protective Stabilizer may get stuck catastrophizing all the reasons why the plan won’t work or the future state can’t be achieved, stopping her from sequencing the specific steps to follow.

Planner Section 1: Envision Your Desired Future State

Where do I want to go?

What does it look like when I get there?

Our brain is naturally oriented toward creating worst-case scenarios as a self-protective mechanism. However, it is capable of creating best-case and desired future states as well. Envisioning your desired future state requires you to fully engage your right rational brain (Visionary or Performer). It involves creating an idealized view of yourself, based on living in the SA System of your Predominant Style. This desired future state is meant to be a long-term view that concentrates only on the future—
what it will be like when you have become and are living who you are meant to be.

If you try to use any of the other parts of your brain to complete this section, you are more likely to get distracted with limiting beliefs, such as “I don’t deserve this,” “I will never be able to achieve that,” or other self-protective responses. When you start using your imagination without limitations, it’s normal to be interrupted with automatic negative thoughts and feelings, especially fear and anxiety. You need to be aware when you’re censoring your thoughts or ideas and not writing down what you really want. It’s like having a brainstorming session with yourself in which you are just generating ideas. All ideas are welcome, and no criticizing or judging the ideas is allowed. At this stage, you want to ignore thoughts about how possible or impossible your vision seems.

To be effective, your future state must provide you not only with clear goals (“to overhaul the education system in my state by 2014”) but also with a vivid description that reflects the reality of achieving them (“I will create a system in which the learning and emotional needs of children are attended to through their experience of school. This system will take X amount of time to complete and X number of people to work with me on it…”). You need to talk about it as though it were happening now, using the present tense and describing what it looks like as well as what it feels like. Without imagining yourself in your scenario and seeing how it would feel, you are bound to your survival thinking patterns, in which nothing ever gets any better.

Tips for Completing This Section Based on Your Predominant Style:

Leader or Intellectual:
Give yourself time to produce the possibilities without moving into structuring or planning how you will achieve them. Don’t dismiss anything as overly emotional or too far fetched because it is not logical. You may find yourself questioning, “What is the point of this?” and miss out on your own desires and aspirations in the process.

Performer or Visionary:
This will likely be an exercise that you will enjoy or that may come more easily to you. Be aware of the tendency to try to police or critique your ideas, or attempts to contain your expansive thoughts. Dreaming can seem like you’ve experienced it, so it’s important for you to get your ideas down on paper in order to turn them into plans of action.

Socializer or Artist:
Allow yourself to come up with ideas without evaluating them subjectively or judging yourself for having them. You may find that your secret dreams, desires, or ambitions may put you outside your comfort zone because they mean putting yourself first. You may be surprised that you have such ambitions at all! Don’t devalue them or yourself for having them.

Stabilizer or Adventurer:
Get help. Don’t try to do this on your own. Be willing to listen to what others have to say without getting into a lot of “yeah, buts,” and resist the temptation to dismiss anything that seems to be too far fetched, unreasonable, or frightening. This exercise is about exploring ideas, aspirations, and possibilities; it does not have to “make sense,” so don’t censor or edit things as you go along. Just get it all down.

Brainstorm Your Future State

Start by brainstorming elements of your desired future state by considering things you would like to change, emotional states you want to experience, possibilities you imagine, and/or dreams you have. Use the information from “Step 1—Get to Know Your Brain” (chapter 14) to help with completing this activity.

• Changes—What frustrations in your life would you like to eliminate (what do you complain about)? What self-actualizing behaviors would you like to demonstrate instead of your current self-protective behaviors? What would you do differently in the future from today? What would you do more of or less of? What new habits of mind would you establish, and what existing habits or underlying beliefs would you eliminate?
  

• Possibilities—If there were no limits, what would be your ideal future? What possibilities can you brainstorm for yourself? What do you want for yourself? What ideas for a future different from today you can you play with? What would you do if you won the lottery? What feeling state would you live in? What might you try or experience if you believed it were possible to do so?
  

• Dreams—What ambitions or hopes do you have now for yourself that you are not pursuing? What dreams did you hold when you were younger but have since given up on? What do you most wish for in your life? What secret desires or ambitions do you hold for yourself or your life that you don’t share with others but wish would come true?
  

Set Out Your Specific Goals for Your Future

Next, take the inputs from your brainstorming and state them as specific goals to be achieved in your desired future state. Then describe what each goal looks like and feels like when you have achieved it by following the instructions below. Again, its not enough just to set the goal; you have to envision what the experience will be like and how you will feel as though it were actually happening today. Try closing your eyes and describing out loud what you see and feel if you get stuck trying to write down your descriptions. Remember to be aware of when you are censoring your thoughts or ideas and not writing down what you really want.

Here is an example from Heather’s Planner:

Goal for my future
. Define what you would like to achieve in your future state in all areas of your life. Your goal may be a behavior you want to demonstrate, experiences you want to have, or accomplishments you want to achieve.