Category Archives: Enneagram

A Curious Case of Mistyping

Posted on 09/05/2012 | 3 comments

My friend Debbie, whom I’ve known for close to 40 years, spent a few weeks with me this summer, and I took the opportunity to tape record a discussion with her about her experience with the Enneagram. When she first tried to determine her type, she settled on 7w6, and since that seemed a reasonably good fit, neither of us questioned it. That is, until last summer. Towards the end of her visit last year, several things about what she was doing and saying jumped out at me as being at odds with type 7.

Being mistyped is not at all uncommon. There are lots of reasons for it. But it happens to some types more frequently than to others.

I’ve broken my conversation with Debbie into five parts. Here is part one.

J: What was interesting to you about the Enneagram?

D: It seemed like if there was a way to understand better what was going on with me, what was driving things—the way I was looking at things—that would be a good thing to do. I hadn’t yet done the Myers-Briggs or anything like that, but I was interested in psychological kinds of things and what made people tick. I was interested in finding out what made me tick.

J: So it was primarily to get some personal insight. What did you find out?

D: Well, I thought I found out that I’m a 7 and that explained quite a bit about me. I was always interested in a lot of things and willing to kind of go down whatever path struck my fancy at the moment. I’m interested in this, and I’m interested in this, and I’m interested in this. It really fit. I’m a 7. It’s pretty cool. That gave me a sense of it being OK to have a lot of interests and to not know which one I wanted to nail down.

J: It validated some of your own experience.

D: Yes, and it gave me an explanation for it, so that if I looked at someone who seemed to have an idea of exactly what they wanted to be doing and didn’t have all of this other stuff going on, I thought, well, they must not be a 7. So, yes, it made me understand myself better. Continue reading →

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Posted in Enneagram, Mistyping, Type 6, Type 7, Wing

Tagged 6w7, 7w6, Enneagram, Enneagram wing, Mistyping

R.I.P. Don Richard Riso

Posted on 09/03/2012 | Leave a comment

Don Riso, author with Russ Hudson of one of the go-to Enneagram books on my shelf, Discovering Your Personality Type: the Essential Introduction to the Enneagram, died on August 30^th.

I didn’t study with Riso, but I was present at a couple of workshops he and Russ Hudson presented at the IEA conferences I attended. He was always the perfect combination of informative, witty, and entertaining. I’ve devoured several of his books, but what I like best about Discovering Your Personality Type are the extremely detailed type profiles, to which I’ve referred over and over again. Those profiles exemplify the breadth and depth of the Enneagram of personality and clarify the distinctions between types. The other contribution I appreciate is his nine levels of development, which are outlined for each type in Discovering Your Personality Type. I have also also used and frequently recommended the RHETI (Riso Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator) to others.

I found Riso and Hudson’s descriptions of what I believe they originally referred to as sub-types to be spot on. And the name he assigned to my subtype, 8w7—Maverick—couldn’t fit me better.

When I first started learning about and working with the Enneagram, I was put off by most teachers’ insistence that type was primarily a result of nurture. That just didn’t make sense to me, nor did it ring true for me personally. Almost everyone has come around to seeing type as a result of nurture and nature, but my recollection is that Riso and Hudson did so sooner than some of the others.

Don Riso was a very intelligent, dedicated individual who contributed significantly to the body of knowledge those of us who work with the Enneagram now have access to. The Enneagram world will miss his lively spirit and his inquiring mind. I’m grateful for all that he shared with us.

Click here to check out The Enneagram Institute website.

Type 2 Wife

Posted on 08/31/2012 | 7 comments

With her invisible Type 5 husband. Fourth in a series of Type comics. See also: Type 7, Type 4, and Type 9.

7 Comments

Posted in Enneagram, Humor, Type 2, Type 5

Tagged Enneagram, Type 2, Type 5

Playing with Dice

Posted on 08/29/2012 | 4 comments

A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to a book called The Dice Man, written by Luke Rhinehart. It was published in the 1970s, deemed “a cult classic,” and banned in some places, although I don’t know why. Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) endorsed it; some compared it to Catch-22. So why haven’t I heard about it until now?

The protagonist, also named Luke Rhinehart, is a psychiatrist disillusioned with—as far as I can tell from reading about the book—just about everything, but especially about the fact that he has a self he feels compelled to be true to. He decides to liberate himself by letting chance determine his actions from that point forward, rather than by remaining true to character, so to speak.

Fortuitously, he finds a single die on the floor at that very moment, and he resolves to henceforth let the die determine his course of action.

While I have no intention of reading the 500+ page book, the premise intrigues me. Personality typing systems such as the Enneagram and the MBTI are based on defining and explaining us by our temperaments. Our temperaments, experiences, and genes combine to form our selves. Generally, we tend to behave like ourselves, but sometimes we notice we are not ourselves or other people comment that we were not ourselves last night or last week or earlier this morning. When it comes to personality, consistency is very highly prized. Continue reading →

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Posted in Enneagram, Habit, MBTI

Tagged Enneagram, Habit, MBTI, The Dice Man

Songs for the Road: Thinking Center

Posted on 08/27/2012 | Leave a comment

My previous two posts summarized the three Doing center types and the three Feeling center types and suggested traveling songs for each of those six types. To complete the road song set, let’s review the three Thinking center types. People who rely primarily on this center don’t necessarily have higher IQs than those who rely on the other centers. They just trust their mental faculties—their ability to reason—more than they trust their feelings or their gut instincts.

This humorous (or not) excerpt from The Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel shows the difference between emotional intelligence and cognitive intelligence:

A frustrated wife looked at her confused husband and said, “You never understand what I am talking about. All you know is what you have learned in books. You couldn’t read my face if your life depended on it!” To this challenge, the man responded, “I can tell from what you say that you’re probably not happy with me. But, you know, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who are too needy, and those who aren’t.”

The Thinking center—also referred to as the Head, Intellectual, or Mental center—consists of Types 5, 7, and 6. This center is concerned with personal power, self-definition, logic, rationality, planning, intelligence, and will. Continue reading →

Songs for the Road: Feeling Center

Posted on 08/24/2012 | 1 comment

Last time, I summarized the Doing center in order to arrive at the best choice of road songs for Types 8, 1, and 9. Now I’ll tackle the Feeling Center, which is definitely not my go-to Center of Intelligence. Decades ago, when I was introduced to the MBTI, I tested as an ENTP/J (Extraverted, INtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving/Judging). The alternative to Thinking was Feeling, so no surprise I tested as a Thinking type. But Thinking/Feeling measures the decision-making function, and at the time, I was absolutely confounded that anyone could or would make decisions based on feelings. How was that even possible? (I should add that as a child, I accused my mother of being overly emotional.) After years of attempting to open up to the possibility, I sort of get it now—at least theoretically.

These comments on two aspects of emotional intelligence are excerpted from Daniel Goleman’s book “Emotional Intelligence,” but they come from psychologist Howard Gardner:

Interpersonal intelligence is the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. Intrapersonal intelligence…is a correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life.

The Feeling center—also referred to as the Heart, Emotional, or Relational center—consists of Types 2, 4, and 3. This center is concerned with emotion/feeling, relationship, sexuality, self-gratification, and empathy. Continue reading →

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Posted in Enneagram, Feeling Center, Road Songs, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4

Tagged Enneagram, Feeling Center, Type 2, Type 3, Type 4

Songs for the Road: Doing Center

Posted on 08/22/2012 | 6 comments

There was a great little piece in the Enneagram Monthly some 15 years ago called “Enneagram Voicemail Codes,” by Lahar Goldberg. It was short, succinct, laugh-out-loud funny—and painfully accurate. As Sheldon said when he explained a joke on the TV show The Big Bang Theory: “It’s funny because it’s true.”

Enneagram Voicemail Codes

If you know exactly what you want…press 1
If you want to help, press…2
If you have a great idea that could make us a lot of money…press 3
If you’re feeling abandoned…press 4
If you don’t want to talk to anyone…press 5
If you don’t know what you want…press 6
For a good time…press 7
If you want to tell us what to do and how to do it…press 8
If you feel irritated, but you need to take a nap…press 9

So I thought it would be amusing and maybe even somewhat illuminating to compile, with a little help from my friends, a list of traveling songs for each type.

Because there are three Centers of Intelligence within the Enneagram and three types within each center, I’ve decided to focus first on the three Doing center types and cover the Feeling center types and Thinking center types in subsequent posts.

Road Songs for Doing Center Types

Maybe it’s because I’m a Doing type, but nine points or nine lenses or even nine types all seem entirely too static—thus the name for the blog, Nine Paths. I think the Enneagram describes the different approaches we take to life and the different ways in which we move through it. Type influences the paths we take, as well as how we proceed along them and what we see on the way. So as we travel our respective paths, let’s queue up some type-appropriate road songs. [As a Type 8 with a strong 7 wing, my own impulse is to keep moving, but to enjoy the ride as much as possible.] Continue reading →

6 Comments

Posted in Doing Center, Enneagram, Road Songs, Type 1, Type 8, Type 9

Tagged Doing Center, Enneagram, Type 1, Type 8, Type 9

I Am He as You Are He as You Are Me and We Are All Together*

Posted on 08/20/2012 | 2 comments

As alien as one Enneagram type may seem to another, the fact is that each type has something in common with every other type. Each type is, in a way, a fragment of a whole. The “whole” is represented by the circle of the Enneagram, which garners nowhere near as much attention as the points on the triangle and the hexad do. It’s our differences that tend to get played up. There’s obviously a lot of value in exploring those differences, but there’s at least equal value in exploring our similarities.

Searching for Common Ground

Figuring out what we have in common with another person, Enneagram-wise, is an interesting exercise that can yield surprising results. Sometimes it’s the very thing we have in common with someone of another type that is the source of friction in the relationship. We all have aspects of our personalities we prefer not to acknowledge or that we outright deny. Besides, seeing what we have in common with others makes it more difficult to write them off completely.

Contact Points

There’s a simple way to check out what you have in common with the other types. This Contact Points chart includes centers, triads, stances, and coping styles (Harmonic Groups). Identifying your contact point with another type and trying to understand how the issues of that particular center (or triad or stance or coping style) play out for someone else as compared to how they play out for you can be illuminating.

You can also print the Ennea-Journaling: Relationships with Other Types worksheets and use them to jot down your thoughts and feelings about each type. You can either stop there or you can use your notes as jumping off points (prompts) for some flow-writing exercises.

The patterns of connection within the Enneagram are very much like the threads that connect everything within the great web of life. We aren’t really as separate from each other as we may imagine ourselves to be.

*Thank you, Lennon and McCartney.

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Posted in Ennea-Journaling, Enneagram, Relationships

Tagged Enneagram

Type 9 Child

Posted on 08/17/2012 | 8 comments

Third in a series of type comics. Check out Type 7 and Type 4.

8 Comments

Posted in Enneagram, Humor, Type 9

Tagged Enneagram, Type 9

When Push Comes to Shove

Posted on 08/15/2012 | Leave a comment

Conflict is a fact of life in general, and relationships—whether with family, friends, partners, co-workers, or neighbors—are definitely a part of life. In any relationship, there are times when things don’t go according to plan. Or they may go according to one person’s plan but not the other person’s. We famously can’t always get what we want. So how do we cope when conflict inevitably arises and things don’t go our way?

In The Wisdom of The Enneagram, Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson describe what they refer to as three Harmonic Groups, which organize the nine types according to their coping styles.

[T]he Harmonic Groups tell us how we cope with conflict and difficulty: how we respond when we do not get what we want. … [T]hey reveal the fundamental way that our personality defends against loss and disappointment.

–The Wisdom of the Enneagram

The Competency Group
Types 1, 3, and 5

This group deals with conflict or difficulty by putting aside their own feelings and needs and attempting to solve problems logically and objectively. Each of the three types in the Competency group has a particular attitude toward playing by the rules. Continue reading →