079: How to Thrive with your specific Personality

Passion Design Project

Oooooh! This is a fun one! So I recently helped launch a church campus and as part of Fresh Life Church's Crash Course, you go through a series of personality tests, one of which is 16personalities.com. I'm sure most of you have done personality tests sometime in your past. I always found them somewhat hard to understand - they describe you in letters and give a little generic description and, whatever. But not this one. This one is dead on. For real though. Once you finish, it gives you one of 16 personalities, and details exactly how you act in about 10 pages. Nothing short of incredible. Of course, most of us are not just one because that would mean we'd have tons of identical people like us in the world, but I'd venture to say it gets the majority of your personality correct, and it's incredibly enlightening. Over Christmas, I had my entire family take it and it was so perfect and so funny. But the best part was that it made me understand everyone SO MUCH MORE. For example, I always wondered why my boyfriend always wanted to be in groups instead of just us two. Turns out a big part of his personality as a Consul is that they see friendship as extremely important, fun, and almost a responsibility. Or why my mom never wanted to participate in an energetic argument, because in her Mediator mind she only seeks harmony. It was truly fun to explore this about everyone, but then there was mine. Debater. I couldn't believe it. I actually thought it was wrong. Thought I should be an Adventurer or Entrepreneur! But no, I got stuck with Debater. Worse was reading the description and recognizing myself and even worse yet was my boyfriend reading it and saying "I've never read a truer description." Or maybe it was the pastor emailing me back and saying he hadn't met a Debater before. Of course, you have to embrace your personality right? Obviously, you enjoy yourself - or I should hope you do! So here's my motto and it says, "Smart and curious thinkers who cannot resist an intellectual challenge." To be honest, I never before had thought of myself as debating person. Yes I like to speak my side and have a jolly ol conversation around things, but now I realize I actually often push my ideas for the fun of it. What I failed to realize all this time is that not everyone likes to play this, let's banter back and forth for the fun of it, game. It made me realize that times I think I'm sharing smart information, I might actually come off as too much. This was incredible for me to hear. Apparently, we Debaters only make up about 3% of the population, which is probably a good thing so we aren't all endlessly debating ideas, but also a good thing because it's unique. Because along with everything else, there are some cool tendencies I found to be true, too. We enjoy reworking systems creatively, we live to become more knowledgeable about subjects just for the fun of it, we think logically in emotional situations, and best of all we're known to be charismatic and energetic. So now what? I believe the trick becomes harnessing the good qualities while approaching the less than ideal qualities day by day. No, I'm not saying attempt to change your personality, I'm suggesting borrowing some good qualities from others. As a purely logical thinker, it's next to impossible for me to make judgments emotionally. But a lot of people are very emotional decision makers, and so it would do good for me to allow emotions to enter conversations along with logic, and not just dismiss emotionally charged conversations as nonsense. And as for arguments that arise, I could add a bit of compassion to my lively debates. Allowing ideas from another view never hurt anyone and would probably help my case in the long run. But how do we change when these things are so ingrained in us? Well first, by knowing yourself. You must be able to recognize your faults and strengths. And then by reigning them in.