Ever wished you came with a user manual? We did. So we set out to create one. The Striving Styles® Personality System is the first user manual for people!
Surviving vs. Striving
Surviving vs. Striving
When we get our predominant need met, we are more likely to self-actualize. However, a combination of external forces, including the influence of our parents, our families, our society, and our educational experiences, can lead us to adapt away from getting our predominant need met in order to simply ensure our survival.
The excessive influence of external motivators undermines our ability to use our predominant Striving Style, and we divert our energy into adaptation and self-protective behaviors. Over time, our self-protective, adaptive behaviors come to govern how we behave in relationships, in our work and towards ourselves. Utilizing the energy of our self-protective system thwarts our ability to use our emotional energy to achieve our potential.
We have two sets of emotions – pleasure-based and fear-based – that drive two distinct systems of responses in the brain: the Self-Actualizing System™ and the Self-Protective System™.
Two Emotional Systems
Humans have two separate emotional systems in the brain, each with patterned, innate responses to stimuli. This means that the emotions you experience when you feel threatened (fear based emotions such as anxiety, frustration and envy) cause chemical reactions in the body that are very different from the chemicals released when you feel confident and secure (pleasure-based emotions such as happiness, love, contentment, excitement, and inspiration).
The Self-Actualizing System involves the emotional and rational brains. It seeks pleasurable and self-promoting experiences that are fuelled by love and other pleasurable emotions.
The Self-Protective System involves the emotional and instinctual brains. It seeks to protect the self from real or perceived threats to survival and is fuelled by fear and other associated emotions.
These systems operate outside our conscious awareness. The self-protective patterns that we develop in childhood, which ensure our survival but inhibit our growth and development, continue to be used, relied upon and replicated into adulthood, causing us to keep bringing the past into the present despite our efforts to change and grow.
Are You Building Your Confidence or Undermining It?
When we feel confident and self-assured, our emotions cause us to expand, share, and grow, while survival or fear-based emotions cause us to fight, withdraw and protect ourselves. Security causes us to seek connection with life; fear seeks protection from life. When we don’t know what we are feeling, or when we don't allow ourselves to express our emotions, it is difficult to know whether we are motivated by love or by fear. We don’t know if we are striving or just surviving.
Stop being at the mercy of your unconscious impulses, emotions, and habits of mind. Learn how to self-actualize based on your Striving Style and become who you are meant to be.
What's your Striving Style?
"
Despite how hard I work, I always run into conflict with my boss. I realized that we had different pictures in our minds of what we were trying to achieve."
Cathy (Visionary)
