THE ENNEAGRAM - A SYSTEM THAT SHOWS YOU WHAT YOU ARE NOT
Sara de Clercq - 18 August 2021
Who are you?
What is your identity?
How does this identity serve you and where does it hinder you?
How can you use it to amplify your potential in work, life and/or business?
YES& | Mastering Self - A 10-Week Course Designed to Reveal Intrinsic Well-Being
gives you answers to some of these questions.
The Enneagram is a system of personality profiling, which reveals the patterns in how we perceive and interpret the world and therefore how we respond and behave.
Combining modern psychology with traditional Sufi wisdom, the Enneagram is an inclusive, powerful and flexible system for understanding yourself and others.
We can view the Enneagram as one of the most powerful tools that can heal relationships, open us to truth and bring about spiritual transformation.
The Enneagram can support us in various ways, including:
Increasing self-awareness, emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Identifying our strengths, limitations, habituated ways of operating and associated blind spots.
Clearing the barriers to experience true love for ourselves, others and the world at large.
Exploring the self on a deeper level, that strengthens your relationship with life, others, work and financial success, freedom, sense of purpose and service in the world.
Deepening connections to others, in a more true, clear and authentic way, in both personal and professional settings.
Becoming more understanding of other people’s intentions and behaviours.
Increasing personal and professional effectiveness.
Understanding our patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.
In short, The Enneagram gets behind defenses and rationalizations to the truth of what we truly are. The Enneagram can reveal the reality of our inner discord and its effect on others. Knowing this system and how the typology is playing out in you specifically, can give you the courage to see how your wounds, triggers and default responses shape your reality and inform all aspects of your life.
The Enneagram is essentially a model of the human psyche, which the system divides as nine interconnected personality types (also called Enneagram POINTS).
You can find a little bit of yourself in all nine of the points/types, although one of them should stand out as being closest to yourself. This is your basic personality point/type. This is where your CORE desires, motivations and fears come from.
Read more HERE about the specifics for each personality point/type.
The nine “enneatypes” are not rigid divisions, so there is no such thing as a pure enneatype. Each enneatype is influenced by its “wings”. The wings are the neighbouring types. Most people have one dominant wing (e.g. a One with a Two wing), but for some people both wings influence them equally.
As the Enneagram Institute describes: Everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality, with inborn temperament and other prenatal factors being the main determinants of our type. This is one area where almost all of the major Enneagram authors agree—we are born with a dominant type. Subsequently, this inborn orientation largely determines the ways in which we learn to adapt to our early childhood environment. It also seems to lead to certain unconscious orientations toward our parental figures, but why this is so, we still do not know. In any case, by the time children are four or five years old, their consciousness has developed sufficiently to have a separate sense of self. Although their identity is still very fluid, at this age children begin to establish themselves and find ways of fitting into the world on their own.
Around the age of 7 we have embedded this separate sense of self and our personality type has been fully formed. As we go through life, most people are less and less in touch with our basic desires, needs and motivations. But these patterns are consciously and unconsciously still shaping our thoughts, emotions, feelings and behaviours to date.
The Enneagram shows us a map to find our way back to these basic needs and then how to free ourselves from these needs.
You are not your point/type (identity)
This personality profiling is essential, and a very important part of the process, yet it’s just the very beginning. The system shows what is ‘in the way’ of us moving into a full self-realisation.
However if there are particular conscious and unconscious patterns in the way, we can not truly realise what we are beyond our personality type. These patterns can be very unconscious and are like blind-spots to virtually every human being.
This is why YES&, in our coaching approach and during courses, incorporates personality profiling as a way to free you from your personality. The system functions as a map, a map to see HOW we get ourselves in the way that is very specific to each individual. From this place we can more truly realise what potentiality is available BEYOND personality.
We cannot ever free ourselves from what hasn’t been brought into awareness in the first place.
“The Enneagram is not a system of personality, as it is so often presented, but rather a definition of character fixations and compulsions. And therefore, the Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.” - Eli Jaxon - Bear
The Enneagram is a map towards our Potential.
Join our upcoming Mastering Self Course to embark on your journey of Potential.
Find out more about the Enneagram HERE.
In our upcoming 10 week course, YES& MASTERING SELF, we go in depth into the Enneagram's Personality Profiling as a tool for Self-Development and Spiritual Inquiry. The course is designed to give you in-depth awareness around your dominant Point/Type and how to become more aware of strengths, desires and motivations within your type. The course also facilitates you into a deep understanding of other people’s motivations and behaviors.
Transform your personal and professional life through this course.
More information and registration.
Links:
The Enneagram Institute: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works
The Coaching Room Australia: https://www.thecoachingroom.com.au/the-enneagram-online-live-course