Color Your Future: Using the Color Code to Strenghthen Your Character - Hardcover

Chapter 1

Four Paths for Life

What you are is God's gift to you;
what you become is your gift to God.

There are four clearly defined paths you can choose to walk in life. Your choices include (from most worthwhile to most detrimental): 1) charactered, 2) healthy, 3) unhealthy, 4) pathological.

Here's how they are broken down:

Charactered positive traits of colors from outside innate core personality
Healthy positive traits of color from inside innate core personality
Unhealthy negative traits of color from inside innate core personality
Pathological negative traits of colors from outside innate core personality

THE CHARACTERED PATH

Only quality individuals choose the charactered path. The other three paths will offer a more limited version of life. Charactered people accurately identify and develop the strengths of their core personalities. Furthermore, they stretch to embrace the strengths of other personalities in order to compensate for their innate limitations. Embracing the gifts (strengths) of other colors, charactered people evolve. The more gifts they adopt, the more charactered they become, and the higher they soar in flight.

THE HEALTHY PATH

Healthy individuals are like a caterpillar in its cocoon, almost ready to take flight. Healthy individuals primarily engage life through their strengths. They provide wonderful role models for quality living as seen through the eyes of their particular personality. However, they remain primarily confined to expressing themselves through the strengths of their core color, limiting themselves only to those gifts championed by their particular personality. Expecting them to express the gifts in terms of other colors is often disappointing.

THE UNHEALTHY PATH

Unhealthy individuals begrudgingly remain caterpillars. Strapped by their innate "baggage," they spend their lives confined to and defined by their personality's limitations. Unlike pathological people, however, they remain true to the limitations within their core personality, expressing themselves consistently with their weaknesses. They usually become manipulative in order to justify and rationalize their limited (and often pathetic) lives.

THE PATHOLOGICAL PATH

Pathological individuals are severely handicapped human beings. In the context of this book, they would most likely even deny their existence as caterpillars. "Don't label me!" they demand. "I'm all the colors, depending on the circumstances. I'm a rainbow!" Pathological people are completely out of touch with who they were innately born to be, and haven't a clue as to what they are capable of becoming.

They express themselves throughout life in the limitations of all colors except their own. They are inconsistent and untrustworthy. While some are extremely intelligent, their lack of congruence creates a lack of clarity in their thought and behavior in all colors except their own. If you could see into the heart of these individuals, you would find serious confusion, powerlessness, and insecurity. They are often incapable of using their natural strengths and yet, ironically, refuse to live within their core personality limitations either.

CHOOSE YOUR PATH

Everybody must choose his/her destiny. The level of health you aspire to will ultimately determine the quality of your life. While there are great latitudes within each level, from charactered to pathological, each level has certain requirements: less healthy individuals typically place greater emphasis on themselves, and most often at the expense of others.

For example, all individuals who walk the charactered path learn and embrace gifts other personalities bring at birth. The more charactered people become, the less concerned they are with themselves. Their focus blends self-love with concern for the quality of others' lives. The people who walk the healthy path discover their core motives and bless others with the strengths from their Color. Unhealthy people share a common bond by choosing to see life primarily through their innate dysfunctional limitations. Less healthy individuals typically place greater emphasis on themselves, and most often at the expense of others. Individuals seeking the pathological path commonly present themselves as angry, self-obsessed, and spiritually dysfunctional.

Why Choose the Charactered Path?

Character is defined as "learned" gifts. The optimum motive for becoming charactered is service. Becoming trustworthy to serve requires us to be accountable for our innate strengths, limitations, and motives. To earn trust requires humility, courage, grace, and mastering the six steps of character.

The optimum motive of service drives us to stretch beyond our raw beginnings. While personalities are limited, character is not. Seeking to bless the lives of others challenges us to stretch in order to develop gifts where our innate personalities are limited. Character will not always equate with financial prosperity, but it will always enhance the quality of our lives.

Becoming charactered is an evolutionary process that will not appear the same to each color. Since character is "learned," what is character to a Red may look different to a Blue, White, or Yellow. Each color comes with inherent gifts that, when embraced by the other colors, become character. However, these same gifts remain defined as personality to the individual who brings them from birth.

The following case histories may help you identify your current path and level of functioning. I hope Color Your Future will help you choose the charactered path.

Which Path Have You Chosen to Walk?

Two roads diverged in a wood and I,
I took the road less traveled...
Robert Frost

THE CHARACTERED PATH

Charactered people will always be best remembered for the unnatural gifts they stretch to develop and freely share with others throughout life.

Lecturing on The Color Code, I was intrigued one night when a gentleman, highly regarded for his expertise in early American history, approached me following my lecture and corrected a perception of mine. I had stated that Patrick Henry, one of America's Founding Fathers, had a Blue personality. He cited numerous references validating his position that Patrick Henry was clearly a Red personality rather than a Blue. Thanking him for his insights, I left rather puzzled.

Highly respected as a businessman with a brilliant political future, many felt certain that Patrick Henry was destined to be the president of the United States, when tragically, his wife became despondent and mentally ill. While Americans remain rather unforgiving of this illness, Patrick Henry's peers were brutal, believing that mental illness was a disease linked with religious impropriety, and often condemning mentally ill patients to a life void of human decency. Their society generally believed that diminished mental capacity indicated satanic possession and shunned the victim, often placing them behind bars to die in total isolation on slabs of cold cement.

To a Red Patrick Henry, mental illness did not make sense. He didn't understand or believe in it, but he recognized that his wife, by some bizarre twist of fate, was suffering tremendous pressure from the society they had once successfully embraced together.

Politically astute, Patrick Henry carefully deliberated over his dilemma. Should he dispose of his beloved wife and pursue the prestigious career he rightly deserved, or should he forsake his opportunities to care for the woman he loved? His character intact, his decision made, Patrick Henry returned home and closed the curtains at their home, and consequently the curtain