Core Need/Motivation

To be seen as successful, admired, approved, worthwhile, competent.

How the Type Meets Those Needs

Type Threes are ambitious, efficient, achieving, status-conscious, and adaptive. Their sense of value, worth, and love comes from being perceived as successful and capable. They plan and execute their plans often forgetting their own deeper desires, loves, and truth. As soon as one goal is achieved, the Three is on to the next. Many resonate with the saying, “You are only as good as your last sale”. Hard work is something Threes understand. To their mind you don’t achieve success by accident, but by planning the work and working the plan with great efficiency.

Along with that internal drive comes a deep frustration with obstacles to success. Many have said that they feel like there are obstacles, inefficiencies, or people withholding something that they need to succeed. This internal frustration drives the type, rarely with complaint, to create avenues around what others would perceive as impossibilities. All of this planning, working, and achieving is in hopes of receiving the admiration, affirmation, and approval from those they admire. Some Threes resist their need for admiration causing internal conflict. Positive feedback is often distrusted as manipulation or justified as something earned but never absorbed into the self. Because they can read how others see them, this pragmatic type is able to shape-shift; to become whatever they need to be. They can lose their sense of self by taking on different identities in different contexts.

Although not often felt, the core emotion of the Three is shame or sadness, stemming from the senses of worthlessness, not being competent enough, not having achieved enough, and not being successful enough. They process how the world sees them first through the heart space, ascending quickly to the head where they spend most of their time planning, then demanding their body to carry those plans out.

The Gifts of the 3

The gifts of the Three are many. They are able to create efficient and success-oriented plans, seemingly from nothing. They are great at teaching others how to succeed and reach their goals. They know how to work around obstacles when others give up. They can anticipate how people will respond to something and they have a unique insight for how best to present a winning message to their audience.