Who Are You Meant to Be? by Anne Dranitsaris Read Free Book Online

her or let anyone else know she’s there. The more we pretend she’s not there, the more energy we expend hiding her and devising stories about why people can’t come over. Because she’s not allowed in our lives, she’s gets more outrageous and demanding, yet we still pretend she doesn’t exist because we’re afraid of what people will think about us if they meet her or know she’s there. What we really need to do is bring her upstairs, give her a room in the house, and bring her into our life.
    As you can see, our conditioned beliefs and the way we relate to our emotions and mental health are a primary impediment to our development because they keep us in survival mode. Until now, there has been no systematic approach to creating mental health that could be used to help people understand the mechanics of their mind, their needs, and their emotions. In the next chapter, we introduce the Striving Styles Personality System and examine how psychological needs have to be satisfied in order for us to develop our brains and escape from survival mode.

C HAPTER T WO
    STRIVING STYLES PERSONALITY SYSTEM
    I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply all my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.
    —Og Mandino
    T HE S TRIVING S TYLES P ERSONALITY S YSTEM (SSPS) is a neuro-psychological approach to understanding the mechanics of the mind. It is a comprehensive “user manual” for people. It shows how our brain is organized, how our needs and emotions influence our behavior, and how we can strengthen our authentic self to become who we are meant to be. It provides an approach to development based on the satisfaction of psychological needs.
    What Are Striving Styles?
    Our personality has a style that includes the way we think and process information, our attitudes, the way we express our feelings, our needs and strivings, our behavior and actions, and our manner of interacting with others. Our Striving Style is expressed in a predictable and dynamic fashion.
    Based on neuroscience and a seamless integration of the work of leading theorists in the area of brain dominance and specialization, such as Carl Jung, Roger Sperry, Ned Hermann, and Katherine Benziger, to name a few, the SSPS provides a way for us to understand and integrate the functioning of our brain. Jung’s work is particularly important to the development of the SSPS, as he was the first to capture the four functions of the brain into a theory of psychological type. He believed that people operate from different psychological frameworks and orientations that are identifiable through observation.
    For the past century, Jung’s psychological type theory has strongly influenced the way we understand mental functions and their roles in our personalities. Jung also believed that humans are driven by a need for individuation, which we can think of as a sense of wholeness or full understanding of ourselves. He saw emotions as agents that could cause us to act in psychologically healthy or unhealthy ways. His careful observations over the years resulted in significant advances in understanding and predicting behavior, particularly with respect to differences in people’s ideas, responses, and actions.
    We have built the SSPS on Jung’s psychological type theory, incorporating recent developments in neuroscience that show that Jung’s proposed mental functions correspond to the brain’s physiology. Brain scanning technologies such as positron-emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have connected Jung’s theory with those of prominent brain scientists by showing that there is a specialized area of the brain for each of the eight Striving Styles.
    The following is an overview of the key components of the Striving Styles. It sets out how the brain is organized to do the work it has to do in our