Who Are You Meant to Be? Read Free Page B

explored in the privacy of a therapist’s office and without reference to its functionality, composition, or purpose. Part 1 makes the brain and emotions less mysterious by providing a clear picture of how our emotions and needs affect our behavior. It explains how the brain is organized, how it develops, and what it needs to develop and perform optimally. This part teaches the basic mechanics of the mind, the functional areas of the human brain, and how each of the Striving Styles is most likely to behave to a model for becoming who you are meant to be.

C HAPTER O NE
    THE WAY WE LIVE
    Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back. From then on, you are inflamed with a special longing that will never again let you linger in the lowlands of complacency and partial fulfillment. The eternal makes you urgent. You are loath to let compromise or the threat of danger hold you back from striving toward the summit of fulfillment.
    —John O’Donohue,
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
    T HINK OF A TIME when you truly felt connected to yourself. You knew what you were aiming for, knew you were on target, knew what you needed, and had a plan to get it. All the while, you were brimming with passion about the whole enterprise. You were fully engaged, working with strong determination and purposefulness. You were infused with a feeling of well-being and power. If you’ve ever experienced this feeling, even for a short time, you have a sense of what it means to live authentically as who you are meant to be. It’s a wonderful feeling—like driving a finely tuned race car on a smooth track with the finish line clearly in your sights. But for most of us, the better-fitting analogy is white knuckling the wheel of a sputtering old jalopy, hanging on for dear life as we bounce over an endless series of potholes toward an uncertain destination.
    Too often, we try to figure out what we are meant to be (good mother, loving husband, dutiful son) or what we are meant to do (scientist, teacher, engineer) without really knowing who we are. In other words, we get in the car and drive with only a vague notion of where we are going or why. We seem to define ourselves and live our lives from the outside in, looking outside for answers to questions that can only be answered from within. This approach leads to a lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness and is one of the reasons that so many of us suffer from anxiety, depression, addictions, and other problems. And even if we see our lives as moving along fairly well (maybe not like a high-performance race car, but not like a bucket of bolts either), imagine the benefit we could enjoy if we had an “owner’s manual” that could show us how to prevent some of our most frustrating situations and how to stay tuned up and running more smoothly. Imagine that there was a Roadmap to help you emerge as the person you are meant to be. Well, here it is!
    Who Are You Meant to Be?
is for everyone who wants to thrive—to step up and face the challenges of living life authentically, feeling the power that comes from living unafraid to be themselves. However, doing so doesn’t mean that we have to drop out of society. The Striving Styles help us understand what it means to live our life authentically and thrive as a result. This book can be of benefit to everyone. It helped a nine-year-old girl learn at school rather than being labeled “unfocused” and “rebellious”; it helped the couple who stopped fighting and blaming each other for their unhappiness and started working together to create a more loving relationship; it helped the employee who stopped complaining about work and asked for a transfer when he realized that his job was not meeting his needs; and it helped the leader who was no longer afraid to hold his employees accountable and stopped hiding out in his office. It has the potential to help every one of us who has ever felt empty, has been afraid to show who we are, has been