How the Enneagram Broke Me Wide Open: AME 130

I love listening to podcasts and over the past few years, mentions of the Enneagram personality test has popped up over and over again. Last Fall, I decided to explore it further and happened upon a podcast interviewing Ian Cron.

I was intrigued.

The podcast shared how valuable knowing your team’s personality profile and how it can help the team as they interact with each other.

Being the team enthusiast that I am, I sent all of Team Sparkle a link to take the Enneagram Test with the expectations that we would share our results at our Team Retreat.

We did and it was really fun BUT…as I explored the Enneagram a bit more, through Ian Cron’s book The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, I felt a sense of awakening that I never experienced before.

And that’s why I decided to make The Road Back to You, the Deep Space Sparkle’s book pick for Spring 2019.

I can’t wait for you to listen to how this book impacted how I think about myself and the work I do to understand myself better but also how it has helped improve how I interact with my team and my loved ones.

So What Exactly is the Enneagram?

It's basically a personality test on how people are wired, both positively and negatively. Results are surprisingly accurate. The Enneagram isn’t just a personality inventory like Myers-Briggs. It’s a powerful tool for personal and spiritual growth that has many layers.

The Enneagram is based on 9 personality types, but it's more than just the numbers. It is structured to determine not only your basic personality type (we are all born with a dominant type) but also factors in how as children we adapt to this personality type. There are many nuances to the Enneagram, like how healthy you are in your dominant personality trait or number and how your Wing factors in.

Here are the 9 types:1  The Perfectionist is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and a perfectionist.2 The Helper is generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.3 The Performer  is adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious4 The Romantic is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.5 The Investigator is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.6 The Loyalist is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.7 The Enthusiast is spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive, and scattered.8 The Challenger is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.9 The Peacemaker is receptive, reassuring, complacent, and resigned.

Here are a few basic assumptions of the Enneagram:

1. People do not change from one basic personality type to another.

2. The descriptions of the personality types are universal and apply equally to males and females, since no type is inherently masculine or feminine.

3. Not everything in the description of your basic type will apply to you all the time because you fluctuate constantly among the healthy, average, and unhealthy traits that make up your personality type.

4. The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each of the types because numbers are value neutral— they imply the whole range of attitudes and behaviors of each type without specifying anything either positive or negative.

5. The numerical ranking of the types is not significant.