About three years ago a friend of mine Brantley introduced me to the lovely world of the Enneagram. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the latest popular personality test that’s become an Instagram sensation over the last three years, let me be the one to enlighten you.
The Enneagram is a personality test that describes patterns in how people manage their emotions and interpret the world around them. There are exactly nine different personality types across the diagram and each is linked to a personal core belief based on how you perceive the world works. Similar to Meyers Briggs, you take a test that helps you identify which number is closest to your core values.
Your number can help you further understand how you react to stress, how you grow, why you behave a certain way, and even make certain decisions. It’s believed that you develop from childhood with one of the nine types dominating your personality based on inborn temperament, genetics, and other prenatal factors.
The nine personalities are comprised of the following:
The Reformer
The Helper
The Achiever
The Individualist
The Investigator
The Loyalist
The Enthusiast
The Challenger
The Peacemaker
Visually, the numbers are displayed on a nine-pointed geometric symbol, representing how each of the numbers interacts with each other.
In each number, you also have varying Levels of Development: Healthy, Average, and Unhealthy. You can dig into these as you learn about each type, and how they typically respond when they’re feeling normal, elated, or even depressed.
Within the diagram, there are three distinct centers for thinking that divide the types:
The Instinctive Center -- Numbers 8, 9 and 1
The Feeling Center -- Numbers 2, 3 and 4
The Thinking Center -- Numbers 5, 6 and 7
The rationale behind each of these types and their location and associate to their center is based on the number’s relationship with a particular set of issues that characterize the center. The centers focus on a powerful unconscious emotional response to how we deal with conflict.
In an effort to not butcher this, according to the Enneagram Institute, the centers are associated with the following dominate emotions:
“In the Instinctive Center, the emotion is Anger or Rage. In the Feeling Center, the emotion is Shame, and in the Thinking Center, it is Fear. Of course, all nine types contain all three of these emotions, but in each Center, the personalities of the types are particularly affected by that Center’s emotional theme.”
Each of the numbers within these centers has a particular way in which they deal with that core unconscious emotion.
Another thing that I find interesting about the Enneagram is their Directions of Growth. Do you remember how I described the Levels of Development above? On the diagram, each number points to two other numbers on the geometric symbol. One direction represents how they react when they might be stressed, and the other represents how they react when they are growing. These stress / growth areas are reflective of another number’s unhealthy and healthy Levels of Development.
For example, the Enneagram 2 known as The Helper, when stressed will begin acting as an unhealthy 8, becoming aggressive and dominating. When in growth and feeling their best, 2’s will go to a healthy 4, focusing on being self-nurturing and emotionally aware.
Now that I’ve given you a fairly decent amount of information from what I’ve gathered surrounding the Enneagram, the main reason why I think it’s important to talk about the Enneagram is because of how helpful I found it to be with my personal journey. And, how I think maybe it could be helpful for you.
For a long time, I thought I was a 3, which can be described as The Achiever per my list above. The Achiever is image-conscious, adaptable, excelling, and driven. All these characteristics align with my core values and goals. But my issue was, I have a bit more of a wanderlust / spontaneous personality. I tend to be a bit more scattered, but also organized? I’m versatile, but also a perfectionist?
None of this really made sense to me until I took a few tests (about three different ones that you can also do here, here and here), and did my own reading on the types. You see, the test results can describe where you could be on the enneagram spectrum, but the truth is it’s quite hard to not be biased when you answer in-depth personal questions about yourself. People have the innate desire to be seen as better than they are, thus why it’s hard to be honest with yourself when doing a personal assessment. The fact is, after you take the test, you need to learn more about the type and then personally identify with it. Ensure that you feel comfortable with the core values the specific type describes, and understand why you click with them the most.
After doing my research, I discovered I am without a doubt through and through a 7, The Enthusiast, at my core. You see, in stress 7’s go to 1, and a 5 in growth. When I’m stressed, I am an absolute perfectionist and self-critical, like an unhealthy 1. When I’m happy and growing, I become focused and fascinated by life, like a healthy 5.
I approach life with an insanely optimistic and positive lens. I thoroughly enjoy being bold and confident, but I approach almost everything with a happy mindset. My positivity is contagious, and I love to have multiple projects going on at once. Being busy keeps me happy, and brainstorming on a project or idea gets me overwhelmingly excited.
On the negative side of things, as a 7 which lives in the Thinking Center, I’ve found that I tend to avoid feelings of pain, loss, deprivation, and general anxiety. I wouldn’t personally call it a fear, but I have this heavy desire to avoid pain or being sad. So, I typically do whatever I can to find a distraction in order to avoid feeling anything close to that. I write, I read, I call my friends, go on walks, grocery shopping… You name it, I’ve done it. This, in true psychological definition, is also called the avoidance coping mechanism.
The thing is though, it’s healthy to not feel spectacular all the time. It’s normal to feel anxious, or blue sometimes.
What I have to constantly remind myself is that it’s okay to feel like that sometimes, and I don’t necessarily have to find something to distract me from those feelings every time. It’s good to self-reflect and gets to the bottom of why you feel a certain way about something.
But, in contrast, a healthy distraction is also a great way to keep your mind moving to refocus your energy elsewhere so you don’t wallow. So it’s a balance for me. I’m cognitively aware that I avoid feelings like these, so I try to challenge myself to process them before I immediately move on to the next venture in order to distract myself.
Understanding that I’m a 7 helped me come to grips with the fact that I also have a little bit of an unhealthy need for more. I’ve found that I’m not easily satisfied with things. I tend to always think there’s a better choice, another option, something more, or someone else out there. But, being cognitively aware of this reminds me to instead be a bit pickier, or selective, about where I spend my time, and who I spend my time with.
The overall point that I’m trying to make is that the Enneagram, through self-reflection and identifying where I sit on the list of 9 numbers, has encouraged me to be very self-aware of my emotions, my decisions, and how I react to things.
Through understanding yourself more, I’ve also found that you also learn to love yourself a bit more too. Appreciating yourself, and understanding who you are at your core is imperative to achieving and living a successful life. You see, if you don’t know who you are at your core, how can you expect others to know and understand you? And the same goes for love. If you don’t love yourself, how can you expect yourself to love others in a healthy way?
But hey, maybe you think the Enneagram is all bullshit, and perhaps you don’t think personality tests are the way in which you’ll learn more about yourself. That’s totally fine, and I respect that.
What I encourage you to do though is to spend time reflecting and focusing on yourself and your core identity. Through knowing yourself you inevitably know what makes you tick, and in thus also helping you understand how to grow and be happy.
So, take a minute or more to ask yourself - Do I really know myself? Am I happy with who I am?
And if the answers to either of those questions are no, then my friend try to spend a little bit of time refocusing some of your time on yourself. It’s wonders what personal reflection and analysis can do to your confidence and overall happiness.
Comments