Unlock Your Potential with the Power of the Enneagram
The Enneagram is one of the most illuminating personal development systems for understanding our deepest motivations, fears, and potential for growth. This ancient personality typing framework provides a roadmap to self-awareness and transformation.
It is a powerful personality typing system that provides deep insights into human motivations, fears, and desires. Originating from the Greek words “ennea” meaning nine, and “gram” meaning point, the Enneagram identifies nine distinct personality types.
A Brief History of the Enneagram
While its origins are ancient and somewhat contested, spiritual teacher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff introduced the Enneagram to the West in the 1900s. It has been widely taught as an oral tradition since the 1970s and continues to grow in popularity today.
Though no single creator can be identified, the system was developed over centuries and has been popularized in modern times by psychologists, authors, and personal development experts like Helen Palmer, Don Riso, Russ Hudson, and Sandra Maitri.
The 9 Personality Types
The Enneagram consists of nine basic personality styles, each connected to a different way of perceiving the world:
- The Perfectionist (Type One): Principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
- The Helper (Type Two): Generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.
- The Achiever (Type Three): Adaptable, excelling, image-conscious, and status-seeking.
- The Individualist (Type Four): Expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
- The Investigator (Type Five): Perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.
- The Loyalist (Type Six): Engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
- The Enthusiast (Type Seven): Spontaneous, versatile, acquisitive, and scattered.
- The Challenger (Type Eight): Self-confident, decisive, confrontational, and assertive.
- The Peacemaker (Type Nine): Receptive, reassuring, complacent, and resigned.
When is Your Enneagram Type Formed?
Your basic type is established in childhood, based on your early life experiences and relationships with your family. This forms your unconscious motivations and core fears that remain consistent throughout your life.
While the type itself doesn’t change, how it manifests can evolve as you age and gain self-awareness. The Enneagram provides a “user’s manual” to understand these unconscious patterns.
What are the Core Components of the Enneagram?
The Enneagram examines three key aspects of each personality type:
- Core Motivation: The underlying emotional drive and desire of your type. What you strive for in life.
- Basic Fear: The primary unconscious fear that motivates your behavior patterns. What you most want to avoid.
- Chief Feature: Each type’s character traits are overdeveloped as coping mechanisms for fear. They can become imbalanced to serve the personality’s needs for control.
Understanding these components provides self-awareness to foster personal growth.
How Accurate is the Enneagram?
The accuracy of the Enneagram depends on the quality of information and analysis used. Taking online tests provides limited insight compared to studying the types in-depth and working with a knowledgeable guide. Overall, the Enneagram is considered highly accurate for self-discovery when properly understood.
Applications of the Enneagram System
The Enneagram provides useful insights across many aspects of life:
- Personal growth: Provides a framework for understanding personality, motivations, inner beliefs, and paths for development.
- Relationships: Helps improve partner and family dynamics by identifying compatibility and areas of potential conflict.
- Workplace: Enables healthier communication, stress management, and team productivity when applied professionally.
- Spirituality: Offers guidance for spiritual development by identifying unique gifts and weaknesses of each type.
How to Discover Your Enneagram Type
There are a few recommended methods to determine your core type:
- Take a professionally developed assessment test.
- Read in-depth descriptions of the nine types to identify which resonates.
- Speak with an Enneagram coach to personally explore your motivations and patterns.
- Take a workshop to gain hands-on experience with the types.
- Combine multiple methods for the most accurate typing.
The Enneagram as a Path for Transformation
The Enneagram is an insightful framework for understanding ourselves at a core level. It brings self-awareness to our unconscious motivations and provides a compassionate path for inner work, relationships, and collective evolution.
Diamond Approach Enneagram On-demand Courses
In this 11-module course, Sandra Maitri and Russ Hudson will synthesize decades of Enneagram knowledge and teaching experience with a lifetime of Diamond Approach spiritual development and methodology to help us reconnect to our essential being through the Enneagram. Click Here for Access
This course explores how the particular ‘take’ on reality at the core of each of the nine types begins and the resulting belief structures, emotional patterns, and behaviors. Click Here for Access