Who Are You Meant to Be? (34 page)

—“The Purr-fect Crime,”
Batman
episode

Multitasking

Stabilizers become overwhelmed when they have to deal with competing priorities and too many things coming at them at the same time. They lose their ability to sequence and prioritize their activities and look to others for direction. When none is forthcoming, they try to stabilize their anxiety by attending to one thing at a time and ignoring everything else.

Blind Spots

Rigidity and Inflexibility

While others see Stabilizers this way, they don’t see it themselves. They believe that everyone will benefit from their steadfast efforts to keep things the same. As they strive to maintain stability on every level, they can get so caught up in keeping things the same that they get in the way of necessary change. They can easily become stuck in a rut, holding on to “the way things should be done.” They limit themselves and others and get in the way of achieving their potential.

Doing Everything

Stabilizers have a hard time seeing how talking to others can help them problem solve. They believe they’re responsible for fixing whatever is wrong and making sure everything that needs to get done is done. Their imagination runs amok with negative consequences of epic proportions should they not get things back in order.

Impact of Their Behavior on Others

Stabilizers see themselves as providing a necessary service: guarding and protecting. They can’t see how harsh and judgmental they are when doing this. They don’t tend to reflect on the impact their harsh words and criticisms have on themselves and others. Even when they are told, they can dismiss the other person as being too “soft” or lenient.

Blind Obedience

Stabilizers have a blind spot around the benefit of challenging rules. They don’t realize that by blindly following rules, they are failing to get to know themselves. Their sense of security remains dependent on the consistency of events outside themselves, which they must constantly try to manage because they have not learned to find a source of security within themselves.

Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.

—Douglas Bader

Inability to Say No

Stabilizers have difficulty saying no when asked to do something for someone in need. They quietly support their colleagues and friends, helping them in practical and tangible ways. They can do so much for others that they are easily taken for granted. This characteristic can be difficult and frustrating for people who care about the Stabilizers when they see how others take advantage of them.

Upshifting to Their Self-Actualizing System

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

Picking Battles

Stabilizers need to learn to know when something is worth fighting or upsetting others about. They tend to “sweat the small stuff,” treating minor breeches of protocol with the same degree of upset as a major transgression. Stabilizers can upshift to where they see the impact of their behavior on other people. Taking a moment to actually feel what they are inflicting can stop them in their tracks.

Practicing Self-Soothing

Stabilizers need a mechanism inside of them to calm their anxiety so that they can shift to the SA System. They can also get others to put things in perspective. Although Stabilizers’ behavior can seem frightening to others, they need to be soothed out of their anxious state. Over time, they will develop their own mechanism for recognizing when they are in this state, but a good friend, partner, or colleague needs to reach out to help them so that they don’t destroy their relationships.

Asking for Help

Talking to others and letting them know what is going on with them can help Stabilizers get perspective. They need to learn to trust others and become less suspicious of others’ motives for helping them. They need to be reminded that worrying isn’t a solution and that sometimes the best action is to relax and float, and let the stream support them.

Taking a Time-Out

Quiet time to reflect and calm their anxiety is often a key to Stabilizers upshifting to their SA System. This lets them consider, order, and make sense of what is going on. Being alone often helps this happen. Stabilizers need time on their own to stop reacting to their anxiety, to actually understand what they are saying no to. It is often surprising to others how quickly they can shift if they are not pushed.

Getting the Steps Straight

If they take time to consider the sequence of steps required to make them feel safe doing a new activity or learning a new skill, Stabilizers gain the ability to say yes to novelty. Having someone help them put the steps in place greatly reduces their anxiety. They can also upshift by talking to trusted friends and family who have experience with similar activities or situations, and who can convince them that there are possible outcomes other than the worst imaginable ones.

Practicing Mindfulness

Stabilizers need to be able to take stock of what they are experiencing and reacting to. They think of themselves as practical, rational people and don’t realize that they are reacting to their fear. In fact, if you asked them they would tell you they aren’t afraid! The practice of mindfulness helps them to develop an observing self that can monitor, recognize, and manage their fear-based reactions so that they can act from their SA system.

Achieving Their Full Potential

Steadfast, reliant, and true of heart, Stabilizers are the “backbone of society,” intent on building a solid foundation upon which they ensure physical safety for themselves, their families, and their community. Seeming to bear the weight of the world on their shoulders, Stabilizers will not stop working until they are spent. Then they will get up and do it all over again. They are loyal, trustworthy, and capable. When Stabilizers learn to meet their need for stability without becoming rigid and to do what is expected of them socially and professionally without undue fear of failing, their considerable assets shine.

PART III

B
ECOMING
Y
OUR
B
EST
S
ELF

There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

—Art Turock

R
ECENTLY, WE MET WITH
a group of angel investors to discuss investment money for the Striving Styles Personality System (SSPS). In response to our pitch, they told us that unless we were offering people something that would give them immediate results or a quick fix, it wouldn’t be successful, because that is what people want. Two of the three people to whom we were pitching told us that people really couldn’t do anything about their unproductive habits and behaviors because “it’s human nature.” Needless to say, we didn’t get any investment money from them.

This example shows the beliefs and attitudes people have that get in the way of change and growth. Although there is truth to what the angel investors said, that it’s human nature to want things to be easy (Self-Protective System), it is also human nature to want to self-actualize (Self-Actualizing System). We make up all kinds of excuses when we give in to our fears and impulses, instead of holding our minds steady and staying on course. We say things like, “It’s too hard. There has to be an easier way.” “I’m not ready. I have to be in the right space to do this” or “I’m too undisciplined to do this. I probably don’t deserve to be happy anyway.”

There are all kinds of excuses we can use for not putting in the
sustained
effort it takes to live life as your best self. This section gives you the tools and strategies for developing self-awareness, starting with the awareness of where you are right now. It helps you identify and work through self-limiting beliefs and fears and teaches you how to face head-on the excuses (resistance) you are likely to put in the way of living life as who you are meant to be. It guides you to chart a course for your own development so you can stop living from your Self-Protective System and become who you are meant to be.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

HOW TO BECOME YOUR BEST SELF

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

—Alexander Graham Bell

W
HILE WE LOVE TO
learn about how to improve and develop ourselves, taking in such information is a passive activity, whereas actually changing our behavior is an experiential one. These two activities are governed by different areas of the brain, and as much fun as an aha moment is, it usually doesn’t take us anywhere in our lives. The purpose of part 3 of the book is to provide you with a step-by-step approach to becoming who you are meant to be based on your Predominant Striving Style. It takes you from simply learning about your Predominant Style through all the actions and experiences necessary to break your emotionally driven behaviors and unconscious habits of mind that get in the way of achieving your potential.

This chapter introduces the SSPS Roadmap for Development, which is a three-step process that helps you repattern your brain and achieve concrete behavioral changes that can make an immediate difference in your life. This chapter also takes you through a series of exercises to let you get to know your brain (step 1) from the insights you’ve gained from parts 1 and 2 of the book. In chapter 15, you will complete the Who Are You Meant to Be Planner, which helps you to articulate and then achieve your specific development goals (step 2), as well as exercises intended to support your ability to move to action (step 3).

By the end of part 3, you will know in which areas of your life your predominant need is being met and in which it is not. You will understand why your need is not being met and the consequences for you in terms of how you feel and behave. As well, you will have charted a course for getting your need met that enables you to shift out of self-protection and to strengthen your Self-Actualizing System in order to achieve your potential. You will be armed with all the tools and practices you need to become your best self by routinely meeting the need that is at the root of your Predominant Style.

SSPS Roadmap for Development

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.