Go Beyond the MBTI
Striving Styles Personality System
Understand What Drives You. Develop What Gets in Your Way.
The Striving Styles Personality System® is much more than a personality assessment.
It is a comprehensive system for understanding how personality, psychological needs, emotions, and self-protective behaviors influence the way we lead, work, relate to others, and respond under pressure.
The Striving Styles Assessment is one part of the system. It identifies your Striving Styles profile and provides the foundation for understanding how your personality is organized.
The broader Striving Styles system then helps you use that information to understand what is driving your behavior, what happens when you become self-protective, and what you need to develop to become more flexible, effective, and self-actualizing.
That is why Striving Styles can be used in personal development, relationship work, leadership coaching, team development, and organizational development.
The SSPS Assessment Identifies Your Striving Style. The System Shows You What to Do With It.
Personality assessment can tell you a great deal about yourself.
But knowing your Striving Style, or 4-letter MBTI code, doesn’t necessarily change your behavior. The Striving Styles Personality System was developed to bridge that gap.
Your assessment results provide insight into your brain organization and predominant psychological needs. The Striving Styles framework then helps you understand how those needs influence your emotions, choices, relationships, strengths, and habitual behaviors.
Most importantly, it gives you a framework for understanding the difference between the behaviors you use when you are self-actualizing and the self-protective behaviors that take over when you feel threatened, frustrated, or unable to get your needs met.
This makes the assessment a starting point for development, rather than the end product.
How the Striving Styles System Works
The Striving Styles Assessment provides the starting point by identifying your personality profile and the psychological functions and needs associated with it.
The Striving Styles Personality System provides the larger framework for interpreting those results and understanding how they show up in your real behavior.
It helps identify when you are using your personality in healthy, self-actualizing ways and when you have moved into self-protective patterns.
From there, the developmental framework helps determine which emotional, behavioral, and relationship capacities need to be strengthened.
The result is not simply greater self-awareness. It is a roadmap for development.
Striving Styles & Leadership Coaching
Develop your leadership capacity by leveraging the strengths of your Striving Style.
Leaders naturally gravitate toward leadership approaches that reflect their personality type. Some lead by directing and deciding. Others inspire through vision, build commitment through relationships, create stability and structure, or lead through expertise and problem-solving.
Those approaches can all be effective. The problem comes when a leader relies on the same approach regardless of what the person, team, or situation actually requires.
In leadership coaching, I use the Striving Styles system to help leaders understand their natural leadership approach, what drives it, and how it changes when they become self-protective. We look at how their behavior is experienced by others, where they may be overusing one approach, and which leadership capacities they need to develop to increase their range.
The assessment provides the personality profile. Coaching turns that insight into practical development by helping leaders become more deliberate about when to direct, coach, support, challenge, involve, delegate, or step back.
The goal is not to replace a leader’s natural style. It is to help them develop the flexibility to use the leadership approach that will be most effective for the people and situation in front of them.
One System. Many Applications.
Striving Styles can be used wherever understanding behavior is essential to creating change.
Use it to understand yourself more deeply, improve your relationships, develop as a leader, strengthen a team, or understand what is getting in the way of performance.
The SSPS assessment identifies your personality type and Striving Style. The SSPS Roadmap for Development helps you put what you learn into meaningful action. Powerful tools designed to help your team move faster and build better products.
SSPS & Leadership Coaching
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Understand how your personality shapes your leadership approach, influences how others experience you, and affects the way you lead under pressure.
Striving Styles helps leaders understand their natural leadership approach, what drives it, and how it changes under pressure. In coaching, I use the assessment to establish the leader’s personality profile and the broader system to examine how their needs, strengths, and self-protective patterns influence delegation, communication, accountability, decision-making, conflict, and relationships with others. We then focus on expanding their leadership range so they can choose when to direct, coach, support, challenge, involve, delegate, or step back based on what the person and situation require.
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SSPS & Team Development
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Understand what is driving the behaviors, tensions, and working styles across the team.
Striving Styles gives teams a shared framework for understanding the behaviors behind communication, conflict, decision-making, accountability, and collaboration. Individual assessments help team members understand their own needs and patterns, while the broader system shows how those differences affect the way the team works together, especially under pressure. I use Striving Styles to help teams reduce judgment, understand predictable tensions, make better use of individual strengths, and identify the behaviors that need to change for the team to perform more effectively.
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SSPS & Personal & Relationship Development
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Understand the patterns that shape how you relate to yourself and the people closest to you.
Striving Styles helps you understand the psychological needs, emotional reactions, and self-protective behaviors that shape how you relate to yourself and others. In personal and relationship development, I use the system to identify patterns such as overfunctioning, people pleasing, control, avoidance, difficulty setting boundaries, emotional withdrawal, or relying on others to regulate how you feel. Rather than simply trying to stop the behavior, we look at what is driving it and what needs to develop underneath it. This creates a more personalized path to stronger boundaries, greater emotional maturity, healthier relationships, and the ability to respond from your authentic self rather than from automatic self-protection.
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Developed as an Evolution of the MBTI
The Striving Styles Personality System was developed by Dr. Anne Dranitsaris and Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard after years of working with personality, emotional intelligence, psychotherapy, coaching, leadership, and behavioral development.
Existing assessments provided useful information about personality, but they did not fully explain why people could understand themselves and still continue repeating behaviors that interfered with their relationships, performance, and development.
Striving Styles was developed to connect those pieces.
The result is a system that brings together personality structure, psychological needs, emotions, behavior, self-protection, and development in one practical framework.
Striving Styles & Leadership Coaching
Develop your leadership capacity by leveraging the strengths of your Striving Style.
Leaders naturally gravitate toward leadership approaches that reflect their personality type. Some lead by directing and deciding. Others inspire through vision, build commitment through relationships, create stability and structure, or lead through expertise and problem-solving.
Those approaches can all be effective. The problem comes when a leader relies on the same approach regardless of what the person, team, or situation actually requires.
In leadership coaching, I use the Striving Styles system to help leaders understand their natural leadership approach, what drives it, and how it changes when they become self-protective. We look at how their behavior is experienced by others, where they may be overusing one approach, and which leadership capacities they need to develop to increase their range.
The assessment provides the personality profile. Coaching turns that insight into practical development by helping leaders become more deliberate about when to direct, coach, support, challenge, involve, delegate, or step back.
The goal is not to replace a leader’s natural style. It is to help them develop the flexibility to use the leadership approach that will be most effective for the people and situation in front of them.