Who Are You Meant to Be? (46 page)

Don’t Stop Here!

This book is just the first milestone on the road to becoming who you are meant to be. Learning about your Predominant Style and charting your course for shifting from your Self-Protective System is only the beginning. There is much more you can learn about your Predominant Style to support your development. To fully achieve your potential, you must learn how to engage the other quadrants of your brain, your Associate Styles, in all aspects of your life. Our site, www.whoareyoumeanttobe.com, provides you with all the resources you need to keep moving along the road to living consistently from your Self-Actualizing System.

Deepen Your Understanding of Your Predominant Style

While this book has provided you with a general introduction to your Predominant Striving Style, including its self-protective and self-actualizing behaviors, more resources are available. Learn about the developmental priorities of your Predominant Style to help you with your planner. Find out how you get your predominant need met in all aspects of your life, including relationships, parenting, career, work, leadership, and learning.

Leverage Your Striving Style Squad

As you learned in chapter 2, you have access to the talents and abilities of three Associate Styles that, together with your Predominant Style, make up your Striving Style Squad. When you incorporate the unique abilities and talents of your whole brain in your life, a powerful new way of experiencing yourself will open up for you, a self that is creative, versatile, resilient, and multifaceted. You will likely discover new talents that you never knew you had. This process starts by understanding how to use all four of the Striving Styles on your Squad and by not limiting yourself to using only a portion of your capacity.

Take the full SSPS assessment, available at www.whoareyoumeanttobe.com, to discover the four Styles in your Squad as well as the extent to which you are using each of the four quadrants of your brain. Use the information in this book to better understand each of your Associate Styles as well as how to fully leverage your Squad to achieve your potential. Download the
SSPS Development Workbook
and complete the activities related to leveraging your Squad.

Get in the Driver’s Seat

The SSPS accelerates the process of becoming conscious by helping you understand the mechanics of your mind. Self-awareness begins when you realize that you have an authentic self that defines, understands, relates, and experiences. This self has the potential for growth, happiness, fulfilling relationships, realization of talents, and more. Knowing that you—your self—are different from your Predominant Style and Associate Styles puts you in the driver’s seat and allows you to develop the capacity to lead and manage all of the members of your Striving Style Squad.

Complete the full SSPS Roadmap for Development set out on our website, which provides you with additional learning resources to build your foundation for living from your Self-Actualizing System and guides your further development according to our five building blocks for achieving potential. From our website, you can also access support from an SSPS practitioner or from our live webinars, so that you can stay the course, change your brain, and achieve your goals.

Get Out of Your Own Way!

The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others.

—Tyron Edwards

You’re never too old to become the person you were meant to be and get back onto the track you detoured from many years ago. However, as adults, learning to think and behave differently tends to activate our Self-Protective System. We are afraid of making mistakes, feeling embarrassed, failing, or being judged or disapproved of. To become who you are meant to be, you need to get out of your own way.

You can’t just decide to be different without working at it. You have to expect things to be hard. You have to act the part before it becomes natural to you. This is the part that trips up most people because it doesn’t feel natural in the beginning. Prepare to feel anxious, embarrassed, and uncomfortable as you try new behaviors. You may feel discomfort, but accept it and don’t give up. Learn to stop paying so much attention to the feelings that hijack you so that you can focus on what you are trying to achieve.

A Final Thought

If you take only one thing from this book, let it be this: As humans we are meant to develop from the inside out. However, most of us have been conditioned to develop from the outside in. Take some time to look inside and don’t hurry the process. The potential inside of you that you’ve been denying, the needs that have been frustrated, and the desired life that you have been too cautious or afraid to live are there for you to embrace, nurture, and fulfill.

And the great news is that the power is ours. Any one of us can become who we are meant to be.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We wrote this book about people, for people, and we couldn’t have done this without our collective experiences. We are grateful for everything we have learned from our spouses, Blake Taylor and Jeff Hollefriend; our children and grandchildren, Ben, Emma, and Paige; and our extended family and friends. In particular, we are indebted to those who joined us in our petri dish over the past five years (as though they had any choice) while we tested our theories and development strategies and who continue to allow their lives to be turned into examples for our books and anecdotes for our seminars.

We are grateful to all of those people who stood beside us, believing in what we were doing and helping us with their time and their caring. To friends Melanie Faye Reeve and Stephen van Beek, for their curious minds and generous feedback. To Thom Boehlert, Tim Baker, Bonnie Mah, and Kirk Fernandes for backing us financially from day 1. To clients who used the Striving Styles with their employees and their families, just because they believed in us.

We would like to thank the editors and writers who contributed to the proposal for the book: Jill Stern, Jacob Moore, and Katrin Schumann. Their work helped give shape to the organization of the book. A special thanks to Bonnie Lynch, whose use of humor and ability to convert our writing into everyday language has made reading this book a more pleasurable experience. To our literary agent extraordinaire, Jennifer Gates, whose belief in the importance of the book and the insistence of “just having one more set of eyes on it” brought the best out in our work. And finally, deep gratitude to Shana Drehs and our publisher, Sourcebooks, for seeing our potential and taking a chance on us.

Thanks to all of the brilliant minds who did the research and psychometric legwork for us, people such as Carl Jung, Katherine Benziger, Ned Hermann, Jaak Panskepp, Abraham Maslow, and Paul MacLean, whose theories and research provided us with everything we needed to create the Striving Styles Personality System. In addition, we want to thank people like Wayne Dyer, Daniel Goleman, Daniel Siegel, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, who are at the forefront of living life with consciousness. Their work has inspired us, and we continue to follow and grow from it, both personally and professionally.

We would also like to acknowledge Oprah Winfrey and her editorial team, who chose to feature our work on the Striving Styles in
“O”, The Oprah Magazine
in November 2009 and who continue to use our materials in Oprah’s Life Classes. Oprah’s commitment to helping people to be their best self and become who they are meant to be parallels ours. We are honored to have her use the Striving Styles in her work as a leader of consciousness.

And we have saved the biggest thank-you until last! Our most heartfelt gratitude to our sister and aunt, Nancy Dranitsaris, who has worked with us on the Striving Styles since its inception. Her deep and abiding commitment to the SSPS and her contributions through writing and editing, as well as training and coaching with the Striving Styles, have been invaluable to us.

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