Through participating in the GPS Life Purpose Journey, people use DISC to discover their personality.  That understanding puts them on a path to leading a focused, satisfying and meaningful life.  Many, for the first time, begin to understand their traits and whether they are action-oriented, enthusiastic and energetic, warm and relational, or perhaps perfectionistic.  They achieve a measure of freedom because they now know they were designed differently from others, that they don’t have to be like everyone else, and can embrace and enjoy their uniqueness.

Step One: Discover Your Personality

The first step in understanding who you are is to understand your personality.  People have been trying to understand what makes us different from one another since before the time of Christ.  It was Hippocrates (460 BC – 370 BC) that made the first known study of personality.  He held that a person's personality was based on the balance of bodily humours; yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood.  He meant well, but ended up being very wrong.  Since then many other physicians and scientists have studied the emotions, attitudes, and behavior that motivate people.

There are many good tools available for identifying personality.  The Enneagram Personality Tests divides the human race into nine behaviors.  Myers-Briggs identifies our uniqueness by focusing on four dichotomies.  The one I recommend, because it is the most widely used method, and the one used in the GPS Life Purpose Journey, is the DISC Personality Profile.  Disk focuses on four personality components:

• Dominance or Drive
• Influence
• Steadiness
• Conscientiousness

“Who am I?” is Everything

This question may seem elementary or the statement of an amnesiac. However, if we cannot clearly and quickly answer it, we risk making poor decisions and perhaps never reaching our full potential. We are all products of our family heritage, educational background, work experience and spiritual experience.  It is very easy to loose our true identity based only on an understanding of “what we do” and “what others expect of us.”  To answer the question, “who am I?” it is essential that we stop for a moment and reflect.

I wrestled with this question for the first time in my early 20’s.  I felt frustrated as I pondered what I had been put on this earth to do.  Fortunately, I had the opportunity to share my dissatisfaction with an older gentlemen who I trusted. As I was describing my situation and the pulling of others to make the choices they had made, he calmly said to me, “You just need to be the best George Gundlach you can be.”  I was stunned by his words.  The thought was both freeing and terrifying.  It was first freeing to find someone without an agenda for me.  The terrifying part was wondering how I was to discover my purpose that was lodged deep within my DNA.