Who Are You Meant to Be? (22 page)

Relationship Style of the Visionary

With their inquisitiveness and interest in what makes people tick, Visionaries can seem more social than they actually are. They have a way of listening that can make you feel like you are the most important person in the universe—and for that moment, you are. They can be extremely empathetic and compassionate. Visionaries are keenly interested in information about people and improving how they live their lives. They will fully engage people in conversations, but they tend to listen more than talk, playing the role of the observer or the adviser in conversations. Very seldom are they unaware of other people’s emotions or interests. Their complex personalities are both sensitive and intense, and although they are quite willing to share their inner selves with people they trust, they tend to hold themselves back and can seem difficult to get to know. Usually, they have a small circle of friends.

Visionaries are wonderful romantics in their own minds. They love to envision all of the romantic things they could say to impress their partners. However, they are generally uncomfortable with physical and emotional expression and tend to express warmth and caring through action rather than words. As much time as they spend contemplating the desired state of their relationships, too often it stays in the mental realm, never becoming a reality. Visionaries find that expressing their needs and romantic ideas makes them feel anxious. In addition, their discomfort with self-expression prevents them from communicating how deeply they feel toward their mates, children, and friends, and they end up with a gap between what they want to say or do and what actually transpires.

Family and friends are extremely important to Visionaries, and they spend as much time with them as they are able to. They tend to put themselves wholeheartedly into their relationships and then need to spend time on their own to restore their balance. Friends and family usually open up to the Visionary and allow him or her to help them. From the outside it can look like Visionaries choose to affiliate with people who need them, and to some extent this is true. They establish their place in a relationship by being the person others come to for guidance or information. They seem to find security in relationships by being useful to others. Because of the way their brains are wired, they don’t always seek to connect first with their emotional needs. They are much more connected to their own inner images and ideas about people and relationships. You could say that more goes on in their heads about the relationship than in the relationship itself.

Will (Visionary) knew that his girlfriend Tracy had been under a lot of stress lately. She was working full-time and taking classes at a commuter college at night with the hope of getting a degree. Her mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, and Tracy was stretched to the breaking point in her efforts to keep up with work, school, and family responsibilities, not to mention the emotional impact of her mother’s illness. Will wanted to take Tracy in his arms and console her, to tell her that he would always be there for her, that he loved her, and that she would get through this tough time. He fantasized about taking her away to their favorite place in the mountains for a weekend of romance and relaxation, and even thought of a beautiful spot on a remote trail where he might propose marriage to Tracy.

In the end, though, he worried that she might be in such a fragile state that she could say no, and this would make him feel foolish for having picked the wrong time to propose. So instead he bought her a gift certificate to a day spa, which included a massage, sauna, and facial. He hoped that she would take away the same message from this gift as from his imagined vacation.

Visionaries are intensively introspective and probing in communication. The Visionary who sits next you at a community event may grill you with questions about seemingly unconnected aspects of your life—such as your pets, your diet, and your tendency to pepper your speech with phrases like “heavens to Betsy” and “holy smokes”—after which she may render a conclusion that you could realize more peaceful sleep by lowering your intake of gluten and spending more time walking barefoot each day. Without trying to do so, Visionaries can intimidate others with their intensity. Their desire to understand a subject or someone’s intentions can cause others to feel that they are being interrogated. Their listening skills and uncanny sensitivity to the nuances and nonverbal aspects of communication can make people feel exposed and vulnerable without understanding why. At the end of a conversation, Visionaries may feel they have skillfully removed the pretenses that can clothe relationships, although the other person may simply feel naked.

How Visionaries Satisfy Their Need to Be Perceptive

Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. It’s where all the fruit is.

—Shirley MacLaine

Helping Others Achieve Their Potential

This type of encouragement is frequently heard from Visionaries. They meet their need to be perceptive by seeing others’ potential and encouraging, inspiring, and helping them to achieve it. They have a strong desire to use their intuition to contribute to the welfare of others, either in personal or impersonal ways. Their focus with friends, spouses, or children is on showing them how to achieve their personal best and offering regular feedback and correction. They love making connections for others and tend to give more than they get, as their needs are not always apparent to others.

Cathy (Visionary) shows her caring for her stepchildren by listening to their problems, allowing them to see the nature of their personalities, and helping them to avert potential pitfalls. When her stepdaughter Elisa (Artist) was fourteen, Cathy realized that if Elisa wasn’t able to direct her energy toward something beyond “rescuing” boys who were lost souls, she would likely end up pregnant at an early age. In an attempt to illustrate the amount of energy a baby would take, Cathy and her husband gave Elisa a puppy for Christmas when she was sixteen, hoping that it would drive home the amount of attention and work that caring for another being requires. Although Elisa loved the puppy, she left the lion’s share of the work for Cathy and her father, and ultimately gave the dog away when she got pregnant at seventeen.

Self-Protective Visionaries keep themselves at a distance in relationships.
They adopt a detached approach with people, sometimes treating others as though they were specimens to be inspected and critiqued. This type of scrutinizing makes them seem arrogant and haughty. Even Visionaries themselves may not understand how their detached attitude affects others. Underlying this attitude is often a fear that others will in some way meddle with them and that they will have no way of protecting themselves. They can inadvertently intimidate others with their intellect and can be argumentative for no other reason than to push people away. If you hear a statement like, “I’m not going to discuss this with someone who can’t even open their eyes enough to see they’re being a doormat!” you’ve just been a victim of a Visionary brush-off.

Self-Actualizing Visionaries work at sharing themselves in relationships.
When they are self-actualizing, they initiate opportunities to go out and play with their friends. They start to share their thoughts and feelings with people they trust, becoming less reserved and easier to know—although they are still more likely to share jokes, ideas, spontaneous thoughts, and their many inventive theories rather than their feelings. Self-Actualizing Visionaries let people know when they need distance rather than behaving in a way that pushes others away. They recognize that how another person reacts to their advice reflects that person’s level of functioning, and they don’t take it personally.

Connecting the Dots

And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.

—Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, in true Visionary style, drew connections between two seemingly different mythical systems. By nature, Visionaries build wholeness out of chaos. They are the architects of dreams and visions—their own, or those of others. They are able to see both the big picture and the intricacies of its component parts. They are tenacious and often will not rest until they complete what they see in their mind’s eye, although they do have a tendency to start more things than they can complete. If they are told they can’t do something, they want to know why. Even when they are given a reason, they can believe so much in their own vision of what might be that they pursue it anyway.

In a bar in South Texas, two friends enjoy a cold beer while discussing the ranching business. Visionary Randy has had a brainstorm that he’s convinced is pure genius. It came to him one day last summer as he enjoyed a plate of beef brisket. “Everybody in the south loves to barbecue,” he began, as his friend Bill (Socializer) listened intently, his mouth beginning to water. “But cutting up raw meat for the grill is a health hazard. And when you have to cook the meat piece by piece, you can’t feed everybody simultaneously. You forget which pieces you turned already, so some of ’em get burned. Why not just breed a mini-cow that could be split and sold in halves, ready for the barbecue?” Bill wanted to think that Randy was joking, except Randy was not the type to joke about his business schemes. “Just imagine pulling out a miniature side of beef, perfectly sized and ready to slap on the grill!” Randy was getting more excited by the minute. You could almost see the barbecue sauce dripping from his chin as he mentally tucked into his petite bovine brainstorm. Bill shuddered at the image of something the size of a dog on the family barbecue grill. With Randy, you never knew if he was a brainiac or just a crackpot. But he knew Randy well enough to resist the urge to tell him that. So he just nodded, toasted Randy with a swig of beer, and hoped he wasn’t going to get hit up for an investment.

Self-Protective Visionaries are prone to creating intrigue laced with paranoia.
They can come up with some far-fetched ideas they feel compelled to defend even when they have an inkling the other person is right. Their resistance to taking in what others tell them can give them tunnel vision, excluding all feedback that does not fit their vision. Instead of listening to how others are trying to help them, they discredit dissenting ideas by convincing themselves (and others) that the person who gave them the feedback was plotting against them, was envious, or just wants to see them fail. They are masters at creating conspiracy theories, supporting their rejection of others’ feedback, because this gives them an excuse to do what they want.

Self-Actualizing Visionaries learn to tolerate feedback.
Self-Actualizing Visionaries learn to gather all pertinent and factual data from different sources to ensure their ideas are workable. This includes going to others for constructive criticism, which can help them make necessary improvements before investing large amounts of time and energy in a project. They also learn to simplify their often theoretical and complicated ideas to make them comprehensible to others. In addition, they come to trust that others are giving them feedback in order to help them, not as part of any diabolical plot to bring them down.

Inventing, Envisioning, and Innovating

The perceptions that Visionaries have about the way things naturally relate and evolve, as well as their access to the resources of the unconscious, help them develop visions of what could be. They look for opportunities to approach new activities with a fresh, open-minded attitude. Because of their future orientation, they love to devise plans—for themselves, their children, and anyone else who cares to let them do it. Possibilities, which tend to be far grander than actualities, are much more interesting and pleasurable to them.

Kelly loves the idea of the holiday season. Every year she experiences excitement and joy as she imagines all of the presents she will either buy or make for her family. Around September, she decided she would make a poster board for each of her children, her grandchildren, and her husband—a memory collage with photos and mementoes representing their lives together. She felt that this was a great way of communicating to everyone how special they all were to her and that she treasured each of the shared moments that were reflected in the pictures. She was energized by imagining how delighted each of them would be when they received their individualized poster board.

Flash forward to December 20. Kelly is doing last-minute shopping. Her husband has bought most of the gifts for their family, so she only has to buy for a few people. But time is short and there are no poster boards to be found. Kelly is filled with regret and self-recriminations for not creating the vision she had back in September. She recognizes that she has done the same thing for years and doesn’t know why. The trouble is, when Kelly finishes envisioning what she wants to do, her energy goes elsewhere. Her strength and pleasure are related to creating the vision, not the reality.

Self-Protective Visionaries disconnect from their bodies.
They are not attuned to the emotional and physical cues that let them know when they are no longer grounded. It is as though some wiring gets crossed. When they are tired, they eat. If they are too full from overeating, they eat more. They know they need to exercise, so they sit in front of the television. Overeating or bingeing is very common for them, as are doing other things to excess—drinking, socializing, gambling, or shopping for things they don’t really need. Although they observe themselves behaving this way, they feel helpless to stop, which leads to great guilt and remorse. They can become obsessed with controlling the impulses that triggered the unwanted behavior or fantasizing about how they will act tomorrow while in the midst of the impulsive behavior.

Self-Actualizing Visionaries take care of their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
They make sure they have physical activities in their agenda so that they stay connected with their body. They are willing to listen to and appreciate loved ones who express concern about their self-neglect rather than becoming self-protective and defensive. They know the result of disconnecting from their bodies and emotions and take the time to check in and see how they are feeling. Realizing that they cannot control their needs, they attend to them with self-care. They build tolerance to feeling human and vulnerable and are no longer enslaved by their impulses. They turn important personal visions and plans into realities.