I invite you to imagine that you are a great big bus driving through life and that all the passengers are different parts of yourself—the part who wants everyone else to like you, the part who just wants to be left alone, the part who is excited about your big goals, the part who just wants to do nothing, and so many other subpersonalities with their own desires and beliefs about the world.

Sometimes, you’re driving along the path through life, aligning with your values, reaching your goals, navigating the twists and turns smoothly.

And, other times, you arrive at a crossroads and the passengers on your bus argue about how to proceed. Do you go left? Right? Turn around? Take a sideroad?

Maybe the parts mediate their disagreement well and choose their next move easily. Or, maybe they start battling it out, trying to yank the steering wheel in different directions, going back and forth about what to do next rather than making forward movement.

Or perhaps, you decide to move forward, but then a part of you slams on the brakes, drains all your gas, hijacks the bus, or careens off the road. As one client wrote: “I kept making promises to myself that tomorrow, I’d do things differently. But then I broke those promises and let myself down again. I didn’t understand why I was acting like my own worst enemy.”

So why such stuckness?

Why such simultaneously conflicting feelings?

Because stuckness is an attempt to meet a need. Because different parts of us have different opinions about which needs we should prioritize and which strategies best meet your needs.

I’ll explain:

Needs are the universal motivating qualities behind everything we do; needs are why we do what we do.

In contrast, strategies are the actions we take to meet our needs; strategies are what we do. Everything that you and I do, from waking to sleeping—even the most harmful actions—is a strategy, an attempt to meet a need.

To understand this better, it can help to go back to the beginning, to the day we were born.

We Come to Identify with Our Strategies

You and I came into this world with lots of needs but no strategies to meet them on our own. And so, from the moment we were born, we started learning all sorts of strategies to meet our needs.

We quickly learned that some strategies earned us frowns and rejection, while others strategies earned us smiles and praise.

We practiced some strategies over and over until they became habits, and over time, we started identifying with some habits, saying things like: I’m the type of person who… or This is just how I am or I always… or It’s just in my nature to… or I was born this way…

To be able to compassionately witness our habitual strategies and cultivate a choiceful relationship with them, it can help to imagine that they are subpersonalities or distinct parts of ourselves. I first learned to call these parts strategy children.[1] Here are some examples of parts that I see often in clients and fellow changemakers:

The Achiever: A part that learned to meet our needs by accomplishing big goals and derives its sense of self-worth from our accomplishments.

The People Pleaser: A part that learned to meet our needs for safety and stability by prioritizing others’ needs over our own.

The Rebel: A part that learned to meet our need for self-respect by going against authority figures and disagreeing with everything they say.

The Judge: The part who judges or criticizes ourselves. In the The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this part the Judge. RuPaul calls this part her Inner Saboteur. Anne Lamott calls hers the itty-bitty-shitty committee. My son, Kai, calls his the Troll.

The Victim: The part that blames others for why things are the way they are and abdicates responsibility for choosing a response that honors their needs. In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz calls this part the Victim. Other names my clients have used include Griper, Slider,