drivers.
I have a friend (incredible, right?) who we’ll call… Anne.
For a good year of our friendship life, she was… I’ll say it: obsessed… with a certain personality assessment and putting people into one of four dominant groups: driver, analytical, expressive, and amiable. Without getting into too much detail, my primary personality type (and possibly even secondary, because it is so strong) is “driver.”
Here’s a very short summary of drivers: do-it-now type people. Drivers are often very demanding and have no qualms about sharing what they want. They focus on successfully completing tasks and show little emotion in making quick decisions.
Guilty as charged.
The problem is that drivers only know how to drive activity, to complete tasks, to achieve success - and they rarely discern what’s important.
My days of being a lone driver, focusing intensely on work, watching every televised sports game, and eating the same thing for dinner every night… well, that has changed. In the last three years alone, I’ve gotten married, made a 400 mile move, taken a challenging new job, become a home owner, had a son, and there’s another son on the way. And last night, my wife took some time to go to yoga, leaving my son, my dog, and I home to hang out and do the bath/bedtime routine. It was awesome. Just three guys, trying to make it in the desert.
And it goes against everything “driver me” would have done in the past.
I’ve come to a better understanding of what motivates me. And, in turn, haven taken time to consider what motivates other people… Tony Robbins suggests that the thing(s) which motivate(s) everyone falls into one of six categories. If you can “hack” that, you can generally be an effective communicator and soften or adapt what comes naturally (for me, my driver callousness in achieving goals):
- Comfort
- Variety
- Significance
- Connection
- Growth
- Contribution
I think my top three are some mix of significance, connection, and contribution.
But you know what softening/adapting my driver mentality also means? It also means that I need to be comfortable with being mediocre at things. It almost makes me cringe just to write that. I don’t even know what it means.
But its true. In order to prioritize, to focus on what motivates me and is important, I need to be laser-focused. I can’t drop the ball with my family. I need to do my job well. …and then everything else.
And 2016 is going to be an incredibly painful time for this driver to be ok being mediocre at things that simply aren’t as important.
