Customer Reviews

The Four Elements of Success: A Simple Personality Profile that will Transform Your Team

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Laurie Beth Jones, author of Jesus, CEO and a successful business consultant has written an interesting book on personality profiling, The Four Elements of Success (2005, Thomas Nelson). Personality profiling is not new. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and DISC relational profiling tools. Others will remember Tim Lahaye's books on transforming our personal temperament such as Spirit-Controlled Temperament and Transformed Temperaments. Another useful personality profiling tool is the enneagram. All these are time tested personality profiling tools.

What is new and distinctive about Jones' Path Elements Profile (PEP) is her use of the four elements: earth, wind, water and fire to describe the human personality. Under these four elements, there are 16 possible personality blends: earth, earth/wind, earth/water, earth/fire, water, water/wind, water/earth, water/fire, wind, wind/water, wind/earth, wind/fire, fire, fire/wind, fire/earth and fire/water. Each represents a personality type. In her book, Jones has documented the various types.

Generally a person with a fire personality is one whose strengths are being exciting, passionate, intense, and confrontational and but has a tendency to burn out easily. Fire personalities dislike boredom, sameness, routine, boundaries, sharing the spot light and apathy.

Earth personality includes stability, predictability, orderliness and long term planning. The earth personality weaknesses are changes, sudden movement and too much spontaneity.

Water's strengths include its vitality, people centred, flexibility and team player. Its weaknesses are its need to please people, difficulty in saying no and tendency to lose its identity in others.

Wind personalities are spontaneous, forward movement and the ability to move others. Wind people like changes, new ideas and upward and inspiring things. Their weaknesses are their restlessness, impulsiveness and like the wind, their ability to stir things up and then leave.

The aim of this elemental profiling is to discover how people can work together in teams. For example, teaming a `fire' with `water' will result in confusion while a team full of `earths' will need a `fire'. The use of the elements may sound New Age which Jones assures her readers that it is not so. However it will appeal to many in Asia who are familiar with the increasing popularity of Feng Shui. I find it fascinating that Jones uses the four elements not only to explain the various human personalities but also for developing compatible team building. It sounds interesting and may be a powerful tool to understand human beings and human relationships in a community.

The material here presented by Laurie Beth Jones is excellent and provides tremendous insight for personality studies. Unlike other personality profile models which possess types difficult to grasp and to inter-relate, this model provides the user with common elements which are easy to understand and simple to intertwine. For example, we all understand the nature of fire, and we all understand the result of fire and water being mixed together. Other personality profiles models fall far short of this one.

The only reason I didn't give this book five stars is that the style is too "earthy." Being a fire/wind myself, I found it cumbersome to wade through all the detailed explanations and examples. Overall however, it is a great volume -- I recommend it!

I read other books by this author and this one was great as well! Recommend reading by owners, supervisors, leadership and those who inspire to be successful.

This book has been very helpful in allowing me to understand my own personality and my co-workers. I recommend everyone read it!

Here is another excellent resource from Laurie Beth Jones in her mission to help people achieve success in their lives and in work places. Even though I appreciate the Christian perspective, I like the way Jones sprinkles it throughout the book in a way that it is able to be used by peoeple of other faiths. I would have liked to have seen a more indepth way for the reader to profile their own personality, as I guessed my way through Ch 1. Also, I would have liked the Contents page to have been more comprehensive, as the chapters were too long and I wasn't sure what the pop quiz was designed for. I am looking forward to the workbook that Jones will probably design to go with this resource. Anyway, on its on, its very informative and worthwhile, no matter what field one works in. Thank you LBJ.

Life coach Laurie Beth Jones highlights the differences among individual work styles and categorizes them as elements: Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. She explains that if you pay attention to the natural "elemental" ways that people respond to work demands, you can create a more positive and, thus, more productive work environment. The reasoning (perhaps more than the metaphor) makes sense, and certainly beats always asking square pegs to work in round holes. Jones' approach is a little simplistic but that may help make it easy to use. She also brings in warm references to Jesus and Christianity. getAbstract suggests that this book could be a helpful starting place for understanding work styles and improving team dynamics.

I have found this book to be life-changing in the sense of gaining an understanding of not only my personality traits and needs but also of those on my team. As a result, I have been better able to meet their needs and they in turn have been better able to meet the needs of our business. Having read and worked through Laurie Beth Jones book, "The Path", this book, "The Four Elements of Sucess", became a natural and necessary extension to our continuing growth and progress. I strongly recommend this book to anyone whether for business or personal life. If all it does is give you a better understanding or yourself or of those around you, that in itself can be priceless.

I'm only half way through the book but have noticed that approximately one half of the words are incorrectly put under the wrong element. So I give it a two and one half stars. The premise is great, but lets face it, it's pure pagan astrology, Fire, Water, Air and Earth. There is a personality system called WORDTYPES that admits to it's astrological origins that is much better. But I do suggest reading this book as it gives you the basic idea of elemental astrology. Personally, I think that this system is going to change the world.