Tendencing, Your Natural Inclinations

[Read time: 5 minutes] In the previous article, “Aptitudes, Your Spiritual Gifts,” we examined aptitudes, which are the spiritual gifts or natural abilities God gave you. Understanding how your aptitudes give you specialized abilities and skills is an important step in becoming an effective human being. Other personality traits influence how you use your aptitudes and these are the subject of most personality tests. We will call these “tendencies” because they describe how you are likely to behave or respond.

Why should you consider tendencies in addition to aptitudes? Because your aptitudes describe your inherent abilities — what you do most effectively — and your tendencies describe how you use those aptitudes.

In this study we consider some typical tendencies most people can easily recognize: general orientation (extrovert, introvert), perspective (optimist, pessimist), priorities (people, physical objects, physical body, information, ideas, feelings, results), issue perception (objective, subjective) and orderliness (structured, flexible). We could consider other tendencies, but these sufficiently reveal the intricacy of human character and how God combines its various elements to create effective, skilled human beings. When you see how efficiently your aptitudes and tendencies work together, I hope you will have profound admiration for God’s handiwork.

We will examine how your personality tendencies support your aptitudes or make them function effectively. For example, if you are an encourager (an aptitude), you probably are an extrovert (a tendency). Your primary motivation is to help other people, so you are people-oriented (a priority) and you typically help them by talking to them. If you are introverted or only slightly extroverted (a tendency), you may be more comfortable helping a person one-on-one. That is, your tendencies influence how you use your aptitude of encouragement.

Consider another example. Administrator typically introduce structure as needed, which means they will have the aptitude of administration and a tendency to be structured. If they are introverted, they might excel at handling schedules, merchandise, contracts, or finances. However, the more extroverted they are, the more they will excel at supervising people.

In contrast, some tendencies are essential to your aptitudes. For example, an encourager may have a positive perspective (a tendency), making them optimistic that the person’s situation can improve or they can feel better about it. Encouragers are confident that if someone does what they say, they will get the desired results. A positive perspective is essential for an encourager because pessimism and encouragement just don’t go together.

Your aptitudes describe what you do; your tendencies describe how you do it.

Spiritual Origin of Character

As stated in the previous article, your human spirit seems to be the source of your basic character, including aptitudes and tendencies. If your tendencies were functions of your mind and not your spirit, you could change from one to another simply by making a decision. Our experience, however, shows that is not so.

For example, a flexible, unstructured person (a spiritual trait), can learn some basic organizational skills (mental training), but their basic nature is to be fluid, flexible, adaptable, and spontaneous. By learning some organizing techniques, they can reduce the chaos they naturally create and overcome some of their character weaknesses. They may learn to put their things away and even show up on time for appointments, yet they will continue valuing their liberty and remain a flexible person because their basic character will remain the same.

Strong introverts (a spiritual trait) may learn to converse with others (a learned mental skill for them), but they will never be as effective at conversation as an extrovert. Subjective people (a spiritual trait) may change the degree of their subjectivity or make an objective decision based on circumstances (a mental function), but cannot become a generally objective person.

Mental development definitely affects what you do with your character, but cannot change it. You can learn to use your character and skills more effectively and you can develop some limited abilities that don’t come naturally to you. Training is important but of limited value because your spirit is the main determinant of your character.

Specialization and Limitations

As stated earlier, your tendencies support your aptitudes or make them function more effectively; that is, they facilitate the use of your aptitudes. Like a specialized tool, the features that enable you to excel in some tasks reduce your effectiveness in others, creating obvious limitations. For example, objectivity is essential to some aptitudes, but such people will not respond to human needs as effectively as a subjective person will. Objectivity, as with all tendencies, makes a person even more effective at some tasks and less effective at others; more specialized and more limited.

Format for the Tendency Articles

Part 4 of this article series contains an article for each tendency examined in this study, and the format for each is very similar to that of the aptitude articles. It begins with a description of the tendency and its typical characteristics. Then it explores the specific ways sin perverts that tendency through self-centeredness, extremes, and control. Each tendency article closes with an explanation of how God redeems that tendency so it will provide all its benefits without any of the problems created by sin.

God did not give you tendencies arbitrarily. Instead, He designed you with aptitudes and tendencies that make you very skilled at providing your particular service, which is vital to fulfilling His plan for your life. Identifying them and learning to use them as He intended will make you a very effective person. You can increase your effectiveness and fulfillment even more by applying your skills to your compelling interests, which we will consider in the next article.