Personality Plus: How to Understand Others by Understanding Yourself
Florence Littauer
Table of Contents
What makes you so special?
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
PART ONE - Personality Profile: A Quick Method of Self-Examination
CHAPTER 1 - There’s Only One You
No Two Alike
It’s What’s Underneath That Counts
Each One of Us Is Unique
Where Do We Start?
CHAPTER 2 - Your Personality Profile
PART TWO - Personality Potential:A Look at Our Individual Assets
CHAPTER 3 - Let’s Have Fun with Popular Sanguine
Popular Sanguine Children
Appealing Personality
Talkative, Storyteller
Life of the Party
Memory for Color
Hold On to the Listener
Good on Stage
Wide-Eyed and Innocent
Enthusiastic and Expressive
Curious
Always a Child
Volunteers for Jobs
Creative and Colorful
Inspires and Charms Others
Makes Friends Easily
Seems Exciting
CHAPTER 4 - Let’s Get Organized with Perfect Melancholy
Deep, Thoughtful, Analytical
Serious and Purposeful
Genius—Intellect
Talented and Creative
Likes Lists, Charts, Graphs, and Figures
Detail Conscious
Orderly and Organized
Neat and Tidy
Perfectionist—High Standards
Economical
Deep Concern and Compassion
Seeks Ideal Mate
CHAPTER 5 - Let’s Look at Our Emotions
Prolonged Pattern
A Lot in Common
Dealing with Powerful Choleric and Peaceful Phlegmatic
CHAPTER 6 - Let’s Get Moving with Powerful Choleric
Born Leader
Compulsive Need for Change
Strong-Willed and Decisive
Can Run Anything
Goal Oriented
Organizes Well
Delegates Work
Thrives on Opposition
Has Little Need for Friends
Is Usually Right
Excels in Emergencies
CHAPTER 7 - Let’s Relax with Peaceful Phlegmatic
All Purpose
Low-Key Personality
Easygoing
Calm, Cool, Collected
Patient—Well Balanced
Happily Reconciled to Life
Has Administrative Ability
Mediates Problems
Easy to Get Along With
Has Many Friends
Is a Good Listener
PART THREE - Personality Plan: A Way to Overcome Our Personal Weaknesses
Positives Carried to Extremes Become Negatives
CHAPTER 8 - Let’s Organize Popular Sanguine
No Follow-Through
No-Fault People
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguines Talk Too Much
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguines Are Self-Centered
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguines Have Uncultivated Memories
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguines Are Fickle and Forgetful Friends
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguines Interrupt and Answer for Others.
PROBLEM: Popular Sanguine Is Disorganized and Immature
CHAPTER 9 - Let’s Cheer Up Perfect Melancholy
One of a Kind?
PROBLEM: Perfect Melancholies Are Easily Depressed
PROBLEM: Perfect Melancholies Have Low Self-Images
PROBLEM: Perfect Melancholies Procrastinate
PROBLEM: Perfect Melancholies Put Unrealistic Demands on Others
CHAPTER 10 - Let’s Tone Down Powerful Choleric
Mr. No-Fault
PROBLEM: Powerful Cholerics Are Compulsive Workers
PROBLEM: Powerful Cholerics Must Be in Control
PROBLEM: Powerful Cholerics Don’t Know How to Handle People
PROBLEM: Powerful Cholerics Are Right but Unpopular
CHAPTER 11 - Let’s Motivate Peaceful Phlegmatic
PROBLEM: Peaceful Phlegmatics Are Not Exciting
PROBLEM: Peaceful Phlegmatics Resist Change
PROBLEM: Peaceful Phlegmatics Seem Lazy
PROBLEM: Peaceful Phlegmatics Have a Quiet Will of Iron
PROBLEM: Peaceful Phlegmatics Appear Wishy-Washy
PART FOUR - Personality Principles:A Path to Improved Relations with Others
CHAPTER 12 - Each Person Is a Unique Blend
Natural Blends
Complementary Blends
Opposites
To Work or Not to Work?
CHAPTER 13 - We Don’t Like to Be Fenced In
Boxes from the Beginning
When We Marry
Understanding Our Basic Temperament Doesn’t Fence Us In
Admit Your Weaknesses
Let’s Make a Personal Plan
Assess Your Strengths
Evaluate Your Weaknesses
Seek Other Opinions
Plan Your Steps for Personal Improvement
Ask Your Family for Help
Encourage Honest Opinion
CHAPTER 14 - Opposites Attract
Popular Sanguine/Perfect Melancholy Relations
Misery Wants Company
Schedule? What Schedule?
Powerful Choleric/Peaceful Phlegmatic Relations
Repairing the Damage
CHAPTER 15 - We Can Recognize Differences in Others
Popular Sanguine
Powerful Choleric
Perfect Melancholy
Peaceful Phlegmatic
CHAPTER 16 - How to Get Along with Others
The Popular Sanguine Personality
The Perfect Melancholy Personality
The Powerful Choleric Personality
The Peaceful Phlegmatic Personality
PART FIVE - Personality Power:A Source of Strength to Achieve Our Potential
CHAPTER 17 - Personality Plus Power Produces Positive People!
Freed from Guilt
Find Spiritual Energy
Present Your Bodies
Be Not Conformed to This World
Be Ye Transformed by the Renewing of Your Mind
Our Uniqueness
Parts Are Not Enough
Your Best Friend
APPENDIX - Personality Test Word Definitions
What makes you so special?
A lot of things. Find out just how wonderfully and creatively God made you in Personality Plus. In these pages you’ll learn whether you’re:
• a spontaneous, vivacious, cheerful Sanguine
• a thoughtful, faithful, persistent Melancholy
• an adventurous, persuasive, confident Choleric
• a friendly, patient, contented Phlegmatic
or a combination of the above. You’ll also learn how to best use these unique, God-given assets to bring harmony into all your relationships. Florence Littauer explains, “When we know who we are and why we act the way we do, we can begin to understand our inner selves, improve our personalities, and learn to get along with others.”
Once you understand how to bring out your best, you’ll find that others look better too. Discover the person you’ve always wanted to be in Personality Plus.
© 1983, 1992 by Florence Littauer
Published by Fleming H. Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49516-628
7
Forty-first printing, June 2006
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Littauer, Florence.
Personality plus / Florence Littauer.
p. cm.
ISBN 10: 0-8007-5445-X ISBN 978-0-8007-5445-7
1. Personality. 2. Temperament. 3. Success—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Christian life—1960 I. Title.
BF698.L54 1992 155.26—dc20
92-13275
Unless otherwise indicated Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture marked GNT is taken from the Good News Translation—Second Edition Copyright © 1992 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.
Scripture marked TLB is taken from The Living Bible, copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
The Personality Profile is from After Every Wedding Comes a Marriage by Florence Littauer. Copyright © 1981, Harvest House Publishers, 1075 Arrowsmith, Eugene, OR 97402.
A Special Note of Thanks
Twenty-five years ago a friend of mine gave me a copy of Spirit Controlled Temperament by Tim LaHaye and asked me to read it. I was instantly fascinated with the four temperaments that originated with Hippocrates four hundred years before Christ was born. As I read on, I found the description of a person so like me, and then one so like Fred, that I felt the author must have secretly known us. Although I had never met Tim LaHaye, I really wanted to talk with a man of his perception. Within a year our paths crossed, and we both spoke at the same seminar. Tim was just as dynamic and exciting as I’d hoped he’d be, and he encouraged me in my further study of the temperaments.
After all these years of teaching and counseling, I have put together my compilation of Personality Plus temperaments, and I am dedicating this book to Tim LaHaye, who first inspired me. I agree with what he said to me in a letter:
I am more convinced now than when I wrote the book that the four-temperament theory is the best explanation of human behavior there is.
Thank you, Tim LaHaye, for your encouragement.
FLORENCE LITTAUER
PART ONE
Personality Profile:
A Quick Method of Self-Examination
CHAPTER 1
There’s Only One You
Everyone wants a better personality. We all picture ourselves on Fantasy Island, where the ringing of the mission bells transforms us into articulate, attractively attired aristocrats. We no longer trip, fumble, spill, or grope; we converse, captivate, charm, and inspire. When the show is over, we switch off our mind-set and resume our test pattern of life. As we stare at our blank screens, we wonder why our “situation comedy” was canceled; why we’ve been replaced by the new stars who play their roles with confidence; why we seem to be cast as misfits.
We rush off to personality courses that promise to transform us into sparkling wits within twenty-four hours; self-evaluation experiences that will make us into minigods with maxipower; or sensitivity sessions, where we will feel our way into a fantastic future. We go expecting miracles and come home disappointed. We don’t fit the mold of the exciting person, bursting with potential, pictured as the norm. We have different drives, abilities, and personalities—and we can’t be treated as the same.
No Two Alike
If we were all identical eggs in a carton, a giant mother hen could warm us up and turn us into slick chicks or roving roosters overnight; but we are all different. We were all born with our own set of strengths and weaknesses, and no magic formula works wonders for all of us. Until we recognize our uniqueness, we can’t understand how people can sit in the same seminar with the same speaker for the same amount of time and all achieve different degrees of success.
Personality Plus looks at each one of us as an individual blend of the four basic temperaments and encourages us to get acquainted with the real me underneath before trying to change what shows on the surface.
It’s What’s Underneath That Counts
When Michelangelo was ready to carve the statue of David, he spent a long time in selecting the marble, for he knew the quality of the raw material would determine the beauty of the finished product. He knew he could change the shape of the stone, but he couldn’t transform the basic ingredient.
Every masterpiece he made was unique, for even if he had wanted to, he would not have been able to find a duplicate piece of marble. Even if he cut a block from the same quarry, it wouldn’t have been exactly the same. Similar, yes, but not the same.
Each One of Us Is Unique
We started out with a combination of ingredients that made us different from our brothers and our sisters. Over the years people have chiseled on us, chipped, hammered, sanded, and buffed. Just when we thought we were finished products, someone would start shaping us up again. Occasionally we’d enjoy a day in the park, when everyone who passed by admired us and stroked us, but at other times we were ridiculed, analyzed, or ignored.
We were all born with our own temperament traits, our raw material, our own kind of rock. Some of us are granite, some marble, some alabaster, some sandstone. Our type of rock doesn’t change, but our shapes can be altered. So it is with our personalities. We start with our own set of inborn traits. Some of our qualities are beautiful with strains of gold. Some are blemished with fault lines of gray. Our circumstances, IQ, nationality, economics, environment, and parental influence can mold our personalities, but the rock underneath remains the same.
My temperament is the real me; my personality is the dress I put on over me. I can look in the mirror in the morning and see a plain face, straight hair, and a bulgy body. That’s the real me. Gratefully, within an hour I can apply makeup to create a colorful face; I can plug in the curling iron to fluff up my hair; and I can put on a flattering dress to camouflage too many curves. I’ve taken the real me and dressed it up, but I haven’t permanently changed what’s underneath.
If only we could understand ourselves:
Know what we’re made of
Know who we really are
Know why we react as we do
Know our strengths and how to amplify them
Know our weaknesses and how to overcome them
We can! Personality Plus will show us how to examine ourselves, how to polish up our strengths, and how to chip away our weaknesses. When we know who we are and why we act the way we do, we can begin to understand our inner selves, improve our personalities, and learn to get along with others. We are not going to try to imitate someone else, put on a brighter dress or new tie, or cry over the kind of stone we’re made from. We’re going to do the very best we can with the raw material available.
In recent years manufacturers have found ways to duplicate some of the classic statues, and in any large gift store you may find dozens of Davids, walls of Washingtons, lines of Lincolns, replicas of Reagan, and clones of Cleopatra. Imitations abound, but there’s only one you.
Where Do We Start?
How many of you have a Michelangelo complex? How many of you look at other people as raw material, ready to be carved up by your expert hand? How many of you can think of at least one person whom you could really shape up if only he’d listen to your words of wisdom? How anxious is he to hear from you?
If it were possible to remake other people, my husband, Fred, and I would be perfect, for we set out to chip away at each other right from the beginning. I knew that if he’d loosen up and have fun, we could have a good marriage; but he wanted me to straighten up and get organized. On our honeymoon I found out Fred and I didn’t even agree on eating grapes!
I always
enjoyed plunking a whole bunch of cold, green grapes beside me and plucking off whichever one appealed to me. Until I married Fred, I didn’t know there were “Grape Rules.” I didn’t know each simple pleasure in life had a so-called right way. Fred first brought up the Grape Rule as I was sitting on the patio outside our cottage at Cam-bridge Beaches in Bermuda, looking out to sea and absentmindedly pulling grapes off a large bunch. I didn’t realize Fred was analyzing my unsystematic eating of the fruit until he asked, “Do you like grapes?”
“Oh, I love grapes!”
“Then I assume you’d like to know how to eat them correctly?” On that I snapped out of my romantic reveries and asked a question that subsequently became a part of a regular routine: “What did I do wrong?”
“It’s not that you’re doing it wrong; you’re just not doing it right.” I couldn’t see that there was much of a difference, but I phrased it his way.
“What am I not doing right?”
“Anyone knows that to eat grapes properly, you cut off a little bunch at a time, like this.”
Fred pulled out his nail clippers and snipped off a small cluster of grapes, which he set before me.
As he stood smugly staring down at me, I asked, “Does this make them taste better?”
“It’s not for taste. It’s so the large bunch will keep its looks longer.
The way you eat them—just grabbing grapes here and there—leaves the bunch a wreck. Look at what you’ve done to it! See all those tiny bare stems, sticking up all over the place? They ruin the shape of the whole bunch.” I glanced around the secluded patio to see if there was some hidden group of grape judges waiting to enter my bunch in a contest, but seeing none, I said, “Who cares?”
