The Gift of Understanding: A Conversation with Marita Littauer
Have you ever given someone a terrible gift? Not because you didn't care, but because you didn't really know them? Understanding how someone is wired isn't just a nice thing. It's the starting point for actually loving people well. It’s the key to good, healthy relationships. In this episode, I sit down with Marita Littauer, bestselling author, speaker, and teacher of the Personalities framework. It’s the 20th anniversary of the publication of her book, Wired That Way. We talk about what it means to know yourself well and what it actually looks like to understand and meet the emotional needs of the people closest to you, so you can live out Romans 12:18.
InThis Episode, You’ll Discover:
The surprising origin story of the Personalities framework and how this tool is different.
Why Marita's mother, Florence Littauer, first felt "wrong" in her marriage and how one book changed that.
The tough question a podcast host once asked Marita point-blank — "How is that not manipulation?" and her answer.
A quick, accessible overview of the four personality types, and why no one is 100% just one.
The difference between natural wiring, learned behavior, and a mask.
The physical warning signs that can show up when someone's been wearing a mask for years.
Why understanding someone's personality and emotional needs might be the single most practical relationship skill you can learn.
Why personality differences show up in our spiritual lives too and why that's ok.
Resources Mentioned
Wired That Way by Marita Littauer — Grab it on Amazon HERE.
Personality Plus by Florence Littauer — Grab it on Amazon HERE.
The Spirit-Controlled Temperament by Tim LaHaye — Grab it on Amazon HERE.
Your Personality Tree by Florence Littauer — Grab it on Amazon HERE.
Want to take the Personality Profile? Find it Here.
Note: Some links above may be affiliate links, which means a small commission may be earned at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I genuinely use, love, and can vouch for.
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Episode 09 | The Gift of Understanding: A Conversation with Marita Littauer
Welcome to The Purpose Project Podcast
Hey, friend. Welcome to The Purpose Project Podcast, where we talk about what it really looks like to live, love, and lead with purpose and authenticity in the messy middle — that space between where you are and where you want to be. I'm Valerie Jones, a Christian life and leadership coach, and around here we don't do hustle culture, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or self-help band-aids. Instead, we're all about biblical truth, brain-based tools, and emotional health — so you can walk out your calling with courage without burning out or sacrificing what matters most. Each episode we'll dive into real life stories, engaging conversations, and relatable teaching moments to help you get out of your head and into the life God's calling you to live. Whether you're navigating change, feeling overwhelmed, craving clarity, or just trying to feel like yourself again — take a breath and lean in. You're in the right place. Let's dive in.
Introducing Marita Littauer
Well, hey, friend. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Valerie Gibson Jones, and I am so glad you're here today.
I still remember the first time I heard about The Personalities. I was sitting in a church women's group at our annual retreat, and our leader introduced the book Personality Plus. We took a personality profile, and then we dove into some really good discussion about all of it — our natural behaviors, our feelings, why we do the things we do. In a church setting. In the same room where we're talking about faith. I was so wide-eyed. Nobody had ever really put those two things together for me before — who I was pre-wired to be, while at the same time holding space for the growth and transformation that comes with the work of the Holy Spirit as we're learning to look more and more like Jesus.
So as soon as I got home, I bought this book, along with another book called Wired That Way. Now, I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that these books are part of the reason I am so convinced that conversations about faith and emotional health belong together.
So, twenty years after Wired That Way was first published, I'm sitting down with the woman who wrote it: Marita Littauer. She is a bestselling author of more than twenty books, an international speaker, and for more than fifty years, she's been teaching women this framework all over the world.
Now, if you're already thinking, "I don't really need another personality profile, another personality quiz" — just stay with me. This is not about labels. It's about self-awareness. It's about relationships. It's about showing up for the people you love and lead and giving them the gift of understanding them. And it's about becoming more like Jesus.
This is a Bible and Brain conversation, and I cannot wait for you to meet my guest today, Marita Littauer — bestselling author, speaker, and teacher of the Personalities framework. Let's get started.
A Living Room, a Book, and a Marriage That Changed
Valerie: Well, welcome to The Purpose Project Podcast, Marita. I'm so delighted that you're here. Thank you for being here.
Marita: Thank you so much, Valerie. I've been looking forward to this.
Valerie: Well, you are busy. You are a bestselling author — twenty books, is that right? Speaker, entrepreneur — you're just doing all the things. Tell us a little bit of your story. How did God get you here?
Marita: It's a little bit of nepotism. My mother, Florence Littauer, when I was just nine years old, read a book by Tim LaHaye called The Spirit-Controlled Temperament. As she read it, it was eye-opening for her — I'm almost 68 today, so we're talking almost sixty years ago, and the world was very different then.
Reading that book made her realize, for the first time, that just because she was different from my father didn't make her wrong. My father was the type of person who did everything correctly. My mother was very much like me — a little scattered, tended to be late, more interested in socializing than getting dinner on the table on time. In their marriage, she was made to feel like she was wrong. But as she read the book, she understood: she wasn't wrong. She was just made differently.
This was before there were book clubs, before most every church had small groups. As it began to impact their marriage, my mom started telling other people about it, and before long they had a group of maybe fifteen couples in our living room going through the book. During that time, my father — truly with a vision from God — created what we now call the Wired That Way personality profile. He literally created it in one night. He had this motivation, this vision, this idea, and he stayed up late and wrote the profile we're still using today. It's exactly the same as it was then, though it's been enhanced over the years with support material, like the word definitions that weren't part of his original work.
We used to sell it as two pieces of paper stapled together. Now it's a sixteen-page, full-color booklet, in print and available online. But that's really how it started — in our living room, as a result of my mother reading one book that changed her life.
As I grew up with this material, my mom started speaking beyond the living room, and she eventually wrote her bestselling book, Personality Plus, which has been translated into twenty-five-plus languages and sold millions of copies. When I was younger, I would travel with her to speaking engagements, and she'd say, "Marita, come up and tell the people about..." whatever it was. I was probably thirteen, fourteen, fifteen at the time. I evolved into this very naturally.
From My Mother's Book to My Own
My book, Wired That Way, is kind of a continuation. My mother's book focuses more on understanding your own personality — that was what was life-changing for her. For me, because I grew up with this, that was never really a question. When you go to work is really the first time in your life you're forced to get along with people you probably wouldn't choose. Because I grew up with this material, I was able to quickly and easily identify the personality type of the people I worked with — without even consciously realizing it, I was adjusting my approach to them based on what their personality was.
If you've read both books, that's the big difference. My mother has Personality Plus, Personality Plus for Parents, Personality Plus for Marriage, Personality Plus in the Workplace. I'd be a child at the back of the room selling her books, and people would ask, "Do I have to buy all these books?" So Wired That Way was written to fill that gap. It has two distinctions: it emphasizes how to identify the personality type of others using what I call the visual clues — something I created myself, and to my knowledge no other system has it. And it emphasizes getting along with others, with a chapter on marriage, parenting, workplace, and spiritual life. It's more of a complete package.
Valerie: I love both of the books. I encountered them both around the same time, because a church group brought out Personality Plus, and it was the first time in a church setting that anybody had discussed these kinds of things. I remember being wide-eyed and so grateful that we were having conversations about our natural behaviors and our feelings — why we do the things we do — in that setting, in the same room where we're talking about faith. Then I immediately went and bought Wired That Way, and it really is a natural continuation. You're very clear in your book that it's not just a label.
Not About Labels — About Relationships
Marita: That's right — that's kind of my big thing. This is not about labels. It's about relationships.
Valerie: And you use Romans 12, right?
Marita: Yes, Romans 12:18. That's the foundation I use for teaching the personalities: "If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men." I love how that verse breaks down into three parts, because it's like God is giving us a disclaimer. "If possible" — He's saying, "I know you can't do this, but this is a goal, something you should strive for. "So far as it depends on you" — that means it's each of our responsibility to do what we can. And then, "be at peace with all men."
If that verse simply said "be at peace with all men," that wouldn't be possible — try as we may, we can't control other people. The only person we can control is ourselves. But many people don't realize that it's up to them to do what they can to get along with others. It takes a level of caring.
"How Is That Not Manipulation?"
This year is the twentieth anniversary of Wired That Way's publication, so I've been doing a lot of podcasts trying to reinvigorate the brand. As I've been doing these podcasts, talking about understanding others and adjusting your approach to them, a podcast host once asked me, "How is that not manipulation?" I hadn't really been asked that before, and I didn't have a ready answer. But I said: the difference is caring.
It takes a lot of effort to step outside of who I am naturally, look at who that person is, make an assessment of their personality type, and then adjust my approach to them — and lastly, and most importantly, begin to meet their emotional needs. That's a lot of effort. I'm not going to do that for the kid selling me a hamburger at the fast-food restaurant; I don't care enough about that relationship to put in that effort. But when you do care about people — your spouse, your children, your coworkers, your friends — those are the ones worth giving the gift of understanding.
Valerie: My goodness. We could probably just press stop right now — if we all did that, wouldn't the world be a lot different?
Marita: Oh, it would. It would. But it's hard. You have to care enough, and you kind of have to constantly do a mind shift — bite your tongue instead of spewing out your natural thing to say, and stop and think: who is this person, what do they need, how are they going to respond in a positive way?
Valerie: I'd say it takes quite a bit of self-awareness first, and then some understanding and awareness of the other person at the same time — and that's not naturally what we tend to do.
Marita: No, it definitely is not. So it is work.
Meet the Four Personalities
Valerie: For someone who's never encountered the Personalities framework, do you have a brief overview — what would you say to introduce them for the first time? Why do they matter?
Marita: We're all different. Every one of us. When I'm speaking on this topic, I always ask the audience, "How many of you are a mother? How many of you have more than one child?" Almost everybody raises their hand. Then I ask, "How many of you noticed in the womb that child number two was different from child number one?" And they all say yes. That's my ultra-simple research project to show that we're wired that way.
We come prepackaged with a certain disposition, a certain personality type, a certain set of strengths and weaknesses — we call those the Personalities. The concepts aren't new to me, my mother, or Tim LaHaye — they're more than 2,000 years old. Hippocrates, the great Greek thinker, observed what we all observe: that people are different. With the limited scientific and medical knowledge available at the time, he concluded it was fluids in the body that made people behave differently. Today we realize he was more right than we've given him credit for — it's DNA, not fluids, but it is prepackaged. The funny names we use for each personality type are the original Greek names Hippocrates came up with, and they're actually based on bodily fluids.
What I added to it is an aspirational adjective, because for most people the Greek word alone doesn't mean anything — plus a color for each one. It doesn't matter what you call it: popular sanguine, yellow, popular, sanguine. Because, as we said, it's not about labels — it's about relationships. The Personalities, as we call the greater body of work, is a tool to help you fulfill that biblical mandate of Romans 12:18. It's a tool to help you understand other people.
So let me whip through all four quickly. I like to start with the popular sanguine, represented by yellow, because it's the easiest to identify — the person with a loud voice, who likes loud clothing, is always talking, uses their hands a lot, and has a very open life. They'll tell you personal things and you're thinking, "Why are you telling me this? I hardly know you."
Next, the opposite: the perfect melancholy, quiet and closed. This is the person who's very detailed, scheduled, and organized — that was my father, which is why my mother always felt wrong compared to him. They tend to be a little moody and can get depressed easily, and they have a quiet voice. They like plain colors, and they don't talk unless they need to — they operate on a need-to-know basis.
Represented by red is the powerful choleric — strong, driven, goal-oriented. They have a tendency to be rude to others because they feel like other people are stupid, and they have a hard time apologizing.
Then, represented by green, the peaceful phlegmatic. I talk about that one last — not because they're least important, but because they're the least obvious to identify. The other three have what I call "sticky-out traits." The peaceful phlegmatic is very content, even-tempered, balanced — so the best way to identify them is really process of elimination. They can be unenthusiastic, with an acerbic, sarcastic wit, and they don't like making decisions — but once they do, you're not getting them off it.
Not a Box — A Tool for Growth
It's kind of like a color wheel — I've never, in all my years of teaching this, encountered anyone who's just one color. This isn't about putting someone in a box. That's sometimes people's criticism of this kind of tool. But I feel our program does the best job out there of not putting people in a box, because we talk about blends. Your husband is close to 50/50 popular sanguine and peaceful phlegmatic. My husband is close to 50/50 perfect melancholy and peaceful phlegmatic. I'm close to 50/50 popular sanguine and powerful choleric. We're all unique and individual, but we're not putting anyone in a box.
And I feel like the Personalities is really strong in emphasizing growth — this is a tool for growth. You don't want to say, "Well, this is who I am, so you just need to get used to me." That's really not what the books say. There's a list of strengths and weaknesses for each personality type, but once you realize where your weaknesses are, we as human beings have the ability — consciously, and with the power of the Holy Spirit — to grow, mature, eliminate those weaknesses, and acquire strengths that aren't natural to us.
Valerie: I love that you brought that up, because some of the common objections are that it's too much psychology, too self-absorbed or self-focused. Women in faith circles in particular are suspect of these tools. But when they don't keep the main thing the main thing, of course it doesn't make sense, and it isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It's an opportunity for growth. There's something in the book about even our strengths, carried to the extreme, becoming weaknesses.
Marita: Yeah. We really encourage people to live in their strengths — there's a chart in the book of raw versus refined. Any personality type, if they're living in their weaknesses, is someone you don't want to be with. Anyone living in their strengths — regardless of personality type — is a great person, someone you want to hang around with.
When Wiring Becomes a Mask
Valerie: Let's talk about that for a minute. You've mentioned there are natural blends, but there are also opposing blends — and when someone presents with what looks like an opposing blend, it could be an indication of what you refer to as masking. There's a difference in this tool between natural behaviors — the way we're pre-wired — and learned behaviors, which allow for growth. We can pull the good things from every personality type, just like Jesus — He displays the strengths of every personality and the weakness of none. So there's natural wiring, learned behaviors, and then there's masking. Take us there a little. What does that look like? How does it show up in real life?
Marita: Yeah, it's a deeper concept — a little more difficult for some people to realize. The difference between a learned behavior and what we call a mask is intentionality. I'm a popular sanguine, and I've had to learn to get organized. It's not natural to me, but I've made a conscious choice to be organized.
Where a mask comes in is when it's a subconscious behavior adopted for survival. It usually happens in childhood. I hate to say this, but we sanguines are the most susceptible, because we're the natural people-pleasers.
Picture a bright-eyed sanguine girl who's a little messy but always chat-chat-chat. You see this child in the grocery store, talking to you, and her mother rolls her eyes and says, "Oh, she never met a stranger." That's the popular sanguine. But if dad comes home — very melancholy, maybe some choleric — and tells her she needs to be quiet, that she's giving him a headache, "You need to be more like your big sister" — and big sister is actually a melancholy who keeps her room perfect — that little sanguine girl, a natural people-pleaser who wants daddy to love her, subconsciously takes on a mask. She behaves like her melancholy big sister.
Why is that a problem? It becomes a problem later in life, when she's been trying to play two different roles without realizing what she did. As an adult, you'll occasionally see a burst of freedom happen from this person. They're very fearful, leaning toward depression, trying to hold it in. This becomes exhausting — it can lead to what we used to call a nervous breakdown.
It can also happen in reverse — to a little boy whose mother has gotten divorced, no man in the household, and he's maybe a peaceful phlegmatic. She tells him, "Bobby, you've got to be the man of the house now." She thinks she's building him up, but she's forcing him to take on behavior that's opposite of who he is. As an adult, it can come out as anger — you see this person who seems peaceful and easygoing, but has this anger issue, and it stems from that.
We also sometimes see it caused by marriage — a sanguine woman with a melancholy-choleric man who belittles her. The person she used to be kind of shrinks. For the most part, all it takes to get beyond this — sometimes it requires a level of counseling — is realizing, "I don't have to behave like that anymore." It's the sanguines, the natural people-pleasers, who lean toward that, because they want to be loved so badly: "If I change, you'll love me? Okay, I'll change." My mother wrote a whole book on that, called Your Personality Tree. It's no longer in print, but you can get a used copy on Amazon.
The Warning Signs
Valerie: What would you say is a typical signal — what wakes a person up to realize, "Oh, maybe..."?
Marita: It often comes out in psychosomatic symptoms — stomach issues caused by stress, migraine headaches, TMJ. Those physical symptoms are often stress-linked, because you're carrying this subconscious weight of trying to be someone you're not. It usually comes out in the 40s.
It normally presents when someone takes the personality profile and shows up as opposite personalities. I'm sanguine-choleric, my husband's melancholy-phlegmatic. Your husband is phlegmatic-sanguine, and you're—
Valerie: Melancholy-phlegmatic, actually.
Marita: Okay — those are all natural combinations. The choleric-melancholy — I call that corporate America's favorite person, because they're the worker bees, the natural workaholics. Their weakness is relationships. Your husband's combination, sanguine-phlegmatic, has relationships as their strength — very social, everybody loves them. But work is not necessarily their strength.
Both the popular sanguine and the powerful choleric are extroverts. So when you have someone like me, who's both, you get someone kind of turbocharged. I've heard my whole life, "You wear me out just watching you." My husband is peaceful phlegmatic, perfect melancholy — a CPA, content to spend all day with a calculator and files of numbers. Those two personality types are the introverts.
While I'm constantly going, "Let's go, go, go," he's internally going, "No, no, no." I've had to learn to communicate with him in a whole different way. We can be in the same room, and I'll send him a text message, and he'll say, "Why are you texting me? I'm right here." But I've learned that if I text him, he can think about it and then respond — where if I just charge over and start talking, he feels like he's being attacked.
Valerie: It's a really incredible tool. You said something to me in our pre-interview call — I told you the story that I took the personality profile again, and I had to text my husband several times just to get help clicking the answer. That was my experience the first time I took it too. But you said that sometimes it's hardest for longtime Christians to get an accurate read on their natural personality — you give a tip, before starting the profile, to think about who you were as a child, before life happened and you developed all these coping mechanisms. Can you say more about that?
Knowing Who You Were Before Life Happened
Marita: For longtime Christians — our goal is to become more like Christ. So someone who's been a Christian for a long time, even if they don't think of it as "the personalities," has worked to refine themselves, to get rid of the rough edges. So when they take the profile, it's often difficult to think back — "Well, what was I back then?" — because this is who they are now.
Asking someone else who knows you well helps, because often other people know us better than we do. For most of us, we have a lot of baggage tied up — like the masking example — in what our father wanted us to be, what our mother wanted, what our teachers, our bosses, our spouses wanted us to be. By the time you're old enough to actually take the personality profile, you don't have a clear concept of who you are. But when we're tired, when we're under stress, who we really are comes back out, because it takes work to be that better person.
Valerie: Right. We have to be aware of and acknowledge our weaknesses so we don't just default to living from them. You can't address what you don't admit — and neither can the Holy Spirit.
Marita: Exactly.
The Gift of Understanding Emotional Needs
Valerie: This is one of my favorite areas of conversation — tell us a little about the emotional needs piece of this tool. Why does it matter, and how does it help?
Marita: This is one of the real strengths of the Personalities — the emotional needs component. This is where real relationship change can happen. Each personality type comes prepackaged with a set of emotional needs. I have a friend who's like me, popular sanguine—powerful choleric, but she's not necessarily in tune with this. She didn't have a perfect upbringing, so she doesn't have the confidence and security that I have, even though we have the same basic personality type.
Valerie: So environment does matter.
Marita: Oh, definitely. It shapes why we come out so differently, even with the same basic personality. Because I understand that she needs attention and approval, I work to make sure she gets that. When you understand what each personality type needs: perfect melancholies need sensitivity and space. Phlegmatics need respect and a feeling of self-worth. The powerful choleric needs achievement and appreciation. The popular sanguine needs attention and approval.
Valerie: Do you encounter people most often who are in some kind of relationship crisis when they first discover the Personalities?
Marita: Probably a variety. A lot of therapists use this tool, and we now have an online certification program for people to teach the Personalities. So if someone listening feels like they need some help, we do have people available now who do personality coaching.
Personality and Your Spiritual Life
Valerie: How does this impact our spiritual lives? We've talked about wanting to become like Jesus — but how does it affect the way we actually engage in our faith?
Marita: It totally does. Those of us who are sanguine have a much harder time with "read the Bible through in a year" programs, or making an appointment with God and writing prayers every day, because we have a problem with anything consistent. It has nothing to do with a lack of love for God — it's just not how our love for anyone comes through. I'll pray while I'm driving, I pray when I'm walking. The "Bible in a year" programs and written prayers are really designed for someone who's a perfect melancholy.
It's very easy for those of us who aren't that to feel second-class spiritually, because we don't do all the things we're supposedly meant to do. But I could give you story after story of God giving me guidance and direction for my life — none of it while I was sitting on a mountaintop. My faith is real, and my relationship with God is real and alive. The powerful choleric's love is going to show through acts of service, because they're the doers. The peaceful phlegmatic is going to be more the one who just soaks in the presence of God.
Valerie: I think the beauty of what you're saying about the spiritual component is that God created us — He knows how we're wired. That's one of the things I feel like I've come to understand even more over the years as a believer: He knows me better than I know myself, and there's so much kindness and patience in that.
Marita's Fifty-Year Takeaway
Valerie: All right, last fun question — is there some question you always wish somebody would ask, so you could finally answer it?
Marita: I don't know that I have one. I mentioned earlier the one who asked me out of the blue, "How is this not manipulation?" — that was a new question for me. But you've let me talk about the emotional needs, which I think is so important — that's a real key thing that seldom gets asked.
Valerie: So if there's one thing, after fifty years, that you'd say, "Don't miss this piece" — what would it be?
Marita: I think it's fairly obvious: identify the personality type of the people you live and work with, adjust your expectations of them and your approach to them, and then, most importantly, meet their emotional needs. That will allow you to fulfill the biblical mandate of Romans 12:18 — "If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men."
Valerie: So good. Thank you so much.
Marita: My pleasure. I've loved all this time we've had to really develop the topic.
A Question for You
Marita, thank you. Fifty years of wisdom, distilled down into one forty-five-minute conversation. What a gift.
Friend, I want to leave you with two questions today. How well do you know yourself? And how well do you know the people you love and care about?
Here's what I know: we all have a basic need to be known — really known. Tools like this one help us get to know ourselves, and then offer that same gift to others. It helps us show up in the world, and with our people, in a way that honors God.
You were not wired the way you are by accident. Every strength, every weakness, every talent, every rough edge — everything about you is raw material, waiting to be refined by the Holy Spirit so that you look more and more like Jesus. It's surrender, and it is work, but it's so worth it. Friend, let Him at your heart and mind.
Marita's book, Wired That Way, is linked in the show notes, along with her website, thepersonalities.com, where you can find the online profile. I've linked a few other resources in the show notes as well — I encourage you to check it out.
And friend, thank you again for being here. I'm so grateful for every person who's leaning in with me this season. If you'd like to help keep the conversation going, there's a Support the Show link in the show notes, or you can visit thepurposeproject.us/support.
Until Next Time
Hey friend, thanks for tuning in to The Purpose Project Podcast. I hope today's conversation helped you feel seen and a little less alone in the messy middle of life. If this episode encouraged you, would you take a second to share it with a friend or leave a quick review? That will help other women who need hope and encouragement find this space, and it truly means the world to me.You can always find free resources, upcoming events, or join the email list by visiting my website, thepurposeproject.us. Remember, friend — you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Until next time, be brave, and eyes on Jesus.
Meet Your Host
I’m Valerie Jones, a Christian Life & Leadership Coach and the host of The Purpose Project Podcast. I created this space for Christian women who are navigating the messy middle: those in-between seasons where faith is real but stretched, and life doesn’t look the way you expected.
My approach is rooted in biblical truth, emotional health, and brain-based methods because I believe God designed us as whole people, and transformation and personal growth should consider our whole selves.
“This isn’t about labels—it’s about relationships.”
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