Personality Plus: How to Understand Others by Understanding Yourself Read online

  I had not yet learned that “Who cares?” was not a statement to make to Fred, because it caused him to turn red and sigh with hopelessness, “I care, and that should be enough.”

  Fred did really care about every detail in life, and my presence in his family did seem to ruin the shape of the whole bunch. To help me out, Fred diligently set out to improve me. Instead of appreciating his wisdom, I tried to sabotage his strategy and subtly change him to become more like me. For years Fred chiseled and chipped away at my failures—and I sanded steadily on his fault lines—but neither one of us improved.

  It was not until we first read Spirit Controlled Temperament (Tyndale House) by Tim LaHaye that our eyes were opened to what we were doing. Each of us was trying to remake the other. We didn’t realize someone could be different and still not be wrong. I found I am a Popular Sanguine who loves fun and excitement; Fred is a Perfect Melancholy who wants life to be serious and orderly.

  As we began to read and study the temperaments further, we discovered we were both also somewhat Powerful Choleric, the type who is always right and knows everything. No wonder we didn’t get along! Not only were we opposites in our personalities and interests in life, but each one of us knew we were the only one who was right. Can you picture such a marriage?

  What a relief it was to find there was hope for us; we could understand each other’s temperaments and accept each other’s personalities. As our lives changed, we began to teach, research, and write on the temperaments. Personality Plus is the culmination of twenty-five years of seminar speaking, personality counseling, and day-by-day observation of people’s temperaments. This book will provide a quick psychology lesson in easy, enjoyable terms so that we may:

  1. Examine our own strengths and weaknesses and learn how to accentuate our positives and eliminate our negatives.

  2. Understand other people and realize that just because others are different does not make them wrong.

  To find our own raw material and understand our basic natures, we will examine the personality or temperament groupings first established by Hippocrates twenty-four hundred years ago. We will have fun with the Popular Sanguines, who exude enthusiasm. We’ll get serious with the Perfect Melancholies, who strive for perfection in all things. We’ll charge forth with the Powerful Cholerics, who are born leaders. And we’ll relax with the Peaceful Phlegmatics, who are happily reconciled to life. No matter who we are, we have something to learn from each of these types.

  CHAPTER 2

  Your Personality Profile

  Before we are introduced to the four different types of temperaments, take a few minutes to check off your own Personality Profile, which was compiled by Fred. When you have completed the forty questions according to the directions, transfer your marks to the score sheet and add up your totals. If you are a Popular Sanguine and get confused by columns, find a serious Perfect Melancholy who sees life as a series of statistics and ask for help in adding up your assets and your liabilities.

  No one is 100 percent of any temperament, but your score will give you an accurate view of your basic strengths and weaknesses. If you come up with even scores all around, you are probably Peaceful Phlegmatic, the all-purpose person.

  Your Personality Profile is unlike any others, but the general information in your temperament pattern will be valuable in understanding yourself and in learning to accept others as they are. As you encourage your family and friends to analyze themselves, you will open up new avenues of communication that will be both enlightening and entertaining.

  When you have scored your temperament test, you will have some idea of your inner traits—your inborn characteristics that cause you to respond to circumstances as you do. To get a deeper understanding of the real you, follow the next five chapters and learn something new about yourself.

  When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.

  John 16:13

  Your Personality Profile

  Directions—In each of the following rows of four words across, place an X in front of the one word that most often applies to you. Continue through all forty lines; be sure each number is marked. If you are not sure which word “most applies,” ask a spouse or a friend, and think of what your answer would have been when you were a child. (Full definitions for each of these words begin on page 195.)

  Strengths

  Weaknesses

  Personality Scoring Sheet

  Now transfer all your X’s to the corresponding words on the Personality Scoring Sheet and add up your totals. For example, if you checked Animated on the profile, check it on the scoring sheet. (Note: The words are in a different order on the profile and the scoring sheet.)

  Strengths

  Weaknesses

  This test is very easy to interpret. Once you’ve transferred your answers to the scoring sheet, added up your total number of answers in each of the four columns, and added your totals from both the strengths and weaknesses sections, you’ll know your dominant personality type. You’ll also know what combination you are. If, for example, your score is 15 in Powerful Choleric strengths and weaknesses, there’s really little question. You’re almost all Powerful Choleric. But if your score is, for example, 8 in Popular Sanguine, 6 in Perfect Melancholy, and 2 in each of the others, you’re a Popular Sanguine with a strong Perfect Melancholy. You’ll also, of course, know your least dominant type.

  As you read the following pages and work with the material in this book, you’ll learn how to put your strengths to work for you, how to compensate for the weaknesses in your dominant type, and how to understand the strengths and weaknesses of other types.

  PART TWO

  Personality Potential:

  A Look at Our Individual Assets

  You’ve taken the test. Now you know what personality or combination you are. Following are the strengths of each summarized. Bet you didn’t know you had all this going for you! Now that you know your particular assets—make them work for you.

  Popular Sanguine Personality

  The Extrovert • The Talker • The Optimist

  STRENGTHS

  Perfect Melancholy Personality

  The Introvert • The Thinker • The Pessimist

  STRENGTHS

  Powerful Choleric Personality

  The Extrovert • The Doer • The Optimist STRENGTHS

  Peaceful Phlegmatic Personality

  The Introvert • The Watcher • The Pessimist

  STRENGTHS

  CHAPTER 3

  Let’s Have Fun with Popular Sanguine

  Oh, how this world needs Popular Sanguines!

  The lift of joy in times of trouble.

  The touch of innocence in a jaded era.

  The word of wit when we’re weighted down.

  The lift of humor when we’re heavyhearted.

  The ray of hope to blow away our black clouds.

  The enthusiasm and energy to start over and over again.

  The creativity and charm to color a drab day.

  The simplicity of a child in complex situations.

  Popular Sanguine is off swinging on a star, bringing moonbeams home in a jar. Popular Sanguine loves the fairy tales of life and wants to live happily ever after.

  The typical Popular Sanguines are emotional and demonstrative, they make work into fun, and they all love to be with people. Popular Sanguines see excitement in each experience and repeat the flavor of each occasion in colorful descriptions. Popular Sanguines are outgoing and optimistic.

  One day as I was driving down the freeway with my Perfect Melancholy son, Fred, I noticed all the bankings were covered with bright, white daisies. “Look at those beautiful flowers!” I exclaimed. As Fred turned, his eyes fell on a large weed, and he sighed, “Yes, but look at that weed.” He thought for a minute and then asked, “Why is it you always see the flowers, and I always see the weeds?” The Popular Sanguine temperament sees flowers. Popular Sanguines always expect the best.

  Popular S
anguine Children

  Since we are born with our own set of temperament traits, the pattern begins to show up very early in life. Popular Sanguines innately look for fun and games, and from the time they are little, they are inquisitive and cheerful. Popular Sanguine babies play with anything they can find, laugh and coo, and love to be with people.

  Our daughter Marita is a Popular Sanguine, and she has had a delightful sense of humor right from the beginning. Her big, bright eyes twinkled the minute they opened. Recently, as we lined up her yearly baby and school pictures, we could all see that consistent, impish look that has often gotten her into trouble but has made her a joy to live with. Marita’s mouth was always going, and she had an abundance of creative talent. She colored everything she could find, including the walls. When we moved from Connecticut, I wanted to bring the basement wall along with me, because it was decorated with little blue handprints Marita made after spilling a bottle of poster paint on the floor. Today Marita is a media publicist, an author, and a sparkling speaker.

  Appealing Personality

  Popular Sanguines may not have more talent or opportunity than other temperaments, but they always seem to have more fun. Their bubbly personalities and natural charisma draw people to them. Popular Sanguine children have flocks of little fans following them around, because they want to be where the action is. As a child, our daughter Marita always had something exciting going on. While others just played with toy cars, she built an entire city on the side of our hill. Under her direction, she and her friends shaped streets and leveled lots. Her first building was a bank stocked with Monopoly money. To get in on the action each child had to put up a real dollar to buy shares in the bank and receive phony money. With the dollars, she bought plastic bricks and equipment and sold these to others to build their homes. Each lot had a different price, according to its location in town, and those with the most money had the best sites.

  Children were clambering up and down our hill all the time. I didn’t know real money was involved until five-year-old Freddie tried to sell me a bunch of wild flowers to get enough money to “buy in.” There were hills all around us, where every child could have created his own city for free, but Marita had proclaimed this one cliff “prime property,” and it was the only place to live.

  As Popular Sanguines grow up they continue to draw crowds. They become cheerleaders, have the leads in school plays, and are voted most likely to succeed. In office work they attract attention, put on parties, and decorate for Christmas. Where life is dull, they provide excitement.

  As mothers, Popular Sanguines make the home fun and magnetize children like the Pied Piper. Since Popular Sanguines sparkle brighter in proportion to the size of the crowd, they tend to save their best for an appropriate audience. They would far rather read a story dramatically to a roomful of children than share it quietly with their own little ones.

  A girl named Mary Alice told me at a seminar that she had become the hit of the neighborhood—in fact, the city—when she had found that for fifty-two dollars she could buy four hundred balloons and a tank of helium. She had a birthday party for her child, and all the little guests took turns filling balloons and letting them float away. By the time four hundred balloons were drifting over Downey, her party was the talk of the town.

  Popular Sanguines’ exciting activities sometimes get out of hand, however. One creative mother told me how popular she was with the neighborhood children because she always kept something special going on at her house. One day she told all the visiting children there were elephants in the backyard, and that they should hide. The doorbell rang, and the mother crawled to the door to answer. She opened at eye level with a little girl who asked her why she was crawling. “It’s because the backyard is full of elephants, and I don’t want them to see me. You’d better duck down yourself.” The children stayed quiet and huddled, while the mother crept frequently to the window to check the elephants. At five o’clock she announced, “The elephants are all gone now, so you can go home safely.”

  She found out later that one little girl went home and told her mother, “Mrs. Smith had to crawl around the house all afternoon, because the backyard was full of elephants.” The mother punished the child for lying.

  Be cautious, Popular Sanguines, that your fun and games don’t go too far.

  Talkative, Storyteller

  The most obvious way to spot a Popular Sanguine is by listening in on any group and locating the one who is the loudest and chatting the most constantly. While the other temperaments talk, Popular Sanguines tell stories.

  When we lived in New Haven, Connecticut, the city built a seven-story parking garage. One day before Christmas, I parked my car in this gray cement structure that looked somewhat like an open penitentiary and went off to do my shopping. Popular Sanguines, being circumstantial people with short memories, have difficulty in locating misplaced items, such as cars; and when I walked out of Macy’s and faced this forbidding fortress, I had no idea where I’d left my car.

  One good thing about a Popular Sanguine woman is that she has a helpless look and can usually attract attention. True to Popular Sanguine form, I stood staring up at the seven stories and wondered where I should start. A handsome young man walked by, noticed I was bewildered, holding an armload of bundles, and asked, “What’s your trouble, honey?”

  “I lost my car in this seven-story garage.”

  “What kind of a car is it?”

  “Well, that’s part of the problem. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what kind of a car you own?” he asked in disbelief.

  “Well, we own two, and I don’t know which one I drove today.” He thought for a minute and then said, “Let me see your keys, and I can narrow it down.”

  That was no easy request, because I had to set down all my packages and empty out my entire handbag on the curb before I found two sets of car keys. By this time, another man, seeing me on my knees in the gutter, asked, “What’s the matter here?”

  The first man said, “She’s lost her car in the seven-story parking garage.”

  He asked the same question: “What kind of a car is it?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “She doesn’t know? Then how can we ever find it?”

  I explained, before they both gave up, “It’s either a yellow convertible with black insides and red dials, or a large, navy blue car with matching velour seats.”

  They both shook their heads, picked up my packages, and led me off to the parking garage. As we searched seven stories, other helpful souls attached themselves to our group, and we became acquainted. By the time we found the yellow convertible with the license plate O FLO we were such good buddies, I wanted to start a club and be president.

  I rushed right home, eager to tell Fred every detail of my marvelous moments of hide-and-seek in the garage. Fifteen beautiful minutes later when I concluded my story, I hoped he would say, “Wasn’t that wonderful of all those men to help my little wife.” But, no. He shook his head solemnly and sighed, “I am so embarrassed to be married to a woman so stupid as to lose her car in a seven-story parking garage.”

  I soon learned to save my stories for those who would appreciate my sense of humor.

  Life of the Party

  Popular Sanguines have an inherent desire to be the center of attention, and this trait, along with their colorful stories, makes them the life of the party. When my brother Ron was a teenager and I was his high-school speech teacher, we used to rehearse key lines before going to parties. I’d give him reviews of current events, and he’d plot gag lines to tie in. When the subject came up in a conversation, we’d be ready with “extemporaneous” humor. As our reputation (but not our secret) got around, people bribed us—even paid us—to come to their parties.

  A Los Angeles Times article titled “Rent a Party Guest” told of different charming and witty types people can rent to make sure their parties are successful. What a great occupation for a Popular Sanguine: go
ing to parties each night and getting paid for doing it.

  If you can’t afford the luxury of rented Popular Sanguines, cultivate a few of your own and be sure to invite at least two to your dinner parties. Don’t let them sit together or everyone else will feel left out. Station them at opposite ends of the table, so they won’t spend the evening just amusing each other.

  Memory for Color

  While Popular Sanguines are not good at memorizing names, dates, places, and facts, they do have a unique ability to hold on to the colorful details of life. While they may not remember the heart of the message, they’ll know the speaker wore a purple dress with a pasture of peacocks on the front and a yellow moon rising over one bosom. They may not know if they were in a church or a hall, but they’ll regale you with a description of the choral director who forgot her slip and took a side stance in front of the footlights, clearly disclosing her error.

  I’ve never had much of a memory for names, but I can hold on to colorful thoughts such as a person’s occupation. When our daughter Lauren was a teenager and bringing various and assorted boyfriends through our home, I devised a creative way to remember them by making their job description their last name. It all started with David who owned a bike store and had a long name with a Z dropped somewhere in the middle of it. I can’t to this day pronounce it, so I dubbed him “David Bicycle,” differentiating him from “David Camera,” the photographer. “Dee Plane” was a pilot and you can guess about “Don Air Force.” “Bobbie Waters” worked for the water company, “Ron Loan” for the bank, and “Jeff Jobless” didn’t work at all. Lauren married “Randy Coin,” a numismatist, and now has little pennies of her own.