How to understand your personality type so you can live life to the full

27 Pages·2009·0.89 MB·English

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personality
GPS
How to understand
your personality
type so you can
live life to the full
keith henry + berni dymet
keith henry + berni dymet
Ark House Press
PO Box 163
North Sydney NSW 2059 AUSTRALIA
Telephone: [phone]
PO Box 47212
Ponsonby Auckland NEW ZEALAND
Telephone: [phone]
www.arkhousepress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. Short extracts
maybe used for review purposes.
Except where otherwise indicated in the text, the scripture quotations contained herein
are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of
Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used
by permission. All rights reserved.
© 2009 Keith Henry + Berni Dymet
ISBN: 9781921589195
Cataloguing in Publication Data:
my personality GPS / Berni Dymet, Keith Henry.
ISBN: 9781921589195 (pbk.)
Christian life. Personality. Personality assessment.
155.2
Printed and bound in Australia
Layout by BBD Agency
www.bbdagency.com
Cover design by Mariah Reilly
Internal graphics by Phil Watson
For we are His workmanship,
created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand
so that we would walk in them.
(NASB Ephesians 2:10)
contents
Unless You Read This Bit…The Rest Just Won’t Make Sense 7
1 Ugly Duckling with Dream 11
2 Even Before Time Began 27
3 Investing Our Talents Wisely 43
4 Discovering True Greatness 53
5 What Makes Me Tick? 67
6 The Achiever – 1 o’clock 93
7 The Encourager – 2 o’clock 105
8 The Teacher – 3 o’clock 117
9 The Carer – 4 o’clock 131
10 The Giver – 5 o’clock 143
11 The Practical Server – 7 o’clock 157
12 The Theoretical Server – 8 o’clock 169
13 The Prophet – 10 o’clock 181
14 The Leader – 11 o’clock 193
15 Living Life to the Full 205
16 On a Personal Note 213
About the Authors 222
Other books by Berni Dymet 224
unless you read this bit…
the rest just won’t make sense
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.
(Ecclesiastes 4:9 – King Solomon)
This book is all about just one thing – helping you to discover who you are and
ZKHUH\RXÀW LQhelping you to know beyond any shadow of doubt who God
made you to be and what He made you to do.
If God is God – then He made each one of us to be precisely who He intended us
to be and He set a life before us to do precisely what He intended for us to do. And
unless He made a mistake, then those two - who we are and what we’re called to
do ²VKRXOGÀWOLNHDKDQGLQDJORYH
If God is indeed God, then it stands to reason doesn’t it?
This book is born out of the passion of one man – Keith Henry – who in 1988
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beach; he should have been dead when the rescue helicopter crashed … but he
isn’t. At the very least, he should be a paraplegic … but he isn’t. Because God
had a plan …
During his painful recovery over the next two decades, God led Keith to study in
depth, what have long been referred to as the “motivational giftings” in Romans
Chapter 12, verses 6 to 8, of the New Testament:
We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in
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the compassionate, in cheerfulness. (Romans 12:6-8)
Now we don’t use the term “motivational giftings” so much anymore. The
more common term is “Personality Types”. Keith studied these Personality
Types in the Bible, not from a worldly “me-centred” perspective, but from a
biblical, Christ-centred perspective.
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my personality GPS
And these days when Keith stands up and speaks about what he’s learned, you
can hear a pin drop.
Everybody stops and listens. People are truly
captivated, because deep down we all hunger to
Deep down we all
know who we are and what we’re meant to be doing
hunger to know who
with our lives. And deep down, most of us simply
we are and what we’re don’t know those things about ourselves.
meant to be doing
As Keith discovered though, it doesn’t have to be
with our lives.
that way.
That’s what this book’s all about. But when it came to writing a book, Keith had
a bit of a problem.
He’s an “Encourager” (you can read about his Personality Type in Chapter 7).
Encouragers are the sort of people we all love being around because they make
us feel good about ourselves. But generally, they don’t have the sort of strong
verbal, linguistic skills that you need to write a book. He always knew that God
wanted him to get out and tell this story about the different Personality Types we
discover in His Word, but given who God had made Keith to be – he had no real
way of telling that story.
In 2007 he met another man – Berni Dymet. Berni’s Personality Type is that of
the “Leader” (Chapter 14) and it turns out that more often than not, these people
have strong verbal, linguistic skills. Now that’s something that Berni had already
discovered about himself – having embarked on God’s call to share the Good
News of Jesus by telling stories through his radio programs heard by millions of
people each week around the globe.
And the more Keith and Berni talked, the more they dreamed God’s dreams over
coffee at their favourite coffee shop – the more they came to the conclusion that
together, they had to write this book.
But when it came to making the rubber hit the road – they encountered a very
real problem. It was one that, unless it was resolved, would have prevented them
from writing this book.
And that problem was this: How do two people – Keith who’s developed the
detailed knowledge of the Personality Types through two decades of study, and
Berni who has the story-telling ability but nowhere near Keith’s level of knowledge
– actually sit down and write a book together? How do you actually do that?
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my personality GPS
Berni’s issue was that he only knew one way to tell stories – and that was direct
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Telling the story in any other way would have been completely unnatural to him.
It would have felt contrived.
And then – again over a coffee – Berni and Keith had one of those “God
moments” – when the penny dropped.
Keith said to Berni “Then what you should do, is write the book in the way that
comes naturally to you – let’s both use the natural abilities that God’s given us for
His glory and not for ours. Isn’t that in fact the very thing that we’re going to be
writing about?”
Eureka! There it was. It was obvious! It was the only answer – and it’s an answer
that lies at the very heart of what this book is all about. And that is this …
… that none of us can do it all on our own. The trick is discovering not just
who God made us to be, but also who God made the others around us to be – and
then together, living out who we are, by doing what each one of us was made
to do. That way, we can achieve things together that we could never even have
contemplated on our own.
It’s the how to of living out a godly love for one another in community, rather
than in isolation. And when we know how to live that way – not only can we
achieve things together that we could never have achieved on our own, but we
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God made us to be and what He made us to do!
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It sounds blindingly glimpsingly obvious when you say it like that, doesn’t it?
But as we’ll discover throughout this book – as obvious as it may be, most
people simply haven’t ever discovered who they really are, and so they’re trying
to do things they were never made to do, and expecting others to do the same …
and then we wonder why it isn’t working so well. More about that later.
So, that’s been a round about way of getting to the bit that you really need to
know before you start reading the book – and that’s this.
The person writing, the person that you’ll be having the conversation with, is
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