Enneagram Basics Archives - Prismatic Enneagram

There are a lot of personality systems out there: Strengths Finder, the MBTI, Kolbe, and many more. So why use the Enneagram? What can it offer you?

Deeper Self-Knowledge

Like all the other personality systems out there, the Enneagram gives you insights into you: your behavior, your motivations, your fears, your coping mechanisms.

Unlike the other personality systems I’m aware of, it has a much deeper, richer set of descriptions that look at not only what our behavior looks like when we’re kind of going along in our everyday, but what our behavior looks like when we’re struggling, when we feel secure, and when we’ve done the work. It also has additional dimensions for the 9 types, including the wings and the instinct stack.

In other words, there’s a lot more to work with in the Enneagram, and it describes not only our behavior, but why we engage in that behavior.

Understanding Others

We live inside our own minds, and we never get to live inside anyone else’s. That means it’s really easy for us to assume everyone else’s minds and inner experiences work like ours do.

Except they don’t.

Here’s just one minor example. Qira (type 6) and I were hanging out with a friend of ours who typed as a 4. They were talking about someone who said they didn’t know how they felt about something, and both Qira and our friend scoffed and said this person was obviously lying, because how could someone not know how they felt?

I raised my hand and said, “because not all of us do?” I often don’t immediately know how I feel about something, which is pretty common in type 9s. Their minds were blown. It was so completely foreign to them that they hadn’t even considered the possibility that it might actually be true for someone else.

When we study the Enneagram, we get a lot of insights like that.

It’s easy to look at someone else’s behavior and think, if I did that, it would be because I was lying/I hated them/I didn’t care/etc. But when we know their Enneatype, we often realize that they’re doing it for reasons that are entirely different from what ours would be — and those reasons are often understandable. We have more compassion and more tools to address things in our relationships or groups that aren’t working for us.

Becoming Our Truest Selves

While the Enneagram is used as — and is very useful as — a personality system, that’s not its most fundamental purpose. Its real purpose is to help us identify our unconscious habits and patterns so we can relax them.

There are people who complain that personality systems put people in boxes. The Enneagram, at its base, shows us how we put ourselves in boxes and how we can get rid of the box to become our highest, truest, best selves.

Have you ever been really stressed about something, and found a way to relax that stress, and then the solution just appears? Our truest selves, our greatest gifts, are within us, and we can access them by finding ways to relax our inner tension and resistance. The Enneagram shows us how.

So Many Reasons

Us humans, we’re messy. We’re accretions of the temperament we were born with, our experiences, the skills we’ve learned, the patterns in our families of origin, our current and previous relationships, and so much more.

When we study the Enneagram, when we apply its lessons and insights, we not only develop our selves — we also have the opportunity to improve our relationships, the groups and communities we’re part of, and the world at large.

The first question anyone has about the Enneagram is, “how do I know what type I am?”

The simple (but not easy) answer is, “whichever one best describes your internal experiences and motivations.” Between our unconscious habits, our narratives about who we are, the cultural expectations about who we should be, and the fact that we are all complex, complicated beings, it’s easy to find bits of ourselves in many or even all of the types.

Each of us, though, has only one dominant point on the Enneagram, and it doesn’t change over the course of our lives — even though how we express that point absolutely does change.

So how can you narrow it down?

Read the Descriptions

You can find short descriptions of the points on the Enneagram Institute website (click into each number to get the full descriptions), or you can read through the descriptions in one of the books in the Getting Started section of the Resources page.

These descriptions will always be describing average, middle-of-the-road behaviors, because the ways we behave when we’re really present are both harder to discern between types and too aspirational — who wouldn’t want to be courageous and loving and deep and protective?

Often, when people find their type, there’s a little wince that goes with it — internally and externally. It’s a wince of “shit, no one was supposed to know that.” It’s a wince of “oh crap, I do that, don’t I.”

That’s okay! As my teacher Russ Hudson once said, every type has its gifts and beauty and not one of us, at the average levels, is a picnic.

Taking the RHETI

The RHETI test can help you narrow down the types to dig into further. It’s rare, in my experience, that it bubbles up a person’s exact type, but the top three gives us some important clues.

Are any of the top three numbers next to each other on the diagram? If so, look at those two more closely, because it could be pointing to a type and a strong wing. (A wing is an adjacent number that gives the primary type some additional flavor.)

Are any of the top three numbers connected in the diagram via lines going through the middle? If so, look at those two more closely, because the types connected by those inner lines have important relationships, and our behavior can sometimes look like the types we’re connected to. (There are lots of reasons for that, but we’ll get into it later.)

Check Misidentifications

There are some numbers that look like one another. 9s and 2s, for example, can both focus on meeting other people’s needs. But why they do that is very different, and that’s what you want to dig into.

There are also types that we are culturally trained to look like. People socialized as women or girls often take on typical 2 behaviors, whether or not they’re a 2. People socialized as men or boys are often told they’re supposed to look like an 8. And US capitalism really, really loves a 3.

The purple book has a section on misidentifications, and there’s also a section on the Enneagram Institute site. They can help you dig into both what they have in common but also how they’re different so you can figure out which type you most identify with not just on the level of behavior but on the level of motivations.

Ask a Loved One

There are often things we, ourselves, have a hard time seeing about ourselves. Our loved ones, on the other hand, often see us more clearly.

If you have a pair or handful of types you’re considering, run them by someone you trust to be both honest and kind. This can be challenging stuff, and someone who is going to use it as a weapon is definitely not who you want to consult.

Pick One

At the end of the day, the reason we look for our dominant point is because it gives us a map for doing the deeper work. When we correctly identify our type, we’re going to see more and more profound results.

So if you really can’t decide between two points, pick one and work with it for a while. See what the fruits of that work are. I know people who’ve mistyped themselves for literal years, and the work was still fruitful. As you get to know yourself and your habitual motivations and behaviors, you’ll start to see whether or not your type feels accurate.

And there’s no penalty for deciding later that you’re actually a different type! It’s all part of the journey.

Why Use the Enneagram?