Strange as this may seem, you have two personalities not just one. Most of us think of personality in psychological terms, yet deep under this personality you have another – your spiritual personality. It’s here in the spiritual bedrock of your true self where you find the freshness of God's presence always at work.
Psychology describes personality in many ways: introverted, extroverted, sensing, intuitive, judging, mercurial, oppositional, etc. Your personality is a unique, distinct, one of a kind, unmistakable, and never to be duplicated entity. While most of us believe that we are unique, we generally remain quite unaware of how this uniqueness is translated into our everyday reality.
Your psychological personality is the sum total of your individual traits all admixed in ways both known and unknown, folded one on and into another, stirred by time and relationship, education and experience, as well as all of your emotional, psychological, and attitudinal specialness, that together distinguish you as you.
Everything about you is processed through and expressed by your personality; every word, gesture, action, “faux pas”, insinuation, attitude, insight, thought, feeling, and choice is a product of your personality.
The overall purpose of your personality, communicating the worldly uniqueness of you, is carried out by the six functions of your personality.
These six functions are:
- Believing function: What you believe your life should be like
- Perceiving function: Where you place your focus
- Thinking function: The meaning you make from your perceptions.
- Feeling function: The automatic emotions that flow from your thoughts.
- Deciding function: The choices you make about your life.
- Acting function: Your behavior…what you actually do.
These six functions of your personality don't act independently, rather they act in succession, and they flow from one another. The work of your personality is therefore sequential. One personality function provides the raw material for the next function; this next function can only work well to the degree that the material it receives from the previous function is clear, accurate, and complete.
These six are always at work processing, collating, mixing, matching, comparing, evaluating, responding, reacting, and doing, doing, doing. The better our personality accomplishes this one purpose, that of communicating your essential character, the happier, healthier, and holier you become.