posted August 26, 2008 06:23 AM         

Every person has one of seven Goals. The Goal causes the general sense of a lack in a person's life. Therefore, it determines what the personality seeks, desires, wants, pursues, and aims for. When the Goal is not fulfilled, the person feels frustrated, and life seems meaningless. The Goal gives the person a purpose, a direction, an overall intention.

Re-evaluation

People with this Goal have a value system hierarchy for everything in their experience. It is as if they have a priority list with the most important things at the top and the least significant at the bottom. They naturally assign a value of relative importance to everything. The object of this Goal is to find ways to shorten the priority list. Even if they are not overloaded, they will still be asking themselves, "Is this really necessary, or can I do without it also?" They "weed the garden" of their life. The desire is to cut out all nonessentials. They seek what is elementary, fundamental, and basic. They do not like to carry around any "excess baggage", so they "sift the wheat from the chaff" in every thing they do. Even in their speaking they do not elaborate or embellish any more than they have to.

Growth

The Cardinal Inspiration Goal is Growth, and it is the optimistic Goal. This is a difficult Goal for the person who has it do deal with. It causes him to always want more, better, higher, greater. It causes discontent and unrest, what I call the "greener pastures" syndrome. He is never quite satisfied with the present situation. To some extent this can be said about all the Goals, since the nature of a Goal is such that one never fully achieves it. It is true of Growth in the sense that the person who has it is never satisfied to "leave well enough alone". He is always demanding so much of himself. Often he takes more upon himself than he can possibly handle. He likes feeling pushed to the limit of his capacity and beyond with challenging situations and relationships. The person in Growth does not want to let any opportunity slip by. Every life event is seen as a chance for further experience. He feels that the biggest sin one can commit is to not fulfill one's uttermost potential. All talents must be developed. Every situation must be explored. To a person in Growth, the world is a realm of never ending variety. He gets bored easily if there is not an unending stream of new experiences. The more that is happening, the more he is fulfilled. He thrives on challenging situations where many things are happening at once. Circumstances that others might find tumultuous, he finds stimulating. He "has his fingers in many pies" at once. He delights in juggling the numerous activities in which he is involved. He likes to be "in the thick of things. "

posted August 26, 2008 06:25 AM         

Discrimination

The Goal of Discrimination (Rejection) is an aspect of the analysis process — the Goal is to analyze things, to take things apart. The purpose of a person with this Goal is to make one thing distinct from another. He likes to find contrast in things. He emphasizes differences rather than similarities. Instead of seeing how one thing is like another, he sees what is unlike. The Goal of Discrimination is to the personality as the immune system is to the body: the immune system keeps the body free of foreign organisms, and the Goal of Discrimination keeps the person free of adulteration and impurities. It works to exclude things, rather than include things. People with this Goal are very selective in what they accept. They are "choosy" — like picking over the fruit and vegetables at the grocery store. Each piece is examined carefully for blemishes, freshness, color, texture, and so on — every characteristic is considered. Only the best of the available items is selected. People with this Goal act this way when they "shop" in the other "markets" of life. In an argument — a favorite exercise for people with this Goal — they will pick apart every word of their contender, to make sure the meaning is precise. No word is allowed to be ambiguous, nor to overlap the meaning of any other word.

Acceptance

If you have this goal, you do not like being different — it is painful to you. You seek to be in accord with others and with the world. You emphasize the ways that things are similar, rather than the ways they are different. In relationships, compatibility is very important to you, perhaps the most important ingredient — the more you have in common, the better you like it. In fact, you avoid relationships or situations that are just too strange. You are very much concerned with issues of liking and disliking. You want to like everything, and if you can't, this can be upsetting to you. This Goal makes you a "nice" person. You try to be polite, cooperative, and tactful. You smile a lot around other people in order to appear more attractive. You try to adapt yourself to others in order to get along comfortably with them.

Submission

posted August 26, 2008 06:27 AM         

Dominance

The goal of Dominance in a personality usually means a desire to initiate events. In its ultimate expression, the person wants to let no happening transpire which is not caused by himself. In terms of people, he regards those who behave independently from himself as disrespectful, disobedient, and perhaps even treasonous. In terms of events, he regards occurrences that arise apart from his instigation to be "insurrections" that need to be quelled. Consequently, it can be difficult for other people to freely exhibit independent behavior in the presence of a person with this Goal. To do so usurps his prerogatives as the leader. The Dominance Goal is the Complement of the Submission Goal. Both Goals in people cause a need to understand where they stand with respect to strength of purpose. However, Dominance is the opposite of passivity. A person in Dominance cannot let things be — he must make things behave as he wants them to. People in Dominance tend to see themselves as too passive, however. They notice the times they let things happen which are out of their control, and this bothers them. They want to avoid this happening too often.

Flow

The original name of this Goal is "stagnation", but to me this word has a negative connotation, whereas the Goal is in fact neither positive nor negative. The word "equilibrium" conveys this sense of neutrality more accurately, I think, but recently the term "Flow" has been widely used with this goal. Whatever the name, a person with this Goal prefers for things to run smoothly: neither starting nor stopping, increasing or decreasing, amalgamating or proliferating. He wants to avoid causing disruptions in the normal order of things: it is uncomfortable for him to create a stir. His basic purpose in life is to relieve stress, or avoid it. People who do not have this Goal perceive a person with this Goal as purposeless — a life going nowhere. Indeed, it often seems to others that he has no ambition except ease and contentment. He is quite comfortable with maintaining the status quo, going along with the existing system, preserving the present state of affairs, just as it is. The advantage of this is that the person is rather stable and dependable — not much changes in his life. The disadvantage is that, even thought he doesn't let things go down hill, neither is the person likely to make things go up hill — making progress or improvement. Balance is another big issue for people in this Goal. If things drift or get pushed out of balance, that is when they spring into action, to restore the natural order.