The Strategist

Every personality sets its own priorities, usually from birth. For the strategist, enforcement and safety are most important. Both are vital needs, we also speak of basic needs.

Enforcement: If you want to live, you have to grow, provide for your livelihood, open up new opportunities and try something that was not possible before. Those who forgo these basic needs will not even learn to walk, let alone start a family later on. We love positive change. It is about developments that can lead to recognizable success. ‘It’ wants us to constantly experience something new. Repetition is boring. Stagnation is decline. The Enforcement god loves challenges.

Safety: Everything new involves risks. Those who put themselves in danger will perish in it. Those who do not take care of their own lives will quickly lose them. You have to be vigilant and thoughtful if you want to get through life in one piece. It’s about sustainability. We strive for continuity and reliability. Everything that is important or could become important should be protected. We should be alert at all times so that we can recognize and avoid risks at an early stage. The god of safety loves consistency.

Recognition: If you want to come into your own, you have to set yourself apart from others in some way. You have to take care of yourself (this begins shortly after birth with a powerful cry) and show that “you are there”. An acclaimed star is the best way to show that you exist. Nevertheless, self-reference often has an introverted effect. We want to be and remain recognizable as a special person. This need hates uniformity and wants to stand out from the crowd. What others do is to be viewed critically. The recognition god wants to be proud of himself.

Belonging: As social beings, we live in dependence on parents, partners, entrepreneurs, etc. Without a common language and coordinated behaviors, we would not be able to integrate - and would have no chance to live as total outsiders. This need for belonging supports communication: we want to belong and this motivates us to conform. What others do and how they act influences our actions. The belonging god wants to feel at home in the community.

Empathy: The best thing is to empathize with other people or the environment to such an extent that we understand them ‘from the inside out’. In relation to ourselves, this means that we want to be loved as we are (our feelings). The first experiences of mutual empathy happen even before birth: we feel completely safe. Empathy motivates us to treat each other openly, without prejudice, trustingly and responsibly. We want to experience the good core in every person and become one with them. The empathy God wants peace.

Rationality (cognition): As small children, we begin to differentiate between ourselves, our parents and strangers. This requires a certain inner and outer distance. The need for cognition is just as existential, because without sensing the way via the senses, we would be helplessly lost. This need serves our rational orientation. We want to perceive reality clearly and, if possible, scientifically correctly so that we can make the best, sensible decisions. The God of rationality wants the truth.

We can imagine how these inner forces wrestle with each other to determine what is best for us in which situation. These basic needs are personified in our fantasy world We can imagine them as strong gods in an inner team, sitting together at a large table and discussing with each other.

The bosses in the strategist’s inner team are enforcement (red) and safety (green). Enforcement finds it good to have Knowledge (Black) at his side, because he can think logically and find rational ways to reach his goal. Safety looks after itself and its fellow human beings. It uses empathy (white), which has a sense of how our actions affect us and those around us.

This need for empathy requires closeness and belonging (yellow) provides it. Cognition, on the other hand, likes to be alone in order to focus on the important things. This also fits very well with the need for recognition (blue), which prefers sensing others from an objective, critical distance.

A strategist wants to create something that will last. The inner team could look like this:

• Red has a thirst for adventure and new things.

• Green takes care of planning and organization.

• Black researches and analyzes feasibility.

• White provides ideas and pays attention to humanity.

• Blue compares alternatives and possible improvements.

• Yellow takes care of communication.

A distribution of tasks is not yet an agreement. These ‘deities’ in our soul do not allow themselves to be told what to do, not even by the need to assert themselves. As long as the inner team has not reached agreement on goals and paths, our consciousness will be confused by these conflicting voices and moods. This is intend…