Enneagram For Dummies. Jeanette van Stijn

Enneagram For Dummies

development path more efficient.

Knowing which type you have

I certainly believe that you know best which type you have. After all, only you can look inside yourself. Only you can observe what you think, feel, and experience, for example. You might not yet know all about the Enneagram and the nine types, but when you receive the information you need, from this book or from a study course, you’re sure to find your own type.

Finding your type isn’t difficult. The Enneagram offers nine templates that you can use as a mirror. You look at every template and then ask yourself whether this might be the mechanism you recognize in yourself. So you move from one map to the next and determine which map fits you best. You observe yourself and ask, “Which part of this do I recognize in myself?” Then you begin a discussion with yourself, using the inner dialogue, or self-reflection. The Enneagram makes a point of offering many guidelines for self-observation and reflection because, when you start on the journey of discovering your own type, you also immediately start training and encouraging these two important skills on the way to further development. Maybe this inner dialogue already helps you discover the Enneagram type in which you see yourself reflected more than in the others. When you recognize yourself, you'll know your Enneagram type, yes, but more importantly, you'll have discovered and experienced things about yourself. You'll be more conscious of certain aspects of yourself and will have gained self-awareness.

Finding your own type means becoming active yourself

When you do something yourself, you also learn something afterward — that's why you don’t gain much when someone tells you that you have Type 1 or a questionnaire shows that you have Type 3. What does this info actually tell you? Maybe you have Type 1 and will now further explore yourself and learn something from it. In practice, however, I often notice that people to whom a type has been assigned by a third party don’t do anything further with the info. After they know which type they have, why continue exploring?

Respecting every step of the journey

Here’s another reason not to let other people assign you a type: One aspect of the Enneagram that appeals to me is the great respect this practice has for others. You broaden your perspective of “being other” and develop an understanding of it; and then you develop respect for the fact that everyone chooses and takes their own path, and for every development process taking its own shape and being unique. Above all, you acknowledge that each person is at a different stage of development and that none is better than the other. In my classes, I often ask the participants: “A baby is at the beginning of its life and still has to learn everything. Do you have less respect for the baby and the development stage that it’s in? Do you love the baby less because it still has to learn everything?” On the contrary. That’s exactly why humans think babies are wonderful.

Getting started

Your first step when it comes to finding out what your attention primarily focuses on — seeing what unconscious driving force or underlying motivation is responsible for your automatic habits — consists of questioning yourself.

Task 1: Take an inventory of your characteristics

You already have an image of yourself — an idea of how you act in life and what your strengths and weaknesses are in your job and your relationships. The first task on this journey of discovery is to write down three of your general characteristics, as shown in Table 4-1. Then ask two people who know you well whether they also see you the same way, what they see differently, and which characteristics they would add.

TABLE 4-1: Write Down Your Characteristics

	What I See	What Person 1 Sees	What Person 2 Sees
Characteristic	1.	1.	1.
Characteristic	2.	2.	2.
Characteristic	3.	3.	3.

In your continued work, when you determine which type mechanism fits you best, you may later notice that the characteristics entered here are less random than you might now believe. They are quite likely connected to your type!

Task 2: Recognize the archetypes

As you can read in later chapters, the Enneagram has different movements and instructors. Many of them have given names to the individual types. As a result, each type has different names in the literature. This is an attempt to express the essence of, or the most important characteristic of, a type. It can happen, of course, that different instructors each find another aspect of the type so important that they use it as a name. So the labels don’t necessarily coincide, though the descriptions mostly remain the same.

Some people may already develop an idea of their type when they recognize themselves in a certain name. You use the different names for the Enneagram types as archetypes for finding your type. In Figure 4-1, you see boxes with designations for the various types. Ask yourself these questions:

Is there one or more box in which you (strongly) recognize yourself?

Are there boxes in which you don’t recognize yourself, which you can exclude from the start?

FIGURE 4-1: Do you recognize yourself?

Task 3: Recognize that strengths are easier to see

It’s difficult to observe what your attention focuses on, especially when you’re only starting out with the Enneagram. Recognizing your strengths is much easier. The strengths of the individual Enneagram types are no accident. They originate from the focus of a type’s attention and their energy. The respective type considers these goals important and works on them. Accordingly, strengths in this area develop seemingly on their own. So the task for the self-observation is to read the nine strength descriptions in Table 4-2 and ask yourself these questions:

Is there one or more box in which you (strongly) recognize yourself?

Are there boxes in which you don’t recognize yourself and can exclude from the start?

TABLE 4-2: Do You Recognize Your Strengths?

Strong, forceful, determined, assertive, protective of others, virtuous, truthful, clear,

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