The Basic Motivational Gifts

The Basic Issue

There are seven Motivational Gifts. We have them all, but tent to be stronger in one or two and not so strong in the rest. We tend to know each other by the gifts others are strongest in. The seven gifts are:

The Source Of The Model

The Gifts model is derived from an aside in Paul's letter to the Romans in the New Testament. In Chapter 12, he makes the comment that people should settle down and be occupied in tasks for which they have been equipped for. He gives seven types of motivational gifts, making brief comments about each.

At the turn of the last century, a minister was reading these listed motivational gifts, and thought that it sounded a lot like the people in his Church. He made a list of eight characteristics for each of the gifts and started to use the model in his work.[]

Bill Gothard, who has been conducting stadium sized-seminars for youth in the United States, in order to help them get the tools for healthy living, adopted the system as part of one of his seminars.

Don and Katie Fortune had some friends who encountered the system at one of Bill Gothards's seminars, and spent a winter in the 1960's teasing out the characteristics to twenty positive items and five negative items for each gift. They published their results in their book Finding Your God-Given Gifts.

This book and their seminars which go with it have been in circulation since that time. I encountered the system in 1990 and have used it extensively in a number of contexts.

The material which is on this site is a collection of the comments which students, and others have made about different issues which they have encountered in life. I have arranged it in terms of one of the central issues which is very typical of each of the gifts. As the other gifts also have an outlook on each of the questions, I have included their comments by way of contrast.

By arranging the material in this manner, it is possible to look at several themes that are common to all people, and compare and contrast the approaches to those issues by people strong in each gift. Of course, most of us are strong in two or three, so a composite picture can be constructed for any particular gift-mix on any particular subject.

The degree of rigor of the system is not strong. It is at the stage in testing of a conceptual framework. In talking to Katie on the telephone, she indicated that the only work done that she knew of was what is outlined above. That was in 1992 (?) so there may be further work since that time.

As I tend to use the model as a conversation piece rather than an exact model, it serves my purposes. However, it is best to be held with a light hand. Katie said that in the groups they have worked with, it is "accurate' with about 95% of the people, but is distinctly not accurate with those who have been abused as kids or pressured to conform to a personality type for external reasons. Once that pressure is removed, the test performs quite adequately she noted.

As the test in their book is a self-report, self-rating system, it is at best a set of scores relative to each other internally. If someone is quite flamboyant, the overall scores will be more extreme than someone who is somewhat milder in their estimates. The person's scores still show the relative comparisons internally however. There is no absolute scale for the scores.

The examples used within the book and the jargon adopted is quite "church-y" and falls on the liberal end of the conservative Protestant Church. One of the weaknesses of the model as it is currently circulated in that book is that it is almost unreadable by people outside the sub-set of society that Don and Katie work within. Some of us have learned to see through the surface terminology and examples to the essence beneath but many folks are just not able to do so. They have circulated questionnaires which they consider "secular" versions of their test, but they have a number of problems as well.

Within the test itself, there are multiple problems which perhaps even Don and Katie have moved beyond in their work. The test questions could be tightened up and some of the item problems ironed out. I find about eighty percent of each profile is accurate in my experience, except for the giver-financier profile. I would rate what they have as quite accurate, but there is a large segment of that profile completely missing. I have been collecting material on this profile in order to strengthen it since about a year after I started to use the system.

Over all, I would rank the system highly, and hope that more rigorous work could be

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