Who Are You Meant to Be? (45 page)

Stay the Course

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

—Aristotle

As you move to action, there are certain disciplines and new habits of thinking that will support your success no matter what plan you set out in your Planner. You need to consider how you will integrate each of these habits into your way of being as you execute your plan. It’s not enough to merely have the idea of doing something; you must commit to exactly how you will make each of these become a habit in order to support your ability to stay the course through the process of becoming who you are meant to be. It’s like the bumpers they put in the gutters in bowling alleys. Even when your ball goes off course and hits the side, you know that it is still likely to hit a few pins. Make sure that you have your bumpers or boundaries in place to keep you on the straight and narrow.

Practice, practice, practice.
It takes determination, discipline, and a lot of regular practice to change your brain over time. Sports analogies help us see the amount of practice that goes into developing a new physical skill and give us an idea of the work that we must commit to, but the development of our brain, self-care, and relationship skills are much more complex than sports skills and take longer to wire into the brain. Think about how long it takes a baby to walk or how long it took you to learn to swim. You have to be prepared to dedicate yourself to your own development, in the same way your mother or primary caretaker dedicated him- or herself to your care while growing up. And if that person didn’t set a good example for you, it’s time to move beyond where he or she left off and challenge yourself to do it differently.

Tiger Woods and others who have achieved great success as a professional athlete are examples of what it takes to change neural patterns. Tiger, following a less-than-stellar year in 2004, decided to make some changes to his swing because he wasn’t having the experience he desired. He worked for an entire year before the new patterns kicked in, substantially improving his game and ultimately winning two postseason tournaments back-to-back. In 2005 he won his fourth Masters, placed second in the U.S. Open, and won the British Open. He finished the year with six victories, ranking first in the world and winning about $10 million in tournaments alone. His need to experience the perfect swing and to be the best golfer in the world fueled his disciplined approach. He was willing to invest the time, effort, and money into becoming who he was meant to be: a world-class golfer.

New habit:
Write down how you will ensure you get the time you need to execute your plan and practice in order to establish new neural pathways in your brain (e.g., “Every Sunday, I will block time in my calendar for the week. I will get up before the kids each day so I have the time.”).

Monitor your progress.
It is not enough just to set the plan. You have to follow it, consistently monitoring your progress against the plan, reflecting on what is going well and where you are struggling or avoiding moving to action. At the end of each month, you will need to reset your monthly plan, acknowledging your accomplishments and identifying new actions or experiences to keep you moving forward to become who you are meant to be.

New habit: Identify how you will monitor your progress against your plan—how, when, and where. What will you do to flag if you are falling off track so you can adjust your plan, rather than abandon it? (E.g., “I will review it each Sunday morning, and will complete that day anything missed from the prior week.”)

Talk about your successes.
Pleasurable experiences are stored in our working memory in the rational brain. For them to register, you actually have to experience them and hold them in your conscious awareness for at least ten to twenty seconds. To the brain, if you have a pleasant experience and just move on, it’s like it never happened. The brain is wired to throw up painful or “negative” emotional memories faster and with greater frequency, which is why people complain more than they talk about their successes and joys. Refocusing the brain on pleasurable experience requires slowing yourself down and taking the time to share your experiences with others so you can build confidence, self-esteem, and optimism. It also requires you to discard that old belief that talking about your achievements is “bragging” or “blowing your horn.”

New habit: Write down how you will talk about your successes and other pleasurable experiences with others (and yourself), rather than complaining (e.g., “If I have something negative I want to share, I have to share a success or pleasurable experience before and after.”).

Create a positive-focus activity.
Another thing you can do is to develop a positive-focus activity. Our family has one called “The Best Part of the Day.” It is often driven by our children, who want to recount the fun things that they have done. We go around the table and everyone says what he or she has enjoyed and why. At work, we start our weekly planning meeting with the “wins, achievements, and things that made us feel proud.” Making this conscious effort allows us to get excited about what we are doing and to share the experience with others.

New habit: Identify what positive-focus activities you can do in your life to regularly reflect on the things that are bringing you enjoyment and a sense of pride (e.g., “I will create a “wins” board in my kitchen where I can write down throughout the week all of my wins.”).

Leverage Relationships

Our brains are especially open to change through relationships. Current brain research has demonstrated that the brain is a relationship organ and that our interactions with others are critical to changing our brain. Relationships provide us with the opportunity to meet our predominant need as well as develop our SA System. They have the capacity to enrich our lives, deepen our self-awareness, and provide us with the love, recognition, and support we need. You need to define how you will leverage relationships in order to support your success.

Don’t do it alone.
You can’t develop in a vacuum, nor can you develop when you are trying to prevent everyone from seeing what you feel is wrong with you. Development won’t happen as long as it is an intellectual exercise. You have to get past the discomfort of letting others in on your plans so that they can support you.

New habit: Identify the people in your life you will share your plans with and engage their help as well as the specific type of help you would like from them (e.g., “My sister—help me to stop complaining about my ex by letting me know when I am and asking me something that helps change the subject.”).

Seek professional help.
Coaching, counseling, psychotherapy, or cognitive behavioral therapy are all approaches that provide a safe, nonjudgmental environment for building self-awareness and getting in touch with your emotions. These professionals help support our emotional and mental health in the same way that a chiropractor supports the health of our spine. This type of support can help you to identify and eliminate automatic negative thinking and patterns of behavior that get in your way. The purpose is to leverage the help of others so you can become more aware of your thoughts and feelings and be supported to live more authentically. Think about seeking professional help to help you build self-awareness or to guide you to achieve the more challenging parts of your plan. Our rule of thumb is, if you need help, ask for it.

New habit: Define your support system by considering what other resources you might need based on the development goals of your Planner. Determine how you will access them. For example, if a career change is included, then a career counselor or some type of career workshop might be needed for you to move forward on this aspect of your plan, especially if you are unsure how to do so on your own. Ask friends if they can recommend someone.

Prepare for the resistance of others.
Be prepared to deal with other’s feelings and judgments about what you are doing, as it is part of the process. Sometimes we expect others to be as excited as we are about making changes and are deflated when someone is critical instead. As much as they love you, friends and family don’t always like it when you start to change. Prepare yourself for criticism, skepticism, or even blatant sabotage. You may have to help others adjust to your new way of being and lifestyle, and let go of those who can’t. Most important, don’t let anyone talk you out of doing what you know in your heart is the right thing for you.

New habit: Identify the people in your life who may resist your efforts to become the person you are meant to be. Write down how they are likely to behave—what they might say or do—and how you will respond when these situations arise (e.g., “My husband is likely to tell me I am great the way I am. I will thank him and tell him I am doing this for me.”).

A Final Look at Your Planner

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

—Harry Emerson Fosdick

The purpose of this chapter was to chart your Roadmap for becoming who you are meant to be based on your Predominant Striving Style. This Roadmap is intended to set out your desired future state, engage you to face your fears and underlying beliefs, and define your plan of action as well as the specific steps you will take. Before moving on, review your Planner and consider the following questions:

Did you complete all the sections including those that made you feel uncomfortable?

• Were you completely honest with yourself?
  
• Is it clear what you will do, when you will do it, and how you will support your success as barriers arise, including your own natural resistance?
  
• Are you ready to move to action by creating the experiences you need to get your predominant need met and strengthen your SA System?
  

If you answered no to any of these questions, reflect on what fears, underlying beliefs, or patterns of behavior may be at play for you. Identify things you can do or support that you can access to help you to fully complete your Planner and prepare to move to action. Go back through your Planner and make the necessary changes, noting when your resistance surfaces and simply acknowledging it without judgment. Then finish the work necessary on your Planner.

If you answered yes to all of these questions,
congratulations!
You are ready to start your journey to becoming who you are meant to be. It’s time to move to action following the steps set out in your Planner.

C
ONCLUSION

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

—Steve Jobs

W
HO ARE YOU MEANT
to Be?
provides an introduction to the process of achieving your potential. As we conclude the book, we want to congratulate you for taking this step for living life as your best self. Every day we show up in our lives and we have the ability to generate the experiences we want to have; to feel the joy of being alive, loving, and loved; to be the authors of our own lives and to authentically express ourselves as we go about doing this. This journey really begins with your commitment to yourself, as who you are meant to be. You won’t achieve your potential just by reading this book, but by spending time with it, going through the exercises, and waking up daily and thinking about what you want to experience, whose lives you want to touch, and what you want to create. The daily practice of reflection, exercising the brain, and living life as your best self is truly a worthwhile experience, and over time it will ensure that you will no longer find yourself living in survival but instead moving steadily along the path toward actualizing your potential.

For some people, the best they can do in life is just survive. But for most, the capacity for self-actualization is already available to us—we just need to learn how to access it. We have a choice as to whether or not we live our lives feeling at the mercy of situations and people. We can say no to adventure, challenges, and new experiences for fear it will cost us our security, or we can say yes. Having the courage to meet our needs, to grow, develop, and prosper—to be the person we are meant to be—may mean that we live our lives without a safety net.

The SSPS offers you the opportunity to become self-aware and to develop a faster, smarter brain. There is no time like the present to learn to help your brain become more efficient and to develop more advanced skills. Even though we can damage our brain and its cells through neurotoxins caused by drugs, alcohol, and environmental pollutants, if we continue to use it, we won’t lose it. Brain connections that are stimulated and used repeatedly grow stronger, whereas unused connections wither away. The more time we spend giving ourselves new and challenging activities and experiences, the more the capacity of our brain is increased.

Reading this book and completing your Roadmap to becoming who you are meant to be is really just the end of the beginning of your journey toward your conscious life. We are excited about the books to come, including those on the following:

• Relationships.
  This book will be for everyone who wants to create a fulfilling relationship. It will show how use a need satisfaction approach to living and working with, and loving, others.
  
• Careers.
  This book will be for people wanting to chose a career that is most likely to satisfy their needs. It will demonstrate the work environment and the need satisfiers and dissatisfiers that will influence how they feel about themselves at work.
  
• Parents.
  This book will help people parent consciously, aware of the impact of their Striving Style on their children and of what their needs are, so that they can raise them to know their brains and the biology of their best self. It will also give insight into why children frustrate their parents needs just by being themselves and how parents can get their needs met despite this.
  
• Children.
  This book will teach children the mechanics of their mind and their personality. It will help them learn about their behavior and how they behave when they are trying to get their predominant need met. It will help them understand how their brains are organized, what their needs are, and what their behavior means.
  
• Educators.
  This book will be for educators who want to teach students consciously. It will help educators become aware of the different learning needs of their students and how to teach to all four quadrants of the brain. It also will show how individual Striving Styles influence how teachers manage their classrooms and the need that they must have met to be fulfilled in their roles.
  
• Leaders.
  This book will identify how the different Striving Styles lead others. It helps people lead authentically from their Style. It also shows them how they are most likely to organize their teams and employees to achieve their potential and that of the organization.