People have strong feelings about personality frameworks, and I wouldn’t say that I disagree with some of those assessments. What I will say is that some personality frameworks are better than others and, to me, the Enneagram is the best.
I learned about the Enneagram when it became all the rage on Instagram in the years before the pandemic. I read The Road Back to You in 2018, and since then, there have been oodles and oodles of Enneagram books written to help people find their type and explore the ins and outs of their personality. (Suzanne Stabile is my favorite Enneagram teacher, if you’re looking for a gateway!)
A lot of people take a test to find their Enneagram type, which is fine, but I think it’s better to read about all nine types and see which one speaks to you most. By “speaks to you,” I mean the one that makes you crawl out of your skin because it feels like someone took your brain and put it on the page.
At least, that’s the way I felt when I read about the Enneagram 9, which is my Enneagram type. The nine is called the peacemaker. We are non-confrontational; we go with the flow; and we want everyone around us to be happy. And that’s because we fear that expressing our opinions or standing up for ourselves will make the people around us mad, and when people are mad at us, they will leave.
There are many reasons why I love the Enneagram so much, and the primary reason is that it has helped me grow so much as a person. Personality frameworks do not exist to put us in a box. They are there to show us why we do the things we do, and help us understand ourselves better. The cornerstone of the Enneagram is our core fears, desires, and motivations. By understanding what scares you the most (is it not being seen as successful, is it feeling helpless, is it abandonment?) and what actually motivates you (is it unity or feeling free or being morally right?), you discover a deeper layer to your sense of self.
I’ve written before about how learning about my type has helped me grow as a person. It’s helped me understand that I am motivated by unity and peace, to the point where I will sometimes let people walk all over me. But now I know that I do that, and I can set boundaries to fight against this inclination. And I can find the good in my peaceful nature. It means I am a calming presence to my friends, and someone they feel they can come to with problems and I won’t judge them. It means I’m happy to go with the flow, won’t make a fuss, and don’t need too much to be happy and satisfied. I’m the friend who won’t ask a lot of you, and while I definitely have to remind myself that it’s okay to ask my friends for help, I also like my low-key nature.
I’d be remiss to write a whole post about the Enneagram and not talk about the podcast I started with my best friend, Bri, in 2022. We started The Friendship Paradox to discuss what it’s like to be best friends with wildly different personalities. How different? When we took the Big 5 personality quiz, the results measured our extroversion on a scale of 0 – 100%. I scored 6% and Bri scored a whole-ass 100%! We are not ambiverts in the least. We are on opposite ends of the introversion/extroversion spectrum! Anyway, we started our podcast with a strong focus on personality frameworks and all the ways our differences show up in our lives. And now, we’re finishing up our fifth year and still going strong! Feel free to give it a listen if you want.
Oooh subscribing now, that’ll be really fun to listen to!
I’ve always wanted to do one of these personality tests but never have. Whenever someone asks “are you xyz” or “type (insert letter here)” I just end up giving them a blank look because I have no clue. I’m adding that book to my TBR, which as we know, is going to get a major-look in at the start of next year haha.