Category: Uncategorized

Self-Betrayal and Finding Your Way Back to Who You Are Meant to Be

For many of us, there comes a point when something about how we live our lives suddenly becomes clear in a way it never was before. You recognize how often you’ve kept quiet because someone else’s disappointment felt too uncomfortable, how many decisions you’ve made because financial security felt too important to risk, or how much of your life has been organized around being the dependable one who keeps everything going. What once seemed like personality, responsibility, or simply the way life had to be starts looking different.

You begin to see the behavioral pattern underneath it. You see the stories you’ve told yourself to make certain choices feel necessary, and you recognize how often you’ve put aside what you knew, felt, needed, or wanted because doing so helped you feel safe. That kind of awareness can feel both exciting and deeply uncomfortable. Once you see what you’re doing and understand why, it becomes much harder to keep telling yourself there’s nothing to see.

In my book, Who Are You Meant to Be?, I wrote about the idea that, at birth, we know what we came into the world to become. And then we forget. As we interact with our families and the world around us, our brain gets busy creating neural pathways based on what we experience, what gets reinforced, and what helps us feel secure and connected. That original knowing doesn’t disappear, but it moves outside conscious awareness and becomes what Christopher Bollas called the unthought known. Somewhere inside, we still know something about who we are, even when we no longer have easy access to it.

This is why it is so easy, in childhood, to abandon our authentic selves and, based on our conditioning, create an adaptive persona to ensure out psychological survival. Our authentic self knows who we are meant to be, but we are raised to become who others prefer us to be.

We Are Unaware That We’re Adapting

By adulthood, the person we’ve learned to be feels so natural that we don’t recognize how much adaptation is still at work. We say, “I’ve always been independent,” without wondering whether independence became necessary because depending on other people didn’t feel safe. We say, “I’m just ambitious,” without asking whether achievement became the way we learned to feel valuable. We describe ourselves as caring and generous without noticing how uncomfortable we become when our needs conflict with someone else’s.

None of those qualities is bad. Independence, ambition, generosity, competence, and responsibility are genuine strengths. The problem comes when we can’t step outside them because they’re no longer simply strengths. They’ve become part of the way we protect ourselves using our adaptive persona.

That’s how self-abandonment continues without us knowing it.

You may stay in a career you’ve outgrown because the income makes you feel secure and because being successful has become such a large part of how you know yourself. You may keep saying yes to family members because their disappointment still feels much harder to tolerate than your own resentment. You may repeatedly choose what makes sense on paper even when something inside you is telling you that the choice no longer fits.

For years, you may not experience any of this as self-betrayal. It simply feels normal.

Then the light of consciousness wakes you up.

The Moment You Know

I think there’s a real difference between doing something unconsciously and continuing to do it once you know what’s happening. This is the knowing-doing gap. Before the light of awareness, you may genuinely believe that you don’t have another choice. After awareness, the question changes. You may still make the same choice for a while, but you know now that it is a choice and that you are paying the price for self-abandonment.

You may be like many people who have spent years staying in a job because it gives you financial security. You’ve told yourself that leaving would be irresponsible, even though you haven’t felt alive in the work for a long time. Increasingly, you feel depleted. Then the light goes on, and you realize that you’ve compromised yourself because your salary has come to mean security, success, status, or recognition. It touches an old fear that you won’t be okay if you can’t control what comes next.

In my late thirties, I left a well-paying position as the director of a women’s clinic to open my own psychotherapy practice. By the time I finally decided, I could see the path clearly, but it took me more than a year to admit I had overstayed because the job felt safe. I knew my path was to strike out on my own, yet giving up a secure salary for a profession that wasn’t even widely recognized at the time brought up plenty of fear.

And it wasn’t only my own fear I had to deal with. Friends and family questioned why I would leave such a good job, along with the status that came with working in a Yorkville clinic in downtown Toronto. They were convinced I would never make the same amount of money on my own and couldn’t understand why I would give up something so secure to do something that wasn’t even to them legitimate.

Their fears landed in two very different ways. My authentic self pushed back hard because I knew this was my path. My inner rebel became even more determined to follow my own path and prove I could do it. At the same time, their certainty stirred up more doubt and anxiety, because they were voicing the very fears I was already struggling with myself. Fortunately for me, anxiety has always driven me to do it anyway, especially when it came to my career. It made me stop talking about what I was doing.

The choice, when we wake up and discover that we are living life from our adaptive persona and not our authentic self, is, “Who am I when I’m not being what other people want or need me to be?”

Who Am I When I’m Not Being What You Need Me to Be?

What resides outside of the safety of our comfort zone is uncertainty. Uncertainty triggers fear. And here is the choice. We can scurry back into the safety of our persona and our comfort zone, or we can tolerate uncertainty until it becomes our new normal. This means developing resilience, becoming curious about ourselves, and becoming less one-dimensional.

If you’ve spent your life being the dependable one, who are you when nobody needs you to fix anything? If you’ve organized yourself around achievement, what do you actually want when there’s no prize at the end? If you’ve spent years keeping everyone happy, what happens when your needs are inconvenient, or someone doesn’t like a decision you make?

I’ve seen people reach a stage in life where they’re very clear about what everyone else expects from them but surprisingly unclear about themselves. They know what their partner wants, what their children need, what their clients expect, and what their work demands. Ask them what they need, though, and the answer gets much harder.

That’s not because they don’t have needs. It’s because they’ve spent so long organizing themselves around the outside world that their own inner signals have become faint. This is where awakening becomes more than simply recognizing a pattern. It becomes a process of turning inward and asking what’s actually yours.

When Self-Abandonment Becomes Conscious

Once we become aware of how we have been abandoning and neglecting the development of our authentic self, we have the power to make different decisions, despite it creating anxiety. What once felt normal when we lived from our adaptive persona becomes recognizable as a repeated turning away from and betrayal of our authentic self and what we know, feel, need, or want in order to preserve security, approval, belonging, or a self-protective identity.

Growing pains aren’t just part of physical growth. Psychological development also comes with growing pains, and awareness can feel uncomfortable because it pushes us to behave in ways that aren’t natural or normal for our adaptive persona. We recognize that nobody is making us stay silent now, remain in the wrong job, keep pleasing everyone, or continue choosing security over what feels true. Developing agency and authority is our responsibility, not someone else’s. Just because we were disempowered as children, even through traumatic conditioning, doesn’t mean that we must keep projecting authority out onto others and wait to be told we are okay to be who we now know ourselves to be. The original adaptation began when we had very little choice, but as adults, we can eventually see that we have continued living by the same rules long after the circumstances changed.

This is where self-betrayal becomes a useful way of understanding what is happening. It isn’t about blaming ourselves for having adapted. It is about recognizing that once we know what we are doing, continuing to abandon the authentic self has a psychological cost.

Reparation and the Return to the Authentic Self

Once self-betrayal becomes conscious, reparation means resuming the development of the authentic self and gradually withdrawing the energy we’ve spent strengthening the adaptive persona. For years, sometimes decades, we may have become increasingly skilled at being the competent one, the responsible one, the achiever, the peacemaker, or the person who never needs much. Those ways of functioning may have helped us feel safe and successful, but they can also keep us investing in the same familiar parts of ourselves while other capacities remain underdeveloped.

What often gets in the way is how quickly awareness turns into self-attack. I hear people in my life, and clients I work with, become angry with themselves once they see their pattern. They ask, “Why do I keep doing this?” or “What’s wrong with me?” as though the answer is that they somehow failed to know better. But that kind of self-criticism only fuels the adaptive pattern. It keeps us focused on what is wrong with us instead of becoming curious about what still needs to develop.

The adaptive persona didn’t become dominant because there was something defective in us. It became dominant because it worked. It helped us navigate childhood, maintain attachment, get our needs met, and create enough psychological safety to function. The problem is that we kept strengthening it long after the original circumstances changed, while the self-actualizing capacities of the authentic self received far less attention.

Reparation means changing where the energy goes. Instead of getting better at pleasing, achieving, controlling, overfunctioning, or whatever our familiar strategy is, we begin developing the capacities of our authentic self that let us function differently. That is how the authentic self begins to take up more space in our lives. This doesn’t mean trying to recover an earlier version of ourselves or undo every choice we regret. It means recognizing that the authentic self still has capacities that are waiting for development.

For someone who has spent decades organizing life around other people’s expectations, that can lead to a very unfamiliar question: Who am I when I’m not being what everyone else wants or needs me to be?

That question goes much deeper than career, relationships, or lifestyle. It asks us to separate what is genuinely ours from what became necessary through adaptation. It also brings us back to the central idea in Who Are You Meant to Be?: becoming ourselves isn’t about inventing a new identity. It’s about becoming conscious of what has been left undeveloped and resuming the work of becoming more fully who we were meant to be.

Self-Awareness Is Where the Return to the Authentic Self Begins

The first step in ending self-abandonment is being able to see when it’s happening. We have to recognize when the adaptive persona is taking over, understand what we’re trying to protect, and become more aware of the needs, feelings, and capacities of the authentic self that have been pushed aside. That awareness changes our relationship with ourselves because we’re no longer automatically repeating a pattern without knowing why.

This is what the Striving Styles Personality System was designed to help us see. The assessment identifies the psychological needs that drive us, the strengths we rely on most naturally, what happens when we become self-protective, and which capacities of the authentic self need further development. Take the Striving Styles Personality Assessment.

I’ve also created a free guide, The 16 Capacities of the Authentic Self, with self-awareness questions that help you look more closely at the capacities you’ve already developed and the ones that may need more attention. Download The 16 Capacities of the Authentic Self

Remembering who you are meant to be isn’t enough if you continue investing all your energy in the adaptive persona. The deeper work is becoming aware of where you’ve been abandoning yourself, forgiving yourself for the ways you learned to survive, and resuming the development of the authentic self. That’s how you stop living only as the person you learned you had to be and begin becoming more of the person you were meant to become.

The Difference Between Achievement and Psychological Need Satisfaction

Have you ever reached a goal you worked hard for and been surprised by how quickly the satisfaction disappeared?

Maybe you finally got the promotion you had been working toward. Your business reached the revenue target you had set. You bought the house, paid off the mortgage, earned the designation, became a partner, or reached a level in your career that once seemed very far away. For a while, it felt good. You were proud of yourself, relieved, excited, or simply pleased to have arrived.

Then life carried on.

Before long, another goal appeared. There was another level to reach, another problem to solve, another opportunity you felt you should pursue. You may not even have stopped to ask whether you wanted it. It was simply the next thing that made sense. This is how many of us build our lives. We become very good at moving toward what the external world tells us matters, while gradually losing touch with the question of what actually satisfies us.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as we get older because there often comes a point when achievement stops doing what it used to do. We can still succeed. We may still be very good at what we do. But something has changed inside us, and another promotion, more money, or another impressive accomplishment no longer creates the same sense of satisfaction.

When that happens, we often assume we need a new goal.

Sometimes we need to ask a very different question.

When Did You Stop Asking What You Need?

Most of us were taught very early to pay attention to what was expected of us. We learned what pleased our parents and teachers, what earned praise, what made us successful, and what helped us feel secure. As adults, the messages become even louder. We are surrounded by ideas about what a successful career should look like, how much we should earn, how far we should advance, what we should own, and what we should have accomplished by a particular age.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting any of those things. The difficulty comes when the external world becomes so influential that we stop checking whether what we are pursuing actually satisfies us.

Our psychological needs are not nearly as visible as our accomplishments. You can point to the promotion. You can see the salary increase. You can announce the new position on LinkedIn. It is much harder to measure whether your work gives you enough autonomy, connection, intellectual stimulation, creativity, recognition, meaning, challenge, or opportunity to influence what is happening around you.

And yet those experiences have enormous influence over whether work feels satisfying.

When we repeatedly override our internal experience in favor of what looks successful from the outside, we can slowly become disconnected from our own needs. Eventually, we become much better at answering “What should I do next?” than “What do I need at this stage of my life?” or “What might I do that would actually satisfy me now?”

That is when the external world starts making more of our decisions for us.

The Career That Worked Until It Didn’t

Think about someone who has spent twenty-five years building a successful career. They have progressed steadily, earned a good income, become respected in their field, and built the financial security they once worked hard to achieve. They know how to succeed in their organization, people trust their judgment, and they are often the person others call when something difficult needs to be handled.

For years, much of that felt genuinely satisfying. They enjoyed the challenge and the sense of accomplishment that came from becoming increasingly competent and successful in their work.

But lately, something has changed.

They still do their job well, but they no longer feel particularly energized by it. They catch themselves watching the clock in a way they never used to. Winning a new client does not excite them as much as it once did, and neither does another opportunity to prove themselves, take on a difficult assignment, or move into an even more senior role.

Nothing terrible has happened. In fact, that is part of what makes the dissatisfaction so confusing. By most external measures, they are doing extremely well.

So they begin looking outside themselves for an answer. Maybe they need a different company. Perhaps they should start their own business, take on a bigger challenge, or begin thinking seriously about retirement. They start researching possibilities because that is what they have always done when they want to move forward.

But underneath all those options is a question that is much harder to answer: what do they actually need to explore now to become who they are meant to be?

For years, their career gave them what mattered most to their adaptive persona, and doing became a priority over being. Achievement may have brought recognition, financial success may have created a sense of safety, and being the person others relied on may have reinforced their sense of value. Solving complex problems may also have met an important psychological need and contributed to the sense that their work mattered.

Those experiences were not superficial. They were genuine sources of satisfaction. The difficulty is that they may have spent so many years pursuing what worked that they have given very little attention to the needs of their authentic self.

They know how to survive by achieving. They no longer know what would feel deeply satisfying now.

Our Adaptive Persona Can Be Extremely Successful

This is where understanding the difference between the adaptive persona and the authentic self becomes important.

Our adaptive persona develops as we learn to use our natural strengths to function effectively, protect ourselves psychologically, and meet our emotional needs. It emerges from the self-protective system, and much of what it acts from is real ability. In fact, our adaptive persona can become extraordinarily successful. But its agenda is to protect by continuously being better than before. Always comparing, competing, and fearing that you aren’t good enough despite your achievements and success.

If you discovered early in life that being competent brought you recognition, you may have become exceptionally competent. If being overresponsible made you feel secure or valued, you may have become the person everyone can count on. If accomplishment gave you a strong sense of worth, you may have spent decades becoming very good at accomplishing things.

The external world tends to reward these behaviors, which makes it even easier to keep relying on them. The promotion says, “Keep doing this.” The larger salary says, “You are on the right track.” The recognition from other people tells you that the version of yourself you have developed is working very well.

And perhaps it is.

But working isn’t necessarily the same as continuing to develop. The adaptive persona can become so effective at producing success that we stop noticing how much of our life is being organized around the same familiar parts of ourselves.

What Satisfies You Is Different From What Proves You Are Successful

This distinction between achievement and need satisfaction is central to the Striving Styles Personality System.

We are born with a preference for one psychological function, and that function becomes the foundation of our dominant Striving Style, with its predominant need. Because it operates more efficiently for us, we naturally use it more often. We build strengths around it, and the psychological need connected to that function is particularly important in shaping what motivates and satisfies us.

This helps explain why the same job can feel deeply satisfying to one person and completely draining to another. We do not all need the same things from our work.

What matters is whether the experiences we are having actually satisfy our psychological needs.

The problem is that many people have never been taught to think about their careers this way. We tend to approach career development in terms of what we are capable of doing, what opportunities are available, and what will advance us professionally. We are much less likely to ask whether the environment, role, and work itself provide enough of what we psychologically need in order to thrive.

Eventually, that catches up with us.

You can be highly successful at work that no longer satisfies you. You can be exceptionally good at something that you no longer want to spend most of your life doing. You can earn more money than you ever expected to earn and still find yourself wondering why you feel flat.

That does not mean you are ungrateful. It may simply mean that the things that have been driving you are no longer enough.

This Is Why I Wrote Maximizing Your Career Potential

When I wrote the 16 Maximizing Your Career Potential books based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Striving Styles Personality System, I wanted to approach career development differently. Most career books begin with the external world. What job should you pursue? What skills do you need? What does the market want? What should your next career move be?

I wanted people to start with themselves. To go beyond just surviving to truly thriving.

One of the things the books help you explore is your own need satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Instead of immediately trying to identify the next goal, you begin looking at the experiences that actually give you energy and the ones that consistently take it away. You start noticing what you need from your work to feel engaged and psychologically satisfied, rather than assuming another achievement will automatically make you feel better.

That can change the conversation you have with yourself about your career.

You may discover that what you need is not another promotion but greater autonomy. You may realize that you have spent years being rewarded for managing people when what actually engages you is creating, exploring, analyzing, teaching, or solving difficult problems. You may recognize that you still enjoy your field but no longer want to function in the same way within it.

Sometimes the answer is an external change. But the external change becomes much more useful when it grows from an understanding of what you need rather than from the vague hope that somewhere else will feel better.

You May Have Outgrown More Than Your Job

There is another part of career dissatisfaction that I think we often miss.

Sometimes we are not simply outgrowing a job. We are outgrowing the way we have been using ourselves.

Jung understood psychological development as something that continues throughout life. We are not meant to spend our entire lifespan becoming increasingly skilled at using the function that came most naturally to us in the first place. Our dominant function gives us tremendous strengths, but it represents only part of our psychological potential.

At some point, development asks us to become more than the person we have already learned how to be. That can feel strangely unsettling when the person we have learned how to be has been very successful.

If you have spent decades being decisive, perhaps the next stage of your development requires greater receptivity. If you have built your career around taking care of everyone else, you may need to become more aware of your own needs and boundaries. If you have always relied on logic and control, you may begin feeling drawn toward experiences that require more emotional presence, creativity, or openness to uncertainty.

The pull toward these less-developed parts of ourselves can initially feel like dissatisfaction with our circumstances because that is where our attention naturally goes. We think something outside us needs to change.

Sometimes what is really happening is that something inside us wants to develop.

Before You Set Another Goal, Get Curious

If you have reached a point where success no longer feels as satisfying as you expected, you do not necessarily need to figure out your next move immediately. In fact, rushing to replace the old goal with a new one may keep you doing exactly what you have always done: looking outside yourself for the answer.

If you have spent most of your adult life setting goals, solving problems, achieving, and moving forward, not knowing what comes next can feel uncomfortable. But that uncertainty can also create the space you need to notice what has been pushed aside while you were busy building a successful life. You may begin to recognize interests you stopped making time for, experiences that energize you in a different way, or needs that have been overshadowed by achievement, responsibility, security, or the expectations of other people.

This is not about abandoning ambition. It is about understanding what you want your ambition to serve. Achievement feels very different when it grows out of who you are and what you genuinely need than when it has become the primary way you create security, establish your worth, or prove that you are succeeding.

At some point, another goal may stop being the answer. When that happens, resist the urge to immediately fill the space with the next promotion, project, business opportunity, or five-year plan. Use it as an opportunity to understand yourself differently. Your next chapter may eventually involve a new job, a different kind of work, or a significant change in how you live, but the most important shift may happen before any of those decisions are made. It begins when you stop asking achievement to tell you who you are and start paying attention to what you actually need.

If you already know your Myers-Briggs personality type, you have an easy place to begin. Use the MBTI to Striving Styles Converter to discover your Striving Style, then explore the Maximizing Your Career Potential book for your type. Rather than giving you another goal to chase, the report helps you view your career through the lens of your psychological needs, the experiences that satisfy and frustrate those needs, the strengths you naturally rely on, and the areas of yourself that may now be asking for more development.

You may discover that the question you need to answer is no longer, “What should I accomplish next?” It may be, “What do I need from my work and my life now to truly feel satisfied, and what capacities of my authentic self need to develop to meet my needs?” That is a very different starting point for your stage.

Why Success Can Make It Harder to Recognize That You Are Living Out of Alignment

Have you ever asked yourself questions like, “What if the life keeping you from becoming who you are meant to be is not obviously dysfunctional? What if you are successful at it? What if it is “good enough” or “better than most people’s”?

Are you living your life experiencing a pervasive, low-grade sense of “Is this all there is?” or a feeling that something is missing? If so, it may indicate that you are living misaligned with who you are meant to be.

This kind of misalignment can be hard to recognize because nothing appears wrong. We may be functioning well, succeeding in our work, maintaining relationships, and receiving positive reinforcement for the way we show up in the world. Yet the life we have built may be organized around the strengths and behaviours of our adaptive persona rather than the fuller range of who we are. Because those behaviours have helped us succeed, feel secure, and gain approval, there is often little external pressure to question them, even when we begin to feel that something important in us is being left out.

We are born with a self-protective system that is hard-wired to ensure our survival. As we grow and interact with our environment, we develop an adaptive persona that helps us protect ourselves psychologically and get our emotional needs met. We learn which of our natural strengths are most effective, which behaviours produce the responses we need from other people, and which parts of ourselves are safer to rely on than others.

Because the adaptive persona develops around real aspects of our personality, it rarely feels artificial. In fact, it often feels like who we are.

A child who receives recognition for being capable may increasingly rely on competence. Someone who discovers that being useful keeps them connected to others may become extraordinarily responsible and dependable. A person who feels safest when they understand and control what is happening may become highly analytical, organized, or decisive. These are genuine strengths. The difficulty arises when success continually reinforces them while other capacities remain underdeveloped.

We become very good at being one version of ourselves. Eventually, the very life that proves how successful that version has been can make it harder to recognize what has been left behind.

When the Environment Rewards the Persona

Consider someone who has built a successful career in an organization where she is known for being dependable, organized, calm under pressure, and able to get things done. She has advanced because of those qualities. People turn to her when something goes wrong. Her employer values her judgment, colleagues depend on her, and she has built a level of financial security that would be difficult to walk away from.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.

But increasingly, work that once fully engaged her now feels routine. She finds herself looking forward to the end of the day rather than becoming absorbed in what she is doing, and the things that once energized her, such as meeting a new client, pursuing a business development opportunity, or taking on a complex challenge, no longer have the same pull. Nothing dramatic has happened, but the work that once felt stimulating and meaningful has gradually stopped feeling like a place where she is fully alive.

Her dissatisfaction is confusing because she has spent years creating exactly the kind of success she once wanted.

The usual explanation would be that she needs a hobby or that it’s a phase she is going through. That may be part of it, but another psychological dynamic is just as important. The job continually rewards her adaptive persona.

Every time she solves another difficult problem, takes responsibility for something that others cannot manage, or receives recognition for being the person everyone can rely on, the organization reinforces an identity that has become deeply familiar. She knows who she is there. She knows what makes her valuable. She feels safe and secure.

What makes this difficult is that she may not know what would satisfy her instead. For years, she has invested in the parts of herself that produced success, recognition, and financial security because those things helped her feel safe. Her adaptive persona has been rewarded again and again, while the needs of her authentic self have been deferred, minimized, or simply left unexplored.

She may know that the work no longer fits, but that does not mean she knows what would. She has spent so much time becoming the person who can perform, achieve, solve problems, and create security that she has had far less practice listening for what feels meaningful, enlivening, or personally important when there is no obvious reward attached to it. The question is no longer simply whether she should leave a secure job. It is whether she can begin making room for the parts of herself she has spent years putting on hold.

That is the deeper conflict. The adaptive persona knows exactly how to pursue success and safety. The authentic self has been waiting for her attention.

We Can Mistake Reinforcement for Alignment

When the world consistently rewards a particular version of us, it becomes easy to assume that this must be who we are meant to be.

The person who has always been rewarded for achievement keeps achieving. The person known for being strong keeps carrying more than everyone else. The one valued for being accommodating becomes increasingly skilled at anticipating other people’s needs. The analytical person continues moving further into thinking because that is where competence, certainty, and recognition have always been found.

Nothing about this necessarily feels maladaptive because the behavior keeps producing a payoff.

Yet psychological development is not measured solely by how effective we are at using our strongest capacities. Sometimes the question is whether those strengths have become so dominant that there is little room for anything else.

A life can be highly functional and still be developmentally narrow.

This is one of the central ideas behind the Striving Styles Personality System and a Jungian approach to development through the stages of life. We are born with a natural preference for one psychological function, and because that function operates more efficiently for us, we tend to rely on it more heavily than the others. Over time, it often becomes the foundation of our competence, identity, and adaptive persona. But we do not reach our full potential or become who we are meant to be by relying solely on our dominant function. Development requires us to bring less-preferred functions and capacities into greater consciousness and develop them so that we are not limited to responding to life through the same familiar strengths, needs, and patterns.

Without that development, our strengths can gradually become our limitations.

The Cost Often Appears as Loss of Vitality

Living out of alignment does not always produce dramatic unhappiness. Often the signs are much more subtle.

We may find ourselves increasingly bored by things we are still very good at. Accomplishments that once gave us satisfaction do not have the same effect. We may grow irritated when people keep expecting us to play a role we have willingly performed for years. We begin envying people who have made choices we would once have dismissed as impractical. We may fantasize about an entirely different life without understanding why we cannot simply appreciate the one we already have.

These experiences are easy to label as restlessness or dissatisfaction. Sometimes they are. But they can also reflect a developmental tension between the person we have become highly skilled at being and aspects of ourselves that are asking for more expression.

This is why simply adding more rewards to the existing life often does not resolve the problem. A promotion may give the competent person a larger arena in which to be competent. More responsibility may give the responsible person even more opportunities to be needed. Greater success may provide additional evidence that the persona is working exactly as intended. Yet none of those things necessarily create room for what has not been developed.

We can keep improving the life built around the adaptive persona while becoming progressively less connected to ourselves.

Outgrowing a Role Does Not Mean It Was the Wrong Role

One reason people resist acting on these feelings is that they assume dissatisfaction means they made the wrong choices.

That does not have to be true.

The career may have been exactly right for a particular stage of life. A role may have given us opportunities to strengthen capacities we genuinely needed to develop. A relationship may have supported us in important ways. The version of ourselves that created our current life may have been entirely appropriate to who we were at the time.

Development changes the equation.

As more of our personality develops, we may begin to want things that were previously less important or less accessible to us. We may have less tolerance for roles that require us to overuse one part of ourselves. We may become aware of needs that were previously overshadowed by the drive for security, achievement, approval, belonging, or control.

What once fit can stop fitting without having been a mistake.

The problem occurs when we continue treating an old adaptation as a permanent identity.

Changing the Outside Does Not Develop the Inside

When we begin to feel dissatisfied, our attention usually turns outward. We assume the problem is the job, the relationship, the city, the organization, or the circumstances we are living in. Sometimes those circumstances genuinely do need to change. But when dissatisfaction is rooted in a lack of psychological development, changing the outside does not necessarily resolve what is happening inside us.

We can leave the secure job and take the same adaptive persona into the next one. We can end a relationship and recreate similar dynamics with a new partner. We can move to another city, change careers, or completely restructure our lives and still discover that the same restlessness, frustration, or sense of incompleteness has followed us. The setting has changed, but the way we are using ourselves has not.

For the woman who has spent years organizing her life around achievement, competence, success, and financial security, leaving her job may create temporary relief or excitement. But if she continues to rely on the same dominant strengths to establish her worth and safety, she may simply rebuild the same psychological structure somewhere else. A new career can become another place to overachieve. Entrepreneurship can become another arena in which she has to prove herself. Even a major life change can be organized around the same adaptive needs that shaped the life she wanted to escape.

This is why development requires us to look inward before assuming the solution lies outside us. The more important question is not simply whether a job, relationship, or lifestyle still fits. It is whether we have developed enough of ourselves to know what our authentic self actually needs and to respond to those needs without automatically falling back on the strategies that have always made us feel safe.

Sometimes an external change is part of becoming who we are meant to be. But if we change our circumstances without developing the parts of ourselves that have been neglected, the dissatisfaction often comes with us. The deeper work is not merely creating a different life. It is developing enough of ourselves that we are capable of living that life differently.

Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be Is a Developmental Process

The idea of becoming who you are meant to be can easily be misunderstood as though there is a perfect life waiting somewhere outside you, if only you can find the right career, the right relationship, the right place to live, or the right set of circumstances. We live in a culture that continually reinforces this idea. We are encouraged to believe that happiness, security, fulfilment, and even a stronger sense of self can be found by changing what is around us.

But the external world cannot do the work of inner development for us.

Who we are meant to be is not a career, relationship, lifestyle, or destination. It is the fuller development of the personality we were born with. Our adaptive persona is part of that personality, but it is not the whole of it. It reflects the ways we learned to use ourselves to function effectively, protect ourselves psychologically, and get our needs met. Over time, we can become so invested in maintaining the life that persona helped us build that we stop noticing the parts of ourselves that have been deferred, underused, or left undeveloped.

When your inner world begins to beckon you, pay attention. The restlessness, dissatisfaction, loss of energy, or sense that something is missing may not be telling you to blow up your life. It may be asking you to turn toward yourself. To become curious about what has been neglected. To understand which parts of you have carried the burden of keeping you safe and which parts have never had enough room to develop.

That is where the work begins. You might start by building greater awareness of your patterns, taking the Striving Styles Personality Assessment, starting therapy, or beginning another form of meditation or self-exploration. Not because you are broken and need to be fixed, but because you may not yet know the self that has never been allowed to fully emerge.

Becoming who you are meant to be is not about finding a better life somewhere else. It is about developing enough of yourself that you are no longer asking the external world to provide the security, identity, and fulfilment that can only come from a deeper relationship with your own inner life.

Sometimes the greatest obstacle to becoming more fully ourselves is not failure. It is succeeding for so long at being the person we learned how to be that we stop asking, “Is this authentically who I am meant to be?”

Why Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be Begins With Discovering Yourself, Not Fixing Yourself

William Wordsworth wrote, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”

I have always been fascinated by that idea. What if, when we come into this life, we already carry some sense of who we are meant to become? Not a detailed plan for the career we should have, the person we should marry, or the life we should create, but an inner direction. We arrive with a brain organized in a particular way, psychological needs that drive us, capacities waiting to develop, and the potential to become more fully ourselves.

Then life starts happening.

From the moment we are born, our brain is responding to the world around us. In the early years, it is rapidly creating neural connections, strengthening the ones that are repeatedly used and eventually pruning others as it becomes more efficient. At the same time, we are learning something much more personal: what it takes to live successfully in the family and environment into which we were born.

We begin noticing, long before we can put any of it into words, what brings people closer and what pushes them away. We learn what gets a smile, what earns praise, what creates tension, what makes someone withdraw, and what helps us feel secure. Little by little, we adjust.

Perhaps that is where some of the forgetting begins.

We Learn to Adapt Before We Learn to Know Ourselves

Maybe you learned to be responsible because that earned approval. Perhaps you became the peacemaker because conflict felt dangerous, the achiever because success got noticed, or the independent one because depending on others led to disappointment.

Those adaptations can become so familiar that we start calling them our personality. We become the capable one, the helpful one, the strong one, the agreeable one, or the person who never needs anything.

Then those same patterns begin to create problems. We take on too much, avoid difficult conversations, need control, seek approval, overwork, or struggle to know what we actually want.

And that is often when we start trying to fix ourselves. Instead of becoming more curious about who we are, we turn our attention outward and become increasingly dependent on signs that other people approve of the adaptive persona we are creating. Their approval reassures us that we are getting it right, so we invest even more energy in becoming the person who will be accepted, valued, successful, or loved.

At the same time, our relationship with our inner world and our authentic self begins to weaken. We spend less time reflecting on what we feel, what we need, what matters to us, and what feels genuinely enlivens us. The quieter voice of the authentic self becomes harder to hear beneath all the expectations, roles, and adaptations we have accumulated. Eventually, we can become so practiced at being who we think we should be that we lose touch with who we actually are.

The Way Back Is Inward

By the time we recognize that something is not working, our first instinct is usually to figure out what is wrong with us and try to fix the behavior. We want to stop overthinking, pleasing, controlling, overworking, avoiding conflict, or worrying about what other people think. But focusing only on the behavior keeps us working on the adaptive self we have already created.

The deeper work is to repair our relationship with our authentic self.

For years, we may have been directing most of our attention outward, monitoring what other people need, expect, value, or approve of. Our primary attachment is external, not internal. Reconnecting with ourselves requires us to reverse that orientation. We need to become interested again in our own inner world: what we feel, what we need, what energizes us, what matters to us, and what we are being pulled toward in our development.

We stop being dependent on others to regulate our self-esteem and manage our attachment anxiety. By looking inward and using ourselves as our source of authority, we become the primary reference point for who we are and who we are meant to be.

Stop Fixing Yourself and Start Discovering Yourself

This is where the Striving Styles Personality System can help. Instead of giving you another aha moment or insight into what might be wrong with you, it helps you understand yourself from the inside out.

Your Striving Style helps you see how your brain is naturally organized, your dominant function (the psychological need that drives you), the capacities of your authentic self that are naturally developed, and those that require development because they are connected to your less preferred functions. It also helps you recognize when you have moved away from that developmental path and started using your personality primarily to gain approval, avoid rejection, maintain control, or protect yourself.

That understanding changes the question. Instead of asking, “What do I need to fix or change about myself?” you can begin asking, “What capacities do I need to develop to be more fully integrated?”

As you become more connected to your authentic self, you also begin to notice how often your choices have been shaped by the outside world. You can catch yourself looking for reassurance before trusting what you already know, saying yes when something inside you is saying no, or choosing what will be approved of rather than what supports your own development.

The goal is not to stop caring about other people. It is to stop abandoning yourself in order to remain attached to them.

Prioritizing Your Authentic Self

Reconnecting with yourself requires more than insight. Your authentic self has to become a priority in your life.

That means paying attention to your psychological needs rather than continually overriding them, making room for reflection instead of filling every moment with external demands, and developing the capacities your personality needs to move beyond its familiar protective patterns. Gradually, your inner experience becomes something you consult rather than something you dismiss when it conflicts with what other people want from you.

This is where strengthening your authentic self and self-actualizing system begins. As the relationship with your authentic self becomes stronger, approval becomes information rather than direction. Other people can have expectations of you without defining you, and disappointment no longer automatically means you did something wrong.

You begin making choices from a different place, not because you have finally fixed yourself, but because you know yourself well enough to stop continually leaving yourself behind.

Becoming Who You Are Meant to Be

The Striving Styles doesn’t tell you your life purpose or prescribe the life you are supposed to live. What it can do is help you begin looking in the right place. It is the first step that leads you back to yourself, the place where your potential resides.

Becoming who you are meant to be requires moving your attention away from the endless search for external confirmation and back toward the self whose development has been waiting for your attention. As you understand how your brain is organized, what you genuinely need, and what capacities are trying to develop, you begin to separate who you are from who you learned you needed to be.

Perhaps Wordsworth’s idea of forgetting describes this better than we realize. We do not necessarily lose our authentic self. We simply become so attached to the external world and the persona we created to function within it that we stop listening to ourselves.

The journey back is not about creating a better version of that persona. It is about restoring your relationship with your authentic self, prioritizing its needs and development, and allowing it to become the increasingly conscious guide for how you live your life.

That is where the journey to remembering and becoming who you are meant to be begins.

How a Call From O, The Oprah Magazine, Helped Bring Striving Styles Into the World

In 2009, I received a call from O, The Oprah Magazine. They wanted me to create a personality quiz around a question I had already spent years thinking about:

How can I help people discover and become who they are meant to be?

They wanted a Who Are You Meant to Be? Quiz.

And there was only one catch. They needed it in about ten days. Actually, there were two catches. I was working with eight Striving Styles, and the magazine had room for seven.

Nothing like a national magazine deadline to encourage creative problem-solving. So, naturally, I did what people do when Oprah calls. I figured it out.

What appeared in the magazine looked like a personality quiz. Behind it, however, was a much bigger body of thought about personality, emotional needs, self-protective behavior, and human development.

And the response confirmed something I had already suspected: people were hungry for more than another personality label. They wanted to understand themselves in a way that actually helped them live their lives authentically and on purpose.

The Question Became a Book

That question eventually became the foundation for the book I co-wrote with my daughter and business partner, Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard, Who Are You Meant to Be? A Step-by-Step Guide to Discovering and Fulfilling Your True Potential.

The book was never intended to tell readers that there was one perfect version of themselves hiding somewhere, waiting to be uncovered.

It was about understanding the personality you were born with, the needs and patterns that shape your behavior, and the parts of yourself that still have the potential to develop.

Because one of the things I had seen repeatedly in my work was that people could be remarkably self-aware and still feel stuck.

They could know they took over too much, avoided conflict, overfunctioned in relationships, pushed themselves relentlessly, or needed other people’s approval. They could even understand where those patterns came from.

And still keep doing them.

That interested me far more than simply assigning someone a personality type.

Personality Was Only the Beginning

My background in Jungian psychological type and the MBTI had already shown me how powerful personality insight could be. It helped explain why people notice different things, make decisions differently, communicate differently, and approach life in ways that can feel completely natural to them and completely baffling to someone else.

But I wanted to know more.

What emotional need was driving the behavior? Why did certain strengths become so heavily relied upon? What happened when those needs were threatened? Why could a natural strength become rigid or self-protective?

And, most importantly, what needed to develop next?

Those questions became central to the Striving Styles Personality System.

From “Who Am I?” to “What Can I Develop?”

Striving Styles starts with the way your preferred psychological functions are wired into your brain, but it does not stop with describing them.

The Striving Styles Personality System helps you understand the emotional needs associated with those functions, the normal behaviors and strengths you have developed around them, how you behave when you become self-protective, and which capacities of your Authentic Self need further development.

That last part is what makes the work so important to me.

Development is not about getting rid of what you don’t like about your dominant Striving Style or becoming less of who you are. It is about developing more of the capacities available through the other psychological functions in your Striving Styles Squad.

The goal is not a “better personality.”

It is about achieving your potential through understanding how your brain is hard-wired to function, the needs you must satisfied to stay motivated and maintain emotional balance, and the capacities that need to develop on your path to becoming who you are meant to be.

I’m Still Asking the Same Question

More than fifteen years after that O Magazine article, I am still fascinated by the question Who are you meant to be?

It inspired me to write Become Who You Are Meant to Be in Your Personal Life and Become Who You Are Meant to Be in Your Relationships.

It shows up in my work with leaders who have reached the limits of the strengths that made them successful. It shows up with people who understand their relationship patterns but cannot seem to move beyond them. It shows up with individuals who know there is more potential in them but do not yet know what they need to develop to access it.

That is why Striving Styles has become the thread connecting so much of my work as a developmental therapist, leadership coach, author, and MBTI Certified Practitioner.

The question may have started as a magazine assignment. It turned into a book. And it continues to shape a system designed to help people understand not only who they are, but also who they are capable of becoming.

Curious About Who You Are Meant to Be?

The Striving Styles Personality Assessment is the place to begin. It can help you understand how you are wired, what drives your behavior, what you naturally rely on, and where your development needs to go next.

If you want to take that understanding further, I also use Striving Styles in my work with leadership, personal development, and relationships.

[Take the Striving Styles Personality Assessment]
[Discover the Striving Styles Personality System]
[Explore Who Are You Meant to Be?]

Become who you are meant to be.

Insight is Only One Part of the Knowing-Doing Gap. It Isn’t Enough for Real Development

Most people assume that once they understand what they are doing, they should be able to do something differently. Yet one of the most frustrating experiences for intelligent, psychologically minded people is recognizing a behavior pattern, understanding why it is problematic, and still finding themselves repeating it when the pressure builds. A leader may know she needs to delegate but continue taking work back from her team. Someone may understand that constantly accommodating others leaves him resentful and depleted but still find it nearly impossible to say no. A partner may recognize that rescuing creates dependency and imbalance while still stepping in the moment the other person begins to struggle.

In each case, the person knows what would be more effective and may have considerable insight into the pattern, but that knowledge does not necessarily translate into development. What is often missing is an understanding of the two different psychological agendas operating beneath the behavior and the capacities that must be developed before another response becomes genuinely available.

The Two Agendas Behind the Knowing-Doing Gap

The Striving Styles Personality System distinguishes between the self-protective agenda of the persona and the self-actualizing agenda of the authentic self. The authentic self is oriented toward development and seeks to develop our psychological capacities so that we can respond to what a situation actually requires. The persona, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with protecting our authentic self and meeting our predominant psychological need, and relies on familiar ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that have helped us feel secure in the past.

This helps explain why someone can sincerely want to develop and still continue behaving in ways that interfere with that development. A leader may genuinely want to build a capable, autonomous team and understand that delegation is essential, but when an employee makes a mistake, moves too slowly, or approaches the work differently, her need to be recognized as a good leader or to be in control may become threatened. Taking the work back reduces the immediate discomfort, even though it undermines the longer-term developmental objective. Her authentic self and persona are pursuing different agendas, and when pressure increases, self-protection can easily take precedence.

Why Self-Protective Behaviour Is Difficult to Recognize

The challenge is that self-protective behavior rarely feels self-protective from the inside. The leader who takes over may experience herself as responsible rather than controlling. Someone who constantly says yes may see himself as generous and dependable rather than overaccommodating. A partner who repeatedly rescues may believe she is simply being caring and supportive rather than recognizing that stepping in also relieves her own anxiety.

These patterns are especially difficult to question because they often grow out of genuine strengths that have been rewarded over time. Responsibility may have met the need for recognition or control, helping may have met the need to be connected, and solving problems may have met the need to be perceptive. All of them are meant to reduce anxiety and uncertainty. Gradually, these ways of functioning become part of the persona and part of how we define ourselves. We become the responsible one, the strong one, the helpful one, or the person everyone can depend on, without necessarily recognizing when we express those strengths authentically and when we use them to protect ourselves from feeling exposed or vulnerable.

Accurate Self-Awareness Has to Be Developed

This is why self-awareness is much more complex than simply knowing our personality, values, intentions, or strengths. We can be highly introspective and still interpret ourselves through the persona that has developed to protect us. The responsible leader may accurately recognize that she is conscientious while remaining unaware of the point at which responsibility becomes a way of managing anxiety. The empathic person may genuinely care about others while failing to recognize when empathy has shifted into monitoring other people’s reactions to avoid rejection, conflict, or disapproval.

Accurate self-awareness develops when we become increasingly able to distinguish between the self-protective agenda of our persona and the self-actualizing agenda of our authentic self. Learning your Striving Style begins the development of this capacity because it provides a framework for understanding your preferred functions (just like the MBTI), predominant psychological need, the capacities you rely on most naturally, and the self-protective behaviors likely to emerge when that need feels threatened.

Instead of simply reinforcing the identity of being responsible, caring, independent, decisive, or helpful, the Striving Styles framework allows us to ask a more useful question: is this capacity being used because it is genuinely what the situation requires, or because it is helping me maintain psychological security?

Insight Is Important, But It Doesn’t Close the Gap

Greater self-awareness allows us to recognize the pattern, and insight helps us understand why it exists, but neither automatically develops the capacities required to respond differently. A leader may fully understand that taking work back reduces her anxiety, yet still lack the ability to tolerate uncertainty while someone else learns. Someone who overaccommodates may recognize that he is trying to avoid rejection, yet still struggle to remain grounded when another person is disappointed. A partner who rescues may understand why she overfunctions and still find it extremely difficult to remain present without taking responsibility for another adult’s problem.

This is where the knowing-doing gap becomes a developmental issue rather than simply an awareness issue. Our self-protective responses rely on capacities we have practiced and strengthened for decades, while the more self-actualizing response may require psychological capacities that remain less developed. Telling someone to delegate, set a boundary, stop rescuing, or let go of control identifies the desired behavior, but it does not address what the person must develop in order to make that response psychologically available.

The Roadmap Moves From Insight to Development

The Striving Styles Developmental Workbook, with its Roadmap for Development, addresses this gap by shifting the focus from suppressing unwanted behavior to developing the capacities of the authentic self. For the leader who continually takes over, development may involve strengthening her ability to tolerate uncertainty, trust another person’s process, coach rather than control, and allow others to learn through experience. For someone who chronically accommodates, development may involve becoming better able to stay connected to personal needs while tolerating another person’s disappointment. For the partner who rescues, it may involve learning how to remain caring and emotionally present without taking responsibility for what belongs to someone else.

This is fundamentally different from simply trying to behave differently. Development expands psychological capacity, giving the person a broader range of responses and reducing dependence on the persona’s familiar self-protective strategies.

Development Is What Closes the Knowing-Doing Gap

The knowing-doing gap is often treated as though people simply fail to act on what they already know. In reality, the gap often reflects the tension between the persona’s self-protective agenda and the authentic self’s self-actualizing agenda, along with an imbalance between the capacities we have already developed and those that remain less available to us.

Taking the Striving Style Assessment starts the process of developing accurate self-awareness by helping you recognize the strengths of your preferred functions, your predominant emotional need, and the self-protective patterns that shape your behavior. But it’s only the beginning. Your SSPS Developmental Workbook helps you identify the capacities you need to strengthen so your authentic self has more resources when those needs are threatened.

The goal is not simply to know yourself better or to force yourself to behave differently. It is to become more fully developed, with greater capacity to recognize when self-protection has taken over and greater ability to respond from the authentic self. To become who you are meant to be.

That is what gradually closes the gap between what you know and what you are actually capable of doing.

Ready to break the cycle? Take the Striving Styles Assessment today to uncover the hidden drivers behind your habits, and use the Roadmap for Development to turn intellectual insight into lasting growth.

What Drives Your Personality and How to Develop It

So, you’ve probably taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). You got your four-letter code, read the description, and thought, “Cool, I’m an INTJ, guess I don’t need to deal with feelings,” or “I’m an introvert, so I’m exempt from small talk forever.”

It’s a classic move. But while the MBTI is great at giving you your preferences, it is indicator and was never built to help you grow. It is a self-scoring tool that helps sort functions and attitudes based on Jung’s psychological type, not a developmental one.

While the MBTI tells you your preferred function and it’s attitude, the Striving Styles also does that, it shows you what drives it—and hands you the tools to set you on the path to becoming who you are meant to be.

The Floor Plan vs. The Engine

To understand the difference, consider personality as a house:

• MBTI gives you the floor plan. It categorizes your preferred mental layout—Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, Judging vs. Perceiving. It’s a static snapshot showing how your preferences are structured.
• Striving Styles does both: description AND development. It uncovers the engine in the basement—the core psychological needs fueling your behavior—while providing an accessible, self-driven roadmap so you can actively steer your own growth.

Rather than competing with MBTI, Striving Styles expands upon its foundation with a dynamic, brain-based framework you can navigate on your own terms.

The Anatomy of Personality: Beyond Preference to Purpose

MBTI helps you identify your which of the four mental functions you prefer, it is static. It doesn’t connect to the emotional needs that drive the behavior of the function or how it is used in the service of self-actualizing and self-protection.

Striving Styles makes this progress accessible by mapping it directly across six critical dimensions:

• Predominant Need: Every personality style is fueled by a core psychological driver, such as security, achievement, connection, or autonomy.
• Authentic Self & Self-Actualizing System: When your core needs are met, your brain accesses high-level executive functioning, allowing you to innovate, lead, and grow.
• Adaptive Persona & Self-Protective System: When core needs are frustrated, you drop into defense mode—overusing your strengths or acting out stress responses.
• Developmental Capacities: Growth isn’t static. Striving Styles outlines explicit emotional and cognitive skills needed to move from self-protection back into self-actualization.
• Roadmap for Development : The ultimate goal isn’t remaining anchored to a four-letter label, but developing the self-awareness to consciously choose your responses.

Stop Excusing Your Behavior—Start Developing

The primary limitation of traditional type systems is that people use them as a crutch: “I’m an ISTJ, so I’m just not good with emotional discussions.”

Striving Styles flips the script to self-guided, intentional growth:

• It explains behavioral shifts: Answers why a usually calm, rational person becomes critical or defensive under deadline pressure.
• It highlights the shadow side of each function: Reveals how adaptive behaviors—originally formed to protect us—become obstacles to professional and personal leadership.
• It provides a self-driven action plan: Instead of just telling you who you are today, it gives you actionable developmental milestones to reach your potential without needing an expert to decode it for you.

---

Knowing your MBTI type is an excellent first step, but a snapshot can only take you so far. It shows where you stand—not how to move forward. Real growth happens when you stop limiting yourself and identifying yourself with a four-letter label and start addressing the emotional needs and drivers of behavior beneath it.

The Striving Styles Assessment goes beyond static type classification. By mapping your core psychological needs to a dynamic developmental roadmap, it gives you the self-guided process to strengthen the capacities of your authentic self, stop living from your adaptive persona, break through career plateaus, and forge deeper relationships.

Stop excusing your behavior with a code. Uncover what drives your type, step out of your self-protective system, and claim the blueprint to actively become who you are meant to be.

Ready to go beyond your code? Take the Striving Styles Assessment today.

Already know your MBTI? Enter your four-letter code on the site and discover your Striving Style and your Striving Styles Squad at a reduced rate!

1. I’d Still Have Big, Visionary Ideas

Let’s get one thing out of the way: developing my Sensing function wouldn’t suddenly turn off my ability to spot grand patterns, imagine transformative futures, or brainstorm 15 possibilities before breakfast.

• I’d still see the hidden potential in a half-baked concept.
• I’d still connect two completely unrelated industries to predict a market shift.
• And yes, I would still get excited about abstract theories that don’t have a name yet.

What would change is my default assumption that having a brilliant vision is the same thing as accomplishing it.

A developed Sensing function would act like a reality check, prompting me to ask: This overarching strategy sounds amazing on paper, but what does step one actually look like on Tuesday morning?

I might even do something radical: map out a realistic timeline and budget before declaring the project effectively finished in my mind. It would feel unnatural at first—like voluntarily putting lead weights on a kite—but apparently, groundbreaking ideas need an anchor if they’re ever going to land.

2. I’d Discover That Details Are the Pathway to the Future

As an Intuitive type, I am deeply comfortable living at 30,000 feet, painting with broad strokes, and building conceptual frameworks.

What I tend to forget is that execution details are the bricks that actually build the castle.

• Concrete data points are essential validation.
• Clear logistics prevent total operational collapse.
• Physical, present-moment reality is where human beings actually live and work.

Developing my Sensing function wouldn’t make me narrow-minded—it would make my vision buildable. I could still map out a ten-year transformation for an organization while saying, “Let’s check the current inventory levels and actual budget before we launch.”

Details aren’t killing the dream. They’re giving it a foundation.

3. I’d Stop Treating Routine and Process Like Personal Attacks

When someone hands me an operational manual, a strict template, or a spreadsheet of daily tasks, my brain’s default response is Suffocation Mode:

Why are we obsessing over these details right now? It’s just administrative busywork! Where is the creativity? Who built this cage?

With a developed Sensing function, I might finally realize that processes aren’t designed to destroy innovation—they’re designed to sustain it.

Sometimes, routine is just the engine that keeps the lights on while you invent the future.

This requires me to adopt a mindset that initially feels wildly mundane:

“Let’s document this workflow so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single week.”

And then—here’s the real hero’s journey—I have to actively suppress the urge to completely redesign the system halfway through just because I got bored.

Progress.

4. I’d Realize That the Present Moment Is Where Results Happen

Intuitive types love to live in the theoretical future: Once this new model is fully realized and everyone catches up to the vision, the current mess will solve itself!

Enter Sensing, bringing along a deeply inconvenient variable: The Present.

If your current operations are falling apart, telling people about your brilliant three-year roadmap doesn’t fix today’s customer service crisis. Explaining how amazing the concept could be doesn’t compensate for missed deadlines right now.

Vision isn’t automatically “progress,” and “I’m a big-picture person; I don’t do details” is usually what people say right before handing off an unexecutable mess for someone else to clean up.

5. I’d Upgrade My Execution Framework

Undeveloped Intuitive types operate on a very specific internal policy:

“Once I’ve solved the problem conceptually, the interesting part is over. Someone else can figure out how to do it.”

Developing Sensing means respecting the craft of execution. It means tracking metrics, honoring physical constraints, and paying attention to details and sensory facts.

And doing so before an overlooked detail completely derails a project at launch.

6. I’d Stop Confusing Practicality with a Lack of Imagination

The biggest fear for an Intuitive type is that paying attention to concrete facts, data, and immediate realities means surrendering your creative spark.

It doesn’t.

• I can respect operational rules without losing my strategic edge.
• I can double-check the budget without abandoning the big idea.
• I can ground my ideas in reality while still aiming for the stars.

Practicality isn’t the enemy of inspiration. Developed Sensing gives you access to both the sky and the soil—no trade-offs required.

7. I’d Still Maintain My Preference for Intuition

Developing your Sensing function doesn’t mean swapping your vision board for a filing cabinet.

I’d still challenge the status quo. I’d still ask “What if?” fifty times a day. I’d still spot subtle trends long before they show up on the evening news.

The difference is weight and precision. Instead of only asking, “What could this become?” I can also ask:

• “What are the exact facts right now?”
• “What resources do we actually have on hand?”
• “What is the most practical step to make this concept real today?”

That doesn’t weaken my vision—it makes my vision unstoppable. Because the ultimate sign of a developed Intuitive type isn’t just dreaming up a brilliant new world.

It’s having the patience and discipline to actually build it.

Is Your Preferred Decision-Making Function Intuition?

If you are an ENTP, ENFP, INTJ, or INFJ, Intuition is your dominant function. If you are an ENTJ, ENFJ, INTP, or INFP, Intuition is your auxiliary function—meaning possibilities, underlying patterns, and big-picture strategy form your natural baseline for perceiving the world.

Discovering your MBTI type and Striving Style reveals the core operating system behind those choices. But Striving Styles takes it a step further: it uncovers the emotional needs driving your behavior, highlights where your focus on the future turns into self-protection, impatience with details, or impracticality under stress, and maps out the exact capacities you need to develop next.

Real growth isn’t about sacrificing your vision, creativity, or strategic mindset. It’s about knowing when abstract concepts are enough—and when a situation calls for concrete execution, present-moment focus, and grounded reality.

Ready to discover your next stage of development?

Learn more about individual assessments, coaching, and team development at annedranitsaris.com.

1. I’d Still Value the Facts, Details, and Present Reality

Let’s get one thing out of the way: developing my Intuitive function wouldn’t suddenly turn me into a head-in-the-clouds dreamer who forgets to pay their bills, misplaces their keys, or ignores the physical realities right in front of them.

• I’d still notice the exact line-item error on page 14 of the budget.
• I’d still rely on proven, practical methods that have worked reliably in the past.
• And yes, I would still value real-world experience over unproven, pie-in-the-sky theories.

What would change is my default assumption that what is happening right now is the only reality that matters.

A developed Intuitive function would act like a perimeter scan, prompting me to ask: This current method works fine today, but where will this put us two years down the road?

I might even do something radical: entertain a completely wild, abstract idea without immediately listing 10 reasons why it’s impractical within the first 30 seconds.

It would feel unnatural at first—like stepping off a solid concrete path into open fog—but apparently, sustainable long-term success requires looking at the horizon, not just watching your feet.

2.  I’d Discover That Possibility Is a Form of Practicality

As a Sensing type, I am deeply comfortable living in the concrete present, mastering tangible skills, and relying on sensory data and past experience.

What I tend to forget is that anticipating change, seeing hidden patterns, and innovating are critical acts of survival.

• Exploring theoretical possibilities prevents sudden obsolescence.
• Connecting disparate ideas helps spot market shifts before they hit.
• Reading between the lines helps me understand the overarching strategy, not just the step-by-step procedure.

Developing my Intuitive function wouldn’t make me impractical; it would make my practicality future-proof. I could still execute a flawless daily process while saying, “Let’s brainstorm three alternate scenarios in case the market shifts next quarter.”

Innovation isn’t a frivolous waste of time. It’s the foresight that keeps the entire operation relevant.

3. I’d Stop Treating Conceptual Changes Like Personal Threats

When someone proposes changes to or transformation of a system that I believe is currently working, my brain’s default response is Containment Mode:

Why fix something that isn’t broken? Where is the concrete data for this? This has worked for us in the past, why change it? These people who think their ideas are better, don’t know what they are doing.

With a developed Intuitive function, I might finally realize that when people propose changes to existing systems or strategic pivots, they aren’t trying to undermine my hard work or destroy stability.

They’re just testing potential futures.

This requires me to adopt a mindset that initially feels wildly unsafe:

“That’s an interesting concept to explore. Let’s talk about what that concept could look like if we implemented it.”

And then—here’s the real hero’s journey—I have to actively suppress the urge to immediately ask for a detailed step-by-step project plan before the idea has even had room to breathe.

Progress.

4.  I’d Realize That the Big Picture Gives Meaning to the Details

Sensing types love to focus on execution: If everyone executes their individual tasks perfectly and follows the procedure, the project will succeed!

Enter Intuition, bringing along a deeply inconvenient variable: Strategic Context.

If a project is moving in the wrong overall direction, executing flawed tasks with 100% precision and efficiency still results in failure. Perfecting a process that no longer serves a purpose isn’t progress.

Focusing exclusively on the present facts isn’t automatically “grounded,” and “Let’s just focus on what’s in front of us” is usually what people say right before getting blindsided by a shift they refused to anticipate.

5. I’d Upgrade My Problem-Solving Framework

Undeveloped Sensing types operate on a very specific internal policy:

“If I haven’t seen this specific approach to solving our problem before, or if there isn’t a proven template, we shouldn’t attempt it.”

Developing Intuition means exploring and even prioritizing potential over past precedent. It means evaluating options based on overarching implications, underlying patterns, and future trajectories—and doing it before I accidentally shoot down a game-changing opportunity just because it feels unfamiliar.

It means resisting the impulse to say “no” when someone makes a suggestion you haven’t thought of.

6. I’d Stop Confusing Vision With Irresponsibility

The biggest fear for a Sensing type is that leaning into intuition means becoming flaky, unfocused, and detached from reality.

It doesn’t.

• I can explore an abstract concept without losing my grip on current operations.
• I can read between the lines without ignoring the explicit facts.
• I can embrace vision while remaining grounded in execution.

Vision isn’t irresponsibility. Developed Intuition gives you access to both the earth and the sky—no trade-offs required.

7. I’d Still Maintain My Preference for Sensing

Developing your Intuitive function doesn’t mean swapping your checklist for a crystal ball.

I’d still value efficiency, facts, and tangible results. I’d still keep the wheels turning reliably. I’d still bring practical realism to every conversation.

The difference is range and foresight. Instead of only asking, “What are the immediate facts right now?” I can also ask:

• “What does this pattern imply for the future?”
• “What is the underlying meaning or big-picture strategy here?”
• “What possibilities are we missing by only focusing on what’s visible?”

That doesn’t weaken my practical grounding—it makes my grounding strategic. Because the ultimate sign of a developed Sensing type isn’t just maintaining what works today.

It’s having the vision to build what will be needed tomorrow.

Is Your Preferred Decision-Making Function Sensing?

If you are an ISTJ, ISFJ, ESTP, or ESFP, Sensing is your dominant function. If you are an ESTJ, ESFJ, ISTP, or ISFP, Sensing is your auxiliary function—meaning facts, concrete realities, and lived experience form your natural baseline for gathering information and perceiving the world.

Discovering your MBTI type and Striving Style reveals the core operating system behind those choices. But Striving Styles takes it a step further: it uncovers the emotional needs driving your behavior, highlights where your reliance on the familiar turns into self-protection or resistance to change under stress, and maps out the exact capacities you need to develop next.

Real growth isn’t about sacrificing your practical nature, realism, or attention to detail. It’s about knowing when present facts are enough—and when a situation calls for strategic vision, abstract thinking, and exploring new possibilities.

Ready to discover your next stage of development?

Learn more about individual assessments, coaching, and team development at annedranitsaris.com.