You may be leading a team of different personalities with unique strengths & weaknesses. So how do you coordinate your team members' unique life experiences paired with unique desires, fears, and motivations to work toward your business' overarching mission effectively?
One tool that we've tapped to help with self-awareness, empathy, and understanding within our own partnership is the Enneagram.
In this blog, part ONE of our Enneagram blog and podcast series, we set the foundation for what the enneagram tool is and what the different types are. Then we reveal our numbers and how it shows up in our friendship and partnership!
Understanding The Enneagram:
The enneagram is a personality system that categorizes individuals into nine distinct types based on core motivations and behavior patterns. It helps us understand different patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Each type has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they all operate from different core fears and desires.
The Enneagram can help us understand why people behave the way they do and how they can grow and develop. It's important to note that no type is better or worse than another—they are simply different ways of being in the world.
This knowledge can lead to greater self-awareness, empathy, and personal growth.
Remember, this is just a brief overview of the Enneagram.
First, we’ll start off by listing the 9 different types.
The 9 Enneagram Types:
Here is a quick and general description of each type:
Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
Type Two is generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.
Type Three is adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.
Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.
Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive, and scattered.
Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.
Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, complacent, and resigned.1
The Dominant Centers:
In the Enneagram system, the nine types are often categorized into three groups based on the dominant center of intelligence or focus – the body center, the heart center, and the head center. Each group contains three types, and these centers are associated with different ways of processing information and experiencing the world.
Body Center (Instinctive Center): Types 8, 9, and 1 belong to the Body Center. These types are primarily influenced by their gut instincts and deal with issues related to self-preservation, survival, and control.
Heart Center (Feeling Center): Types 2, 3, and 4 belong to the Heart Center. These types are strongly influenced by their emotions and are concerned with issues related to identity, recognition, and interpersonal relationships.
Head Center (Thinking Center): Types 5, 6, and 7 belong to the Head Center. These types rely on their thinking and cognitive processes to navigate the world, dealing with issues related to security, fear, and knowledge.
The Enneagram system acknowledges that all three centers are interconnected and work together in shaping an individual's personality and responses to life situations.
The process each of us went through to find our types:
I took the Enneagram test on the Truity website (90+ questions) - Free. Click here to get more information.
Tori took the Enneagram test on the Enneagram Institute website (140 questions) - $12 per test. Click here to get more information.
Revealing Our Enneagram Types:
YESI: Type 2
Twos are empathetic, sincere, and warm-hearted. They are friendly, generous, and self-sacrificing, but can also be sentimental, flattering, and people-pleasing. They are well-meaning and driven to be close to others, but can slip into doing things for others in order to be needed. They typically have problems with possessiveness and with acknowledging their own needs. At their Best: unselfish and altruistic, they have unconditional love for others.
- Basic Fear: Of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved
- Basic Desire: To feel loved
Key Motivations:Want to be loved, to express their feelings for others, to be needed and appreciated, to get others to respond to them, to vindicate their claims about themselves.
TORI: Type 9
Nines are accepting, trusting, and stable. They are usually creative, optimistic, and supportive, but can also be too willing to go along with others to keep the peace. They want everything to go smoothly and be without conflict, but they can also tend to be complacent, simplifying problems and minimizing anything upsetting. They typically have problems with inertia and stubbornness. At their Best: indomitable and all-embracing, they are able to bring people together and heal conflicts.
- Basic Fear: Of loss and separation
- Basic Desire: To have inner stability "peace of mind"
Key Motivations: Want to create harmony in their environment, to avoid conflicts and tension, to preserve things as they are, to resist whatever would upset or disturb them.
In Part Two of our Enneagram blog and podcast series, we talk about how our types work together, potential trouble spots, how we can be intentional in our work relationship to ensure we thrive in our own numbers and with the other, and more!
Stay tuned for Part Two where we will apply the Enneagram in business.
1 https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works