Before you start on the Enneagram, got a moment? You can sign up for my monthly ezine here.
What is it anyway? The Enneagram is a dynamic personality system that describes nine fundamentally different ways of operating in the world. It reveals how our patterns of attention create our core beliefs, preoccupations, behaviors and our personalities. It is a powerful map for self-discovery and personal development. Understanding the system will help you build personal effectiveness, awareness, compassion and wisdom.
When studying human behavior, we become aware of the beauty and the mystery of the personality of every person. We also see conflict and "stuff" that seems to alternate back and forth, up and down between healthy and unhealthy. These teachings help us to give order and coherence to what appears to be a marvelous, but disorganized, puzzle of human potential. There are nine personality patterns (types) with the inner driving forces that shape the understanding of our life, people and the world.
Getting to know our own type helps each of us become more conscious self-observers, thereby consciously choosing behavior which helps us live more effectively inside ourselves, in relationships and at work.
The Enneagram is about Transformation: rediscovering in ourselves, the God who dwells within and abides with us always. The Enneagram helps us return to the person we have always been from the beginning.
For those of you who have not yet discovered it, the Enneagram (pronounced any-agram) is a powerful addition to our frameworks for understanding human beings. It is a nine point model of personality types. These personality 'types' are the basis for a dynamic model that shows how we function at different levels of development - and how we shift styles at times of growth and times of stress.
Beyond Freud, beyond Jung, beyond EST, lies a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram. And whether you're an overachieving pit-bull lawyer or a hopelessly romantic wanna-be poet, it's got your number.
I'm a six. Still, the discovery of my essential Sixness - embedded in a personality-typing system known as the Enneagram - has revealed more to me about my unconscious patterns, habitual preoccupations, underlying fears, and misused strengths than any technique for self-understanding I've yet come across.
Today, at least a dozen main teachers offer Enneagram workshops across the country. More than 30 books about the system have been published, and two of them - Helen Palmer's The Enneagram and Don Riso's Personality Types - have sold more than 100,000 copies each.
My introduction to the Enneagram took place when my wife, Deborah, and I attended an intensive five-day workshop run by Helen Palmer at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA.
To better understand how transformation occurs, I found myself drawn to the insights of Don Riso, who has developed a more systematic and developmental approach to the Enneagram than its other teachers.
