Getting Around the Humans: Figuring out Why People Do What They Do

By Duane Shoebridge

Getting Around the Humans is a fun look at why people do the things they do. With a little effort and practice, youll be able to see the why behind those strange behaviors and help predict what they may do next. This is a great help when dealing with family, friends, coworkers, students, customers, or the guy in the parking lot who just hit your car. You can get them on your team or limit the damage they can do to your team.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512779479

Duane Shoebridge

Duane Shoebridge is a husband and a homeschool father of three. He has his bachelor’s in psychology and Bible from Northwestern College. His passion has been in youth ministry since 1990. He has been working as a business information consultant and programmer for a business he started since 2010.

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Copyright © 2017 Duane Shoebridge.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-7948-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7949-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7947-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017904047

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/12/2017

Contents

Introduction The Journey

Getting Around the Humans

We Three Countries

Country of Riches (Variety, Creativity, Pleasure)

Country of Wealth (Power, Control)

Country of Honor (Known and Approved, People)

Personal Assessment Worksheet

Priority of Desire

Navigating the Swarm

Riches Strategies

Wealth Strategies

Honor Strategies

Cheat Sheet

Works Cited

In Remembrance of

Wade K. Wahl, PsyD

October 16, 1956–June 14, 2003

Dr. Wahl was my college psychology professor at Northwestern College in St. Paul. He challenged our thinking by asking why there wasn’t a Biblical Psychological Model. Hopefully, this series will be the beginning of that dream.

Book 1: Getting Around the Humans

This is a basic look at the core of who we are. It will help you understand motives and the basic why we do things. It can be applied to business, home, school, church, and life in general.

Book 2: Getting to Know the Humans

This is an in-depth look at humans. We will see how the soul reacts to the different body types and spirit types. It will also be looking at learning styles, restorative centers, the will, mind, conscience, and many other parts of human personality.

Book 3: Managing the Humans

This is the application of all that we have learned to this point. It will also introduce soul demotivators and in-depth look at the honor code. It will illustrate how we help ourselves and others reach our greatest potential.

Special thanks to my editor and nephew, Nathan, for your insights and wisdom. Mostly, thank you for believing in this project. You have been a great encouragement to me. As you know, the fact that this book is finished is proof there is a God and that He has incredible patience.

Introduction

The Journey

When I was a student at North Western College, I was working on a dual bachelor of arts degree in Bible and psychology. In 1993, my psychology professor, Dr. Wahl, asked us in class, if we believed that we had a subconscious. We all raised our hands. He then asked why we believed it. It wasn’t proven. It wasn’t necessarily biblical. It was just one man’s opinion. He challenged us to think of what a biblical model would look like.

Dr. Wahl didn’t have a model to give us, at least not that he shared at that time. But the challenge stuck in my soul. I’m a theory person. I like to dream of and formulate new things. However, putting those things into action is a weakness. So the initial excitement got stored away with all the other grand ideas of a young man.

Time progressed, and I got married. I went back to school and got a computer networking degree to pay the bills. I got a job in a business where I could apply my psychology to technology and help people through the crisis of technology change. I implemented new technology and taught people how to use it, even though the process was fearful. Life happened, and it kept me busy. I took out the idea of finding a psychological model in the Bible from time to time but then stored it away again to work on life.

In 2002, my wife told me that we were going to have our first baby. Something inside me went click. All those spinning gears in my head started to touch each other, and I began to move. The search for a biblical model of how we are made began that very night.

I wish I could say that I stayed at the study until it was completed, but I can’t. God uses us as we are, and I am an artist. I am by nature creative and flighty. Looking back, I can see how God used that time to teach me a fuller dynamic to the basic structure that I initially learned.

It started that night with an idea. I was going to do a complete word study on every word associated with human personality: body, mind, soul, will, etc. Then, through their definitions, I would piece them together. Simple, right?

The first hurdle I found was that many times these words were dropped in the English translations. For example, the term soul was often left out and replaced with a personal pronoun. It was an accurate enough translation, but a nuance of the word was lost. Sometimes words were improperly translated, like making soul and spirit interchangeable terms. To gain a complete list, I had to use web tools to get the Greek and Hebrew words and then look those words up in the Greek and Hebrew versions of the Bible. This gave me a complete list. Tools on the web were very helpful in building the list. I only have a year and half of Greek and no Hebrew education, so I couldn’t study the source directly. However, with a trilinear Bible (Greek, Hebrew, and English together), I could put the proper word back into the English version and see context.

After a year, I had most of the psychological structure built. However, writing became an issue. With ADHD, dyslexia, and a basic dislike of any writing outside of poetry and outlines, I decided to keep most of what I found to oral discussion and personal application. I tried to contact Dr. Wahl for his thoughts and guidance but found out he had recently died in a bicycle accident. I approached local Christian psychologists and pastors but found no one willing to work on a beginning concept. So I applied what I knew to my marriage, youth ministry, work relationships, church dynamics, and, eventually, to three very different children of mine.

Since then, I started reading books on how to own and run a successful business—about one or two a month for a couple of years. I began to see the personality of the authors and why they were suggesting their ideas in the book. I also began to see which books would work for me and my personality type and which ones wouldn’t.

What surprised me was that each theory fit into this new model. Even ideas that seemed at first contradictory fit together. I found holes where some models left out certain personality types. One such incident I brought up to a consultant who taught the DISC model. He agreed the hole was there and the author had later compensated for it in another way.

In 2010, I started my own business. Part of the business was dedicated to bringing in the income, finding creative solutions for information workflow problems. The second part of the business was training companies to solve human-interaction issues using the structure I found in the Bible. My documentation included outlines, graphs, and a few paragraphs here and there. I needed to get this information into a book.

At one point, I hired a ghostwriter. I explained all I knew of the subject to her. It didn’t work as I expected. When I read it, I saw how she interpreted what I said through her filter. It was written well. Parts of her writing are still here. It just wasn’t the direction I wanted to take. But it was money well spent. I realized at that point