A Beautiful Holiday Season in My Mind - The Visionary Striving Style

A Beautiful Holiday Season in My Mind - The Visionary Striving Style

Kelly loves the idea of the holiday season. Every year she pictures, in her mind, all of the presents she will either buy or make for her family and what a special time they will all have together. She experiences excitement, joy and pleasure when she thinks about and envisions what she will create for the holidays. Last year, around September, she decided she would make a poster board for each of her children, grandchildren and husband – a memory collage with photos and mementoes representing their lives together. She also wanted to do this as a way of communicating to everyone how special they all were to her and that she treasured each of the moments they had shared, reflected in the pictures. While she imagined how each of them would look when they received their individualized poster board, she felt energized about doing this.

Flash forward to December 20th. Kelly is out doing last minute shopping. Her husband has done most of the shopping for their family and she only had to buy for a few people. There are no poster boards, Kelly is filled with regret, and self-recriminations for not creating the vision she had back in September. She recognizes that she has done the same thing for years and doesn’t know why she is still doing it. Trouble is, when Kelly stops envisioning what she wants to do, her energy goes elsewhere. Her strength is and pleasure comes from creating the vision, not the reality.

Kelly is the Visionary Striving Style. With inspirations and visions of what might be, these people have great difficulty translating what they see and would like to do into reality. The holidays are often a deflating experience for them, as they tend not to communicate to others what they are imagining or desire. Like Kelly, they can look like they have no interest in participating in the season even though they have been thinking about it for months. Their guilt causes them to overspend on presents as a way of compensating for not doing what they had intended, even though no one else knows about it but them.

The inner world of the Visionary Striving Style is very compelling. Their primary need is to envision what could be, applying their imagination to the process of getting it met. Introverted by nature, these people struggle both because they want to make magic during the holidays, but their energy is easily depleted with the expectations for socializing during the season and their failure to manifest their visions.

Stay tuned for how Kelly was able to break this pattern.