Introduction to the Enneagram:
A System to Release Your Authentic Self
The Enneagram is a precise tool that accelerates your personal and professional growth. It is a framework that allows you to clearly observe your hidden motivations, restrictive beliefs, and habits of mind. Through it you discover your natural gifts, your challenge areas, and your unique path of development.
The Enneagram describes nine wildly different personalities. Each of these personalities pays attention to the world in very specific, habitual ways. At any given moment in time you are bombarded by a million different stimuli. To experience this, take a moment to bring your attention to the various stimuli described below as you read: the noise around you, your emotions, the feel of your shoes on your feet, your internal dialogue or the thoughts in your head, the words on the computer screen, your awareness of the people around you, tense muscles in your body, and your stress level.
You continually block out and let in certain stimuli in a very patterned, habitual way. The habitual manner in which you pay attention to the world narrows your focus so you experience only a particular slice of reality. The particular slice that you experience limits your actions and causes you to be very reactive to certain stimuli. Each of the nine personalities tends to focus on, and react strongly to, very specific events.
Individuals React In Habitual Patterns
Based On Their Bias of Attention
You may notice that you react strongly to people leaving you, confronting you, cutting you off in communication, invading your space, or trivializing things that you feel are very important. You may also notice that others don’t react as you do to these events. You may think an argument is a big deal while your coworker easily shrugs it off. These differences in reactions do not occur because some people "just don’t care." Rather, they occur because your coworkers don’t see what you see, they don’t pay attention to the world in the same way that you do, so their energy and reactivity is linked to different triggers.
The Enneagram is a map of the territory you often live in. It describes nine complex internal belief systems that correlate to nine basic propositions that predispose humans to pay attention to very specific actions in the world.
What Differentiates This System From the Rest?
Three major characteristics distinguish the Enneagram from various personality tools. First, most popular assessment tools describe surface level behaviors. The Meyers Briggs , DISC, and numerous tests that divide people into four groups can accurately describe an individuals likes, dislikes, and the way they will respond in a given situation. While the Enneagram does describe the primary traits of each personality type, it goes beyond to map the underlying motivations, emotional drivers, and limiting core beliefs precisely.
The second distinguishing characteristic of the Enneagram is it's focus on development. The underlying premise of the system is that we created our personality (or false self) to protect our selves, at a young age, when we first felt pain or fear. This protection was absolutely necessary at the time but it now holds us captive. We find ourselves in a reactive stance in which we react automatically to people and events.
You Are Not Trapped In Your Type!
The Enneagram provides methods you can use to open up your awareness and see a bigger world. It allows you to witness your habits of mind and become intimate with the dark corners of the invisible box that currently constrains you. Next it shows you a path to a larger reality, a path to a richer, deeper experience of the world, a path you may eventually use to climb out of your box. Precise self observation of your type behavior raises self awareness and starts to move you into a place of choice. In addition, specific activities, conversations, and attention practices can shift our erroneous core beliefs and create freedom to respond in an effective way to the challenges we face.
Third, the Enneagram is a complex, dynamic system that allows for the wild changes in mood and thoughts that humans experience. It describes the different ways we react when we are threatened, stressed or overwhelmed. It also includes descriptions of our typical reactions when we are calm, centered, and at peace.
The Enneagram is a scientifically researched and validated tool (see the book The Essential Enneagram by David Daniels) that continues to build international popularity. Enneagram seminars are being held in countries on five continents. It has been taught in the Stanford Business School, in management training programs in Fortune Five hundred companies, and is used in many executive development programs in the Silicon Valley.