When Maud Newton read about the traits of the Enneagram Four, she had to laugh out of pure recognition. “On my mother's side, there was this impulse toward larger than life stories. There wasn't really shame around difficult histories and that sort of thing. The greatest sin was to be boring.”

Maud’s ancestors were anything but boring. In this episode, Maud shares what she’s learned about herself through exploring her ancestors' lives, and explains how we’re setting ourselves up to repeat our ancestors’ trauma and toxic patterns if we aren’t able to acknowledge them first. 

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Maud Newton has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Oxford American. She grew up in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in English and law.

Just three weeks shy of their one-year anniversary, the unthinkable happened. Mattie’s 28-year-old husband died unexpectedly, leaving her with a massive hole in her life. 

But being an Enneagram three becomes a double-edged sword in grief: “This compulsion to perform that I have, in whatever I'm doing, was one of my greatest assets in my grief,” says Jackson, who adds,  “It was also one of the things that I had to be the most careful to keep in check.”

This week, we hear how she pursued personal growth and balance through her grief, and managed to come out on the other side with hope, ambition, and her love for her former husband intact. 

Mattie Jackson Selecman is an author, podcaster, speaker, and co-founder NaSHEville, a women's philanthropic apparel brand serving orphans, widows, and victims of human trafficking.

To learn more about Mattie, follow her on Instagram, check out her new book, Lemons on Friday, or visit her website.

Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier has experienced abandonment from her mother, put herself in positions where she would inevitably be betrayed, come to terms with the power of her anger, and found herself struggling with addiction and alcoholism. But for Mary, so much of that tumult and life experience came from a sense of internal intensity. “The self-destructive and self-constructive forces inside of me,” she says, “are both very, very strong.” That conflict often can be too much to bear for many. But for Mary, it was songwriting that gave her the space and opportunity to work it all out. 

In the end, those six decades were time enough for her story to be reframed, rewritten, and even redeemed. 

To learn more about Mary, follow her on Instagram, check out her new book, Saved by a Song, or visit her website.

Every creative has a dream project: something they’d love to do if they had infinite time and resources. But what if you got the chance to pull off that dream project, and it didn’t succeed? 

That’s what happened to Steve Taylor, who poured himself into directing Blue Like Jazz, only to see a middling response at the theater. To him, that result felt like humiliation.

This week, we hear about how his experience creating art for a living has changed his approach to success, risk-taking, and his own personal worth. 

Filmmaker/writer/producer/recording artist/entrepreneur Steve Taylor earned his “Renaissance Man” stripes (Prism Magazine) from a body of work that’s garnered him multiple Grammy, Billboard, Telly, Addy, and Dove awards and nominations. As a recording artist, he’s sold over one million albums worldwide, garnered two Grammy nominations for Meltdown (1984) and Squint (1993), and made history as the only artist to twice win Billboard Music Video Awards for self-directed music videos. He also fronted the MCA-signed rock band Chagall Guevara.

This week, we’re going deep! With the help of the author of The Enneagram for Spiritual Formation, we discuss the various ways the Enneagram can be used narcissistically, and how to avoid those pitfalls. 

Then, we discuss spiritual bypassing, or the ways each type can end up evading the essential personal work they need to do to grow as an individual. 

AJ Sherrill (DMin, Fuller Theological Seminary) has more than twenty years of experience as a pastor, including as lead pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is now lead pastor at St. Peter's Church in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. He is an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he teaches popular courses on transformational preaching and the Enneagram. Sherrill leads Enneagram workshops across the country and is the author of The Enneagram for Spiritual Formation and Being with God.

In the span of a few years, Shauna Niequest found herself experiencing a series of changes and heartbreaks that left her feeling like a completely different person. But in the end, she found herself more easily feeling empathy for those who were going through grief themselves. 

In this episode, Shauna and and I discuss the importance of finding the right geographical place for who you are, the various practices that can help us work through our grief, and how our attempts to outrun grief will always catch up with us. 

Shauna Niequist is the New York Times bestselling author of Present Over Perfect and I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet. She is married to Aaron, and they live in New York City with their sons, Henry and Mac. Shauna is a bookworm, a storyteller, and a passionate gatherer of people, especially around the table.

When her husband discovered Julie Solomon’s thirty thousand dollars of credit card debt, she became acutely aware of how her narrative about herself had failed her. But that moment also kicked off a mutual journey of growth in her marriage. In this episode, Julie explains how being an Enneagram 3 can be a burden as well as a gift, how growing up in a lower-income household led to a complicated relationship with money, and how being married to an Enneagram 4 taught her not to have all the answers. Julie Solomon is a Speaker, Business Coach, Host of the top rated The Influencer Podcast, and Author of the book, Get What You Want: How to Go From Unseen to Unstoppable (HarperCollins Leadership, June 7, 2022). Get What You Want teaches you how to shake off outdated ideas of what is possible and use your newfound belief to make anything you want happen. Julie has launched several successful online programs including Pitch It Perfect, The Influencer Academy, and SHINE Mastermind, which teach clients how to master the skill sets needed to take a personal brand idea and turn it into a profitable, sustainable. In her weekly podcast, The Influencer Podcast, Julie offers up real-time coaching, straight talk, and conversations to her millions of listeners worldwide.

For Jeanne Stevens, it didn't take long to see herself in her Enneagram type. But it took the experience of facing three deep losses in a short period of time to finally learn how to process—and ultimately let go—of grief, freeing her up to truly live in the present. 

In today's episode, Jeanne shares how a childhood experience led her to believe a narrative about her life that no longer serves her.  She also shares the ways she's learned to live in the present through noticing and naming what's happening around her, asking and answering the all-important question: "What's Here Now?" 

Jeanne Stevens is the founding and co-lead pastor of Soul City Church in Chicago, one of America's fastest growing urban churches. Prior to starting Soul City Church, Stevens was on the pastoral staff at Willow Creek Community Church and North Point Community Church. A sought-after speaker, leader, and writer, Jeanne's passion is to help people wake up to their purpose as they pursue a life of wholehearted freedom. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Jarrett, and their two children.

Known for exuding energy, joy, and laughter, former Miss Kentucky and three-time contestant of The Amazing Race, Mallory Ervin reveals her fear of being average and how her hunger to achieve publicly resulted in a big wake-up call. 

In today’s episode, we explore her personal story of overcoming the unhealthy and damaging patterns in her life, the turning point that made her go to treatment, and how her time in recovery helped unmask and reveal her true self, allowing her to “live fully.”

Mallory Ervin is a Kentucky-grown, Nashville-living dreamer who had a roundabout way of arriving at today. From her time in the Miss America pageant to being a three-time contestant on The Amazing Race, Mallory turned her passion for sharing her love of fashion, beauty, and life into a platform for impact. Today she runs a global lifestyle brand she founded in 2016, hosts the Living Fully podcast where she encourages and inspires her dedicated following to seek joy and live fully, and appears across platforms ranging from Instagram to YouTube sharing her life and message of living fully.

What is the life that you want to live? The final step of S.O.A.R. is to rewrite your old story and write a new one that is fulfilling and true to who you are.  The goal is to challenge the old, taken for granted, broken beliefs of your old story and lean into what the future looks like.  So how do you do that? 

In today’s episode, I’ll walk you through a few proactive approaches you can take for lasting transformation. 

For more exercises, reflection prompts, and guided questions, pick up a copy of The Story of You Workbook.