The path to achieving your potential starts with the Striving Styles.
Someone recently asked me what it means to become “Who You Are Meant to Be.” It made me stop and think because those words are so deeply connected to both my work and the way I live my life that I sometimes forget other people don’t necessarily know what I mean by them.
Who Are You Meant to Be was the title of my quiz and article in O, The Oprah Magazine. It was also the name of my book that introduced the Striving Styles Personality System, and it captures what I’ve spent much of my career helping people do. More personally, it reflects how I’ve tried to live my own life. I’ve kept growing, challenging the ways I’ve adapted, developing parts of myself that didn’t come as easily, and trying to live more and more from who I authentically am.
For me, becoming who you are meant to be has never meant discovering some predetermined life you’re supposed to live or uncovering a perfect version of yourself that’s been hiding underneath everything else. It isn’t about becoming more successful, accomplishing more, fixing yourself, or trying to become someone you think you should be.
It’s about development. It’s about understanding the potential you came into the world with and doing the work required to develop it.
We Are Born With a Psychological Blueprint
In my book, Who Are You Meant to Be, I spoke of how at the moment of our birth, our authentic self knows both our purpose and potential. And then we forget. It becomes the unthought known, buried in the recesses of our unconscious. Some of us wake up early to the awareness of our purpose and are able to set our own course in life. For others it comes later on or during a normal life stage and transition. But none of us come into the world as blank slates.
Your authentic self contains the blueprint for who you are meant to be. To help you in your authentic development, how your brain is hard-wired at birth or your Striving Style reflects the natural strengths, abilities, and talents available to help you realize that potential. The predominant need of your Striving Style acts like an inner guide. When you are meeting it in healthy ways, you are more likely to feel engaged, energized, aligned, and on purpose. When that need is repeatedly frustrated, it is often a sign that you are moving away from your authentic development and into self-protective, adaptive behaviors.
Understanding how you use the energy of your Striving Style, along with your Auxiliary Styles, is important because it helps explain something I have seen repeatedly in my work. We can appear highly successful, capable, and accomplished on the outside while relying on internal patterns that are actually limiting our development.
We Chose What Brain System Develops
In the Striving Styles Personality System, I describe the two brain systems that shape how we use our energy. The self-actualizing system directs us toward developing our authentic self. The self-protective system directs us toward creating and maintaining an adaptive persona that helps us feel safe, accepted, and in control.
We need both. As children, we naturally adapt to the people and circumstances around us. We learn what gets us approval, attention, belonging, and security, and what leads to criticism, rejection, or disappointment. The problem comes when those adaptive behaviors become so automatic that we start to confuse them with who we really are.
I’ve seen this many times in my work. Someone becomes highly responsible because it earns approval, overly helpful because being needed feels safe, accomplished because achievement brings recognition, or fiercely independent because depending on others feels risky.
These patterns can work very well, sometimes for years. But when too much of our energy is going into protecting the adaptive persona, less is available for developing the authentic self.
That’s why becoming who you are meant to be starts with noticing which system you are living from and where your developmental energy is going. Into making your persona stronger or into becoming who you are meant to be.
The Authentic Self Keeps Calling Us Forward
I don’t believe our authentic self ever stops calling us to develop. There are always capacities within us that can be strengthened, expanded, and brought more fully into our lives. I think of it almost like a seed within us that keeps pressing toward growth. We can choose to listen to it, or we can keep directing our energy toward strengthening the persona we’ve already built.
That choice becomes especially important as we get older. It can be very easy to keep playing the roles we’ve become good at, doing what others expect of us, and reinforcing the identity that has brought us approval, success, or security. From the outside, everything may look fine. On the inside, however, we may feel increasingly dissatisfied, restless, flat, or disconnected from ourselves.
When we ignore that developmental pull for too long, our attention can become narrower. We may become preoccupied with what is wrong, with our aches and pains, with what other people are doing, or with maintaining the life and identity we already have. Instead of asking, “What is trying to develop in me now?” we keep making our adaptive persona work harder.
I’ve come to see this as one of the great challenges of later life. We can continue protecting and polishing the person we learned to be, or we can listen to the part of us that is still asking to grow.
To me, becoming who you are meant to be means continuing to answer that call.
Curious About Who You Are Meant to Be?
Start by getting to know your Striving Style and the Predominant Need that drives your behavior.
Your Striving Style helps you understand where your developmental energy is going. Are you using it to strengthen and maintain your adaptive persona, the self you created to cope, belong, achieve, and stay safe? Or are you directing that energy toward developing the 16 capacities of the authentic self that allow you to become more fully who you are meant to be?
That distinction can tell you a great deal about why your life feels the way it does, where you may be stuck, and what development is calling for next.
And throughout October, I’m making it much easier to explore.
Take the Striving Styles Personality Assessment and receive 50% off during the month of October when you use coupon code October2026.
You can also receive the same discount when you purchase any of the digital SSPS Reports for your Striving Style:
- Leadership Report
- Employee Report
- Career Report
- Relationship Report
Or you can download my free guide, The Capacities of the Authentic Self, to begin exploring the qualities and capacities that support your development.
And if you want to go deeper, my book, Who Are You Meant to Be?, takes you further into the Striving Styles Personality System and the SSPS Roadmap for becoming who you are meant to be.
You don’t have to keep becoming a better version of the person you learned to be to please others. Make the shift to developing your authentic self and remembering who you are meant to be.