Striving Styles Personality System
Understand What Drives You. Develop What Gets in Your Way.
You are more than a personality type or 4-letter code.
The Striving Styles Personality System (SSPS) helps you understand how your preferred psychological functions are hard-wired into your brain, the emotional needs that drive your normal behavior, and the strengths and capacities you instinctively rely on to move through the world.
It also shows you what happens when those needs are threatened and you become self-protective.
Most importantly, the Striving Styles Personality Assessment identifies the capacities of your authentic self that need further development. Your SSPS Roadmap for Development then gives you a step-by-step process for developing them.
So instead of leaving an assessment knowing more about yourself, you know what to do with what you know.
More Than a Personality Assessment
The Striving Styles Personality System takes you beyond identifying your personality type. It helps you understand what drives your behavior, recognize the parts of your personality you rely on most, and create a practical path for developing greater flexibility and choice.
Personality assessments can give you valuable insight into how you think, make decisions, interact with others, and approach the world. Striving Styles takes that understanding further by showing you why you behave the way you do and where your development needs to go next.
At the center of the system are the four psychological functions identified by Carl Jung. We all have access to Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and Intuition, but we do not rely on or develop them equally.
Your preferred function becomes the foundation of your Predominant Striving Style. It influences what you instinctively pay attention to, the psychological need you are driven to satisfy, the behaviors you use to meet that need, and the strengths and capacities that come most naturally to you.
This is why two people can encounter the same situation and experience it very differently. Their brains are organized to pay attention to different information, they are driven by different emotional needs, and they instinctively draw on different parts of themselves to respond.
Understanding that gives you a very different way of understanding yourself.
Striving Styles Personality Assessment
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What Your Striving Styles Assessment Reveals
Your assessment does much more than assign you a Style. It shows you the psychological functions you prefer and how your brain is organized around them. You learn the emotional needs associated with those functions, the normal behaviors you use to get those needs met, and the natural strengths and capacities you have developed as a result.
You also see what happens when your emotional needs are threatened or go unmet. That is when your natural strengths can become overused and self-protective. Responsibility can become overfunctioning. Decisiveness can become control. Independence can become emotional distance. The desire to maintain connection can make it difficult to set boundaries or address conflict.
The assessment helps you see these behaviors in the context of your personality instead of treating them as isolated problems. And it identifies the capacities of your Authentic Self that need further development, giving you a clear developmental focus instead of simply telling you to behave differently.
Striving Styles Report
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Understand Your Striving Style
Your Striving Styles Report includes a comprehensive personalized report that explains your predominant psychological need, natural strengths, characteristic behaviors, emotional and relationship patterns, and self-actualizing and self-protective behaviors that are consistent with your dominant Striving Style.
It also introduces your Striving Styles Squad, showing how the four psychological functions and their corresponding Styles work together within your personality and the different capacities available to you.
The report also includes an overview of the Roadmap for Development for your Striving Style, helping you see where greater development can expand your capacity, flexibility, and effectiveness. Rather than simply learning your personality type, you leave with a practical framework for understanding how your personality operates, what you instinctively rely on, and where to focus your development.
SSPS Roadmap for Development
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Your Roadmap for Development
Knowing what needs to develop is one thing. Developing it is another. Your Striving Styles Personality Assessment identifies the capacities of your Authentic Self that require further development. The SSPS Roadmap for Development takes those capacities and provides a step-by-step developmental process for building them.
You are not left with a report full of interesting information and a vague instruction to “work on yourself.” The Roadmap gives you a structured way to deliberately practice capacities that may not come naturally, recognize when your self-protective behavior is activated, and build new experiences that strengthen your ability to function differently.
When you take the SSPS, you can download your SSPS Developmental Workbook, which makes development something you can actively work on rather than something you simply hope will happen.
The SSPS Personality Assessment Identifies Your Striving Style. The System Shows You What to Do With It.
Knowing Yourself Is Not the Same as Changing Your Behavior
Personality assessments can give you valuable insight into who you are. But knowing your type does not necessarily explain why certain behaviors are so difficult to change.
That is the gap Striving Styles was designed to address.
Your assessment identifies your Striving Styles personality profile and the predominant psychological needs associated with it. The broader system helps you understand how those needs influence your emotions, relationships, choices, strengths, and habitual responses, including what happens when you become self-protective.
Instead of simply asking, “What should I be doing differently?”, Striving Styles helps you understand what is driving the behavior and what needs to develop underneath it.
That is what turns personality insight into a roadmap for change.
One System. Many Ways to Use It.
Use the Striving Styles wherever understanding behavior can improve results. It can be applied in leadership coaching, team development, personal and relationship development, human resources, talent and succession planning, performance development, conflict resolution, organizational change, and other situations where behavior, relationships, and effectiveness matter.
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.
Do you want to expand your leadership competencies and stop overusing the strengths that got you promoted? The leadership behaviors that helped you succeed can become the very behaviors that limit your effectiveness as your role becomes more complex. You may take over instead of delegating, push for results instead of developing people, avoid accountability to preserve relationships, or rely on the same leadership approach regardless of what the person or situation requires.
Striving Styles helps you understand what drives your natural leadership approach, how your behavior changes under pressure, and where your strengths may be working against you. In coaching, we use that insight to broaden your leadership competencies so you can communicate more effectively, delegate with confidence, hold people accountable, manage conflict, and choose the leadership approach that gets the best from different people and situations.
SSPS & Team Development
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Understand the collective personality type of your team, its strengths, challenges, and areas for improvement.
Want to get beneath the behaviors that keep your team stuck. When a team is struggling, the problem is rarely just communication. People may be frustrated by how decisions are made, avoiding difficult conversations, taking over, withholding input, resisting one another, or interpreting differences in style as problems with attitude or commitment.
Striving Styles helps team members understand what is driving those behaviors and why people respond so differently under pressure. I use the system to help teams surface the dynamics that are affecting trust, accountability, collaboration, conflict, and performance so they can stop repeating the same patterns and start working together in ways that make better use of everyone’s strengths.
SSPS & Personal & Relationship Development
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Understand the patterns that shape how you relate to yourself and the people closest to you.
Want to stop repeating the patterns you already know are not working? You may know you need stronger boundaries, more confidence, greater assertiveness, less control, or the ability to stop overfunctioning and taking responsibility for everyone around you. Knowing that, however, does not necessarily make the behavior easy to change.
Striving Styles helps uncover the psychological needs and self-protective patterns keeping those behaviors in place so you can understand why you react the way you do and what needs to develop underneath it. This creates a more focused path to healthier relationships, greater emotional maturity, stronger boundaries, and the ability to respond from choice instead of falling back into the same automatic patterns.
The Assessment Is the Starting Point for Development
There is nothing wrong with relying on your natural strengths and leading with your dominant Striving Style. It comes naturally to you because its capacities are already well developed and require relatively little energy to access. The limitation comes when your dominant Style is the only one you have developed enough to rely on, and the situation calls for capacities associated with one of your other functions.
Development is not about becoming less of who you are. It is about developing more of the capacities of the authentic self that reside in the other functions of your Striving Styles Squad.
As you develop those capacities, you become less dependent on a narrow range of familiar responses and have more of yourself available to meet the situation’s demands. Instead of automatically turning to the function that comes most naturally, you can draw on a broader range of capacities when you need them.
That developmental potential is already built into your brain. Developing it allows you to access more of who you are and become who you are meant to be.
Want to Understand the Thinking Behind Striving Styles?
Download the Striving Styles White Paper
Striving Styles did not begin as another personality assessment. It was developed to address the limitations we experienced using personality type alone to help people create meaningful behavioral change.
In The Next Evolution of Jung’s Typology and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, I explain how the Striving Styles Personality System builds on Jungian psychological type and the MBTI while adding the psychological needs, emotional drivers, behavioral patterns, and developmental framework needed to understand what is actually driving behavior.
The white paper also introduces the system’s three-part approach to development: the assessment, Developmental Framework, and Roadmap for Development.
How the Striving Styles Goes Beyond the MBTI
Created to Solve a Problem We Kept Seeing
The Striving Styles Personality System was developed by me, Dr. Anne Dranitsaris, and my daughter and business partner, Heather Dranitsaris-Hilliard, after years of using personality and emotional intelligence assessments in psychotherapy, coaching, leadership & team development, and organizational work. We valued the insight these tools provided, but repeatedly saw the same limitation: people could understand themselves extremely well and still continue repeating behaviors that interfered with their leadership, relationships, performance, and development.
We created Striving Styles to bridge that gap. It brings together personality, psychological needs, emotions, behavior, self-protection, and a step-by-step approach to development so that understanding yourself becomes the starting point for meaningful behavioral change.
While the Striving Styles Personality System and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® share a foundation in Jungian psychological type, they are designed to do different things.
The MBTI sorts the four psychological functions and provides a valuable framework for understanding how personality is organized and how people naturally take in information and make decisions.
Striving Styles builds on that foundation and goes much further. It connects personality type to predominant psychological needs, emotional drivers, natural strengths, self-actualizing and self-protective behavior, and development. This helps explain not only how someone is wired, but why certain behaviors become so automatic, why some situations trigger stronger reactions than others, and what needs to develop for behavior to change.
