Who Are You Meant to Be? Read Free Page A

action.
    You Don’t Have to Leave Your Future to Chance
    The unexamined life is not worth living.
    —Socrates
    Who Are You Meant to Be?
reveals an entirely new way of understanding human behavior and, most significantly, a way to help us realize our own potential to live a happy, fulfilled life by breaking free of behaviors that limit our growth. It provides insight into how we can use our natural abilities and inclinations to achieve what we were born for. It also invites us to get our hands a little dirty by becoming a mechanic of our own brain, learning how to fine-tune it for optimal performance. It teaches us to recognize and redirect powerful instinctive and emotional energies into constructive actions, which will help us shift gears from just surviving to becoming who we are meant to be.
    This book emphasizes that the key to lasting change lies in self-awareness, which gives us the ability to make conscious choices about our behavior and how we react to the behavior of others—and the book also shows readers how to take these critical steps toward self-actualization. As the SSPS reveals, when we are able to acknowledge our internal motivation and then consciously engage our whole brain to move us to action, we feel in line with our best selves: we are becoming who we are meant to be.
    We would like to give thanks to all of the people who have influenced the writing of this book, whose needs, behavior, and openness to following our advice and coaching have led us to deeper levels of understanding how the functioning of the brain affects whether we become who we are meant to be. In particular, we are grateful to our husbands, children, family, and close friends who have lived with us in our personal petri dish as we developed the Striving Styles. They gave us real-life experiences to experiment with and learn from, because we don’t just write and talk about our subject; we live it.
    As our experiences shape and develop the structure of our brains, we altered our brains during the development of the Striving Styles. We brought the Styles to life through envisioning and imagining; structuring and building the system; sharing our emotional experiences and witnessing each other’s; and experiencing the moment of completion with a combination of joy, relief, and excitement. We hope that our story inspires you to step out of your comfort zone and take the challenge to live your own life as authentically as possible.

PART I
    W HO A RE Y OU M EANT TO B E ?
    Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
    —Matthew Arnold
    R ESEARCH SHOWS THAT GREATER self-awareness leads to increased fulfillment in life, and that this journey happens by looking inside of us. Unless we have first done the inner work, getting to know our inner landscape, we end up wandering through life forever in search of ourselves. In Western society, we are encouraged to look outside of ourselves for affirmation and approval. We then judge ourselves on the basis of these external standards or measures of success, good behavior, and societal values. We build an idea or image of who we are over time and constantly evaluate whether we are good or bad according to these mental constructs. We feel the need to protect ourselves, and we see ourselves as limited human beings who are merely surviving.
    Part 1 of
Who Are You Meant to Be?
explores the reasons we tend to go searching for ourselves in all the wrong places rather than setting our own course to become our best selves. It provides insight into how both society and our brain development contribute to our living on autopilot without really understanding the mechanics of our mind.
    The Striving Styles Personality System sheds light on how our brains work, marrying approaches from psychology with brain anatomy and physiology. Until recently, the brain has been ignored when it came to studying psychology, and our psyche has been treated as a mysterious terrain needing to be