Your Hospitality Personality: How to Confidently Create Connection and Community by Morgan Tyree

Book Blurb:

Does the thought of hosting a dinner send you into spasms of delight or spirals of dismay? Do you love opening your home to others? Or do you dread even the planning it takes to get a group of friends to arrive at the same restaurant at the same time?
We each have our own unique hospitality personality. And when you tap into yours, you’ll find a lot more blessing with a lot less stressing.
With personal assessments, encouraging stories, and plenty of practical ideas, Morgan Tyree shows you how to identify and embrace your hospitality personality so you can stop worrying and start enjoying yourself and your guests. She helps you understand your hospitality habits, hurdles, and hang-ups, then offers real-life solutions that fit you.

I received a copy of this book for the purpose of this review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own.

Review:

This book made me so mad that we are currently living in a pandemic, where face-to-face interaction is limited at best. Morgan made hospitality sound so doable and fun, and it makes me just want to plan all of the events. Here’s what I loved:

The Four Hospitality Personalities
I love anything personality-related. This is probably because I am an Enneagram type 5, and so I love the patterns and classification systems that personalities provide. At the beginning of the book, Morgan begins with describing four personalities when it comes to hospitality, and how each excels and struggles with hosting. For example, I am an organizer, so I can plan all the things and love to do so, but I can also be perfectionistic and rigid (which honestly wasn’t that surprising).

The Mentality
So often we confine hospitality to hosting people and events in our homes, but it really is so much bigger than that. Morgan explains that hospitality can be paying for the car behind you in line for Starbucks, holding the door for people, or inviting someone to go get coffee. This was such a good reminder that hospitality is less about what you do, and more about why you do it. She also pulls in several scripture references that reinforce this idea, and brings the ministry element to the discussion.

The Grace
Hospitality can be such a stressful thing for each personality, but Morgan does an excellent job of emphasizing grace. Your house doesn’t have to be spotless, your food doesn’t have to be gourmet, you don’t have to host just like everyone else. She discusses common stressors for each type and immediately validates them, encourages readers to give themselves grace, and then provides tips and tricks to help. It was so nice for me (as a perfectionistic organizer) to hear that things don’t always have to be perfect, and are often even better when they are imperfect.

The Ideas
One of my very favorite parts was all of the ideas that Morgan includes. She adds several in each chapter as they relate to the topic, but there is a whole section at the end where she has hosting ideas, complete with decorations, menus, recipes, activities, etc. It made my little planner brain very happy.

Lastly, I get ridiculously excited when authors I love talk about other authors I love, so the fact that Shauna Niequist was mentioned was an added bonus. Overall, I have no complaints!