Personal strivings are the recurring, characteristic goals a person is typically trying to accomplish across the many different situations they find themselves in — what someone is consistently trying to do, rather than what they're trying to do on any single occasion.
The concept comes from psychologist Robert Emmons, who argued that traits alone don't explain behavior well: knowing someone is high in Extraversion tells you they're generally sociable, but it doesn't tell you what they're actually trying to achieve when they walk into a room. A striving like "trying to make people feel included" or "trying to appear competent" can show up at work, at a family dinner, and at a party — the same underlying goal pulled into different specific actions by different situations.
Strivings sit at a different level of personality than traits: broader and more abstract than a one-off goal, but far more specific and motivational than a trait like Conscientiousness. They're closely related to personal projects, the more concrete, time-bound version of the same idea, and both feed into the kind of self-understanding captured by a person's life story.
Emmons also found that the content of someone's strivings matters less for wellbeing than qualities like whether their strivings conflict with each other, or whether they're pursued for their own sake rather than out of guilt or obligation.