Who Are You Meant to Be? (7 page)

Overusing our Predominant Style gets in the way of our development.
Because our Predominant Style is where we experience the greatest comfort and ease of use, we tend to overuse it or to apply it in situations that don’t naturally suit it. This limits our options and our ability to live our life fully. As the saying goes, “If the only tool you had was a hammer, you’d treat every problem as though it were a nail.” Using all of your Styles gives you greater flexibility and versatility to deal with life’s opportunities and challenges.

To become who we are meant to be, we need to learn how to use our whole brain.
In order to self-actualize and achieve our potential, we must learn to use our brain as a whole, with each quadrant and its corresponding Striving Style from our Squad contributing to our overall functioning. The four Styles that make up our Striving Style Squad are designed to be used together. One Style does not fit all situations, and when we try to use just one, we make ourselves one-dimensional. Each of the quadrants of the brain is balanced by the talents and abilities of one of the other corresponding quadrants, and each one has a specific role to play. By using all four striving energies found in our Striving Style Squad, we emerge as stronger, more capable human beings.

The SSPS also shows us how we can play to all of our strengths. Knowing our Predominant Striving Style and each member of our Squad enables us to consciously and enthusiastically gain self-awareness and build a foundation for solid psychological growth and development. Living from our whole brain, with our predominant need fulfilled, we can see life more optimistically and understand our purpose more clearly.

Why Focus on Our Needs?

You have to know what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically—to say “no” to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside.

—Stephen Covey

Our psychological needs are our highest priority after we have satisfied our physical ones. Although most of our psychological needs operate below the radar of our awareness and we don’t talk much about them, they play a major role in our personality and behavior. Well-known theorists like Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Karl Marx, and Abraham Maslow spent decades trying to understand how needs are related to humans’ mental health and potential. Although their theories are different, they all agreed that human needs are the source of motivation for all behavior and social interaction. They believed that while some needs are temporary and changing, others are fundamental to our nature and even regulate emotional and psychological balance.

Psychological needs are a physical reality and are experienced in the same way other human appetites are. Take hunger, for example: we can’t see or measure it, but we can sure feel it when it goes unsatisfied. Observe the emotional reactions that occur when the body is starved for a while. When we meet our needs, we are strong, confident, curious, living our lives in the pursuit of happiness. When our needs aren’t met, we are more emotional and feel anxious, angry, or irritable. We try to have everything our way and get upset when we can’t do so. We pick fights and blame others for our emotional distress. We live our lives in survival mode.

Our needs themselves aren’t bad; they cause us to take action toward a goal, thereby giving purpose and direction to our behavior. Unfortunately, the word “need” has such a negative connotation that most people cringe at the idea of admitting they have them for fear they’ll appear “needy.” We are so determined as a society to be self-sufficient that admitting we have a need is like saying that we are deeply flawed. Apparently, we seem to believe that people who admit to their needs are weak, desperate, unstable, and undesirable, among other things.

It is actually quite the opposite. When we say, “I have a need to be recognized,” we can put together a plan to do just that and organize activities that put us center stage. It doesn’t make us vulnerable; it makes us strong and in charge of our life. And the best news is that we are more likely to get a need met when we know what it is and then do something about it.

What Happens When Our Needs Aren’t Met?

Frustrated, because I can’t tell if it’s real.

Mad, because I don’t know how you feel.

Upset, because we can’t make this right.

Sad, because I need you day and night.

Angry, because you won’t take my hand.

Aggravated, because you don’t understand.

Disappointed, because we can’t be together.

But I want you to know that I will love you forever.

—Unknown

Frustrated needs are the inspiration of the poets, songwriters, and authors of every generation. The poem above conveys the full range of emotions experienced by the author because his need to have the love of his woman has been thwarted. Much of the time we think that what we need is for someone else to change their behavior so that we can feel satisfied—“I need you to help more around the house” or “I need you to communicate more” instead of “I need to feel connected and love to do things with you—even chores,” or “I need to understand what’s going on and need more information.” This is a direct result of looking outside of ourselves, blaming others when our needs are frustrated.

When we don’t allow for or acknowledge our needs, we end up living in a frustrated, unfulfilled, and dissatisfied state. Frustrated needs create emotions, and emotions ignite our engines in an attempt to move us into tactics to get our needs met. Consider the young father with a need to be in control. He has a tendency to micromanage his world, and everyone in it, to satisfy his need. However, his two-year-old son, simply by being himself, frustrates the young father’s need. The father comes home and there are toys everywhere. He ignores his smiling child and starts screaming about the mess. His harried wife scurries to put things back in order. The father has successfully used his emotions to satisfy his need, at the expense of his wife and child’s feelings.

If he were aware that he had a need to be in control, he would be able to negotiate to get his needs met and manage his emotions more effectively. For example, knowing that he was feeling overwrought because of work, he might have called ahead to his wife and asked if she could make sure the environment was ordered and if he could have some quiet time before dinner. When we are conscious of our needs, it’s easy for us to recognize when they aren’t being satisfied, particularly when a situation or a goal has no intrinsic way of satisfying them. We also have to learn to bear the frustration we feel when we can’t have instant gratification.

Human needs are like the furnace in the basement—out of sight and out of mind. We could almost forget that they exist. But when the house turns bitterly cold, we have to be willing to go down and investigate, because we realize that the furnace is essential to our comfort and security. As everything we do is an attempt to meet our needs, these needs give form to our personalities and the ways we interact with the world. The SSPS takes into account the complexity and diversity of personalities and the unrelenting biological nature of human need, as well as the impact that need satisfaction or dissatisfaction has on the way we experience our life.

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STRIVING STYLE SQUAD AND THE FOUR QUADRANTS OF THE BRAIN

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

—Henry Ford

T
HE FOUR QUADRANTS OF
the brain are home to our Striving Style Squad. Although each member of the Squad has a different need and set of behaviors it uses to meet that need, the Squad is meant to function as an alliance to create a solid and enduring foundation for the personality. Our brain has all of the hardware it needs to ensure that this happens; it just needs us to consciously engage in our development.

Once we develop awareness of what the brain quadrants do, we can learn to direct our conscious mind to perform the tasks and behaviors using the right Style from our Squad. For example, the right emotional quadrant is home base for Socializers and Artists, and is largely responsible for processing information according to its subjective values and feelings. This is the part of the brain that is tapped for making connections with others, for example by reading cues from body language, tone of voice, and facial expression. It’s an area that is weak for many people, especially when they are in situations that call for small talk.

Nancy’s friend Kate convinced her to go to the opening of a neighborhood art gallery. While getting a drink from the bar, Nancy found herself face-to-face with a popular neighbor from across the street. Thinking she should at least try to make conversation, she cautiously ventured a few obscure comments on the ways in which a nearby painting is reminiscent of devotional art in Holland during the fourteenth century (one of Nancy’s favorite topics). She failed to notice that her neighbor is looking restlessly around the room, tapping her fingers on the bar, taking frequent sips of her drink, and only occasionally responding to her remarks by mumbling things like, “Uh, right…”

If Nancy could develop her right emotional quadrant a bit, she wouldn’t necessarily become a social butterfly and the darling of the neighborhood party circuit, but she would be able to recognize how others are responding to her behavior, and she would learn to make moment-to-moment shifts in the behavior to ensure more enjoyable conversations. Because she is not outgoing by nature, she might focus on her ability to listen and to encourage others to talk, and in that way she might find she has to expend less effort actually thinking of things to say. She could also perform some other activities at this type of event that she might find more enjoyable, such as giving tours of the gallery to guests who are interested in the stories behind the art, or volunteering to help with refreshments. This would allow her to interact with others from a more secure position, reducing her anxiety about having to make small talk.

The following discussion provides more detail about each of the quadrants. Knowing more about the quadrants’ functions helps you understand why the Striving Styles behave the way they do and helps you determine which Style you need to use during certain activities. It can also help you confirm which of the quadrants or Styles you tend to use most of the time.

Left Rational Brain
(Leader, Intellectual)

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

—James Madison

The goal or purpose of the left rational brain is to decide what something is, where it belongs, what its relative usefulness is, and what the priorities for attention are. It is objective, logical, and principled, seeing the world in data points. It creates a complete ideology of how the world should operate by developing principles, laws, and structures, then sorting things accordingly. It helps us to consider objectively and dispassionately what needs to be done, how soon it needs to be done, and who must do it. It processes information in a reasoned and logical fashion, allowing us to decide things pragmatically. It decides where we need to place our effort in order to achieve goals.

The left rational brain plans and organizes information. It has an impersonal, systematic basis for focusing attention. It notices the parts of objects that are similar and different. This part of the brain is not holistic; instead, it breaks things into their component parts, measures and sorts objects and experiences, and then decides how to respond accordingly. It is able to organize numerous objects and to establish logical relationships between them. If the left rational brain could talk, it would say things like, “Hey, nothing personal, but I’m sorting you into the ‘Plumbers’ category and also into the ‘People Who Live on My Street’ category,” or, “You wear crystals, long skirts, and sandals like my Aunt Betty, and you drive a Honda Prius like my sister Wanda. It’s likely, therefore, that you are an environmentally conscious, New Age sort of person.” The left rational brain doesn’t “feel” any particular way about all this information; it just goes about its tidy, analytical way, keeping track of what’s what.

The left rational brain is responsible for the formation of our self-concept, or the idea of who we are. Our self-concept is the collection of ideas and beliefs that we have about our self. For example, it might include “I am an intelligent and clever individual,” “I am decisive person who can think on my feet,” or “I am talkative and entertaining.” This might not be how other people experience us, but it is what we have decided we are like, on the basis of on our behavior. For example, even if we give money to a homeless person on the street only once a year, we add “generous” to our self-concept.

When functioning from this part of the brain, we decide what is right and wrong according to our own personal charter of rights and are willing to go to battle when others don’t want to do things the way we know they should be done. “I think, therefore I am” is the credo for this part of the brain, and it happily rationalizes our experiences so that those messy emotions don’t interfere with its logical processing.