An Unboxable Enneagram Primer
An archetype system like the Enneagram can expand, rather than constrict and constrain, our spirited leadership.
Hi Friend! I am deep in book revisions this week and next. YES. BOOK REVISIONS. More on “The Ground Truth Process: Name Your Work to Lead with Intention and Conviction” in the coming weeks and months. It’s a deep dive into the Ground Truth process that I use with my clients. It’s all my thinking and experience in putting words to ideas so they become a concrete thing we can do something with.
But for now, please enjoy this gem from the blog archives on the Enneagram archetypes for Unboxable Leadership.
An archetype system like the Enneagram can expand, rather than constrict and constrain, our Unboxable Leadership.
What we can say, we can do something about. We bring the unconscious into our awareness through language and suddenly new possibilities are born just from the act of putting life into words. We need metaphors for our experiences to be able to experience them in deeper ways and make liberated choices.
This is why I love the Enneagram System. The 9 Archetypes are expansive enough to provide both helpful categories and nuanced access.
It offers language that allows us to know each other. What we know of ourselves and each other allows us to better access what it is to be human. We’re here on this earth as a small photograph of the infinite expressions of being alive. Our experiences create something so specific that if we never look beyond that experience, we will miss out on so much.
Consider this not as a handbook on the Enneagram but a series of love letters to the leaders I’ve known.
I don’t want to have y’all reading this and not see yourselves. So know that this is all from my perspective as I’m integrating what I’ve learned through reading and observation of the people around me.
What Enneagram offers isn’t a roadmap for typing us like dead bugs pinned on a card with a label. Instead, I read it as an insistence that diversity is how we live, breathe, and have our being. We don’t get to do this unboxable work alone. We need how others lead just as much as we need to embrace our own forms of leadership.
Which is why I hope you read this as a love letter. Because I want to see you and want you to see you. Because this isn’t about checking the box but about apprehending our infinite complexity and capacity for good. It’s about understanding via naming one of the ways we function.
Some Words of Warning
IT’S NOT FOR WORK
It drives me up a wall that businesses and corporations are using this framing in their employee development. This is not for improving team communication. It is a private tool for personal reflection and development.
Stereotypes aren’t great, even when you choose yours.
It’s a mirror, not a prescription or a box to set up home in. Resist making it another label for your identity. It’s a useful reference point but it is not all of you nor is it all of your art and business. Resist the pleasure of embracing an identity too tightly (aka. stereotype yourself). And be sure: it is a pleasure to hold yourself too tight to a name and title. You are nuanced and complicated and this doesn’t tell you everything about what it is to be you. Look at it as a path for growth rather than a death knell on your potential.
Typing Each Other Doesn’t Work
Ethical enneagram teachers will say that it is important to not type each other. Knowing each other well means accepting and respecting the words and self-understanding of the person we’re talking to. We might have guesses (I cannot stop myself from guessing) but informing someone about who they are isn’t right. That’s not our job. Ever. The same instinct that makes us cling too tightly to our own identifying language is the same that makes us want to put others into a box.
Personality Tests vs Archetypes
Personality tests look for patterns in human behaviors and draw conclusions about our mindsets and beliefs from those behavior patterns. Think things like Meyers Brigg and DiSC.
Enneagram is a set of Archetypes. It does not claim to map based on behavior but to map 9 basic fears and desires. Sure, common behaviors groups around shared fears and desires but that is not how a Type is determined.
Archetypes are more like the common characters you might see in a Greek Epic. They represent human experience or patterns and how they express those things in narrative structure. Think of your type as a character in a parable, an ancient epic, or a fable. This is a character drawn not from details but from their role in the story. They have a part to play.
So as you consider your Enneagram, don’t get too caught up on which Type you are. Instead, look for the Universal experiences each type represents and which one poses a path to growth that feels both challenging and hopeful for you.
Don’t take your “results” for granted
It was not designed as a test but as a system of archetypes for the deep motivations and fears in the human experience. The test was designed many decades after the archetypes began to gain popularity and use. The test is a useful “hint” but not an answer.
Use a website like the Enneagram Institute to read through the core fears/motivations of each type and consider whether or not this reflects and illuminates your experiences!
The test can only reflect common behaviors that tend to gather or group around a particular set of fears/motivations. But the behaviors are superficial (meaning: related to the surface of something) and are not the meaningful indicators for a type.
Even once I found my correct type, I resonate only 30% of the time with the instagram memes regarding my type because it’s based on middle of the bell curve behaviors. Yet I know my type is mine because of how it gave me a path for growth!
From the BookShop
The Enneagram fandom can lean Christian. I enjoy the resources below in their engagement with the spiritual but not so much a particular religious belief system.
The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types By Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson
The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship By Susan Piver
Nice job pulling out the parts that are useful from the Enneagram model while also acknowledging it's limitations.
"All models are wrong. Some are useful." -George E.P. Box