Alfred Adler (1870-1936) crossed over a significant boundary in 1911. At the time, he was president of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Union, a group founded and dominated by Sigmund Freud. Adler's growing conviction and public statements that we're shaped by our goals more than our past, greatly displeased Freud. This strain was made doubly difficult for both men because Adler had been Freud's close colleague. Even so, in that year, Adler broke from his collaboration with Freud and later went on to give us many groundbreaking concepts that have crept into out language in a big way. They include:
  1. birth order, to account for the ramifications of the fact that every child in a family is born into a different environment than that child's other siblings

  2. family constellation, a given family's grid, a clinical pattern of how it functions and malfunctions

  3. organ inferiority, later popularized as organ jargon, to convey how our emotions are often expressed physically in our bodies

  4. inferiority feeling, later popularized as inferiority complex

  5. social interest, that conveyed Adler's view that a person's highest, most effective and authentic striving lay in her reaching the state of cooperation with and contribution to mankind and nature

  6. creative self, by which he meant we each have made ourselves who we are and yet will be

  7. early recollections, his ingenious innovation of using people's earliest memories to ascertain what goals they live by today.
However, the centerpiece of his theory of personality, his crowning achievement, was Style-of-Life. By Style-of-Life, he meant "an organized set of convictions about life of which the individual, at best, is only dimly aware." Adler was the first close associate of Freud to break from him in a manner that was different in kind, not degree. He was, in fact, the founder of the social school of psychiatry. Unfortunately, the powerful tool Adler developed and used so effectively in clinics and schools is a baton that he never passed on to the world of executive performance and the management of complex organizations. That tool is Style-of-Life, an uncanny method for clarifying the real goals by which individuals and organizations live. These goals, identified and made apparent to you, are far different from the ones you and your organization often deceive yourselves into thinking you live by. Understanding your own Style-of-Life - and that of your organization - is the payoff from my new book YOUR INNER CEO: Unleash the Executive Within. The lessons from this book, learned and applied, can spell the difference between your personal and organizational success and failure. As you lay plans for your career and the steps you're going to take to excel in it, please take to heart what Adler espoused: Your central goal that governs your life for better or worse, and the same for such a goal for your organization itself is an expression of purpose - for good or ill. Adler treats goals as engines of attraction, pulling you into the future in a way that either enhances your life or derails it. With guided self-examination you can ferret out these goals and rid yourself of them if they threaten you or nurture them if they support you. Adler shows you the way to do this and that way is reproduced in YOUR INNER CEO. In both your personal career and organizational effectiveness, where the words goals, objectives and outcomes have top priority, wouldn't it be of supreme value to know that the goals you live by are right and real for you? Gaining such knowledge clears the way, as nothing else can, for bringing your unique strengths to bear on the challenges you face. YOUR INNER CEO gives you a clear, direct path to such useful knowledge.
About the Book (inactive)
About the Author
Style of Life
Alfred Adler
FAQs
Blogs
Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn
About the Book
Chapter 5 Download
About Allan's Workshops
Chapter 8 Download