What is the Enneagram? The Story Behind Your Conditioned Personality
Jul 07, 2024
By Karrie Brandt
What is the Enneagram?
The Enneagram system is often categorized as a personality tool. However, unlike other personality frameworks, it is not based on outward behaviors but rather on internal motivations for why one has the behaviors and patterns that one does. It is now widely used in the business and private sectors to facilitate building stronger teams that understand how to work together best.
The Origins of the Enneagram
The exact origin of the Enneagram system's roots is partly a mystery. The framework is built upon ancient wisdom of traditional archetypes combined with modern psychology. The term “enneagram” is of Greek origin, meaning “nine” and “figure.” George Gurdjieff, Oscar Ichazo, and Claudio Naranjo are the more modern people involved in forming the Enneagram into what it is known as today.
The Basics of the Enneagram
The Enneagram framework is based on nine personality archetypes relating to nine distinct core fears and desires. Because of our childhood conditioning, our personality is formed, and we are all subconsciously trying to escape our core fear and achieve our core desire through patterned behaviors and reactions in every aspect of our lives.
How the Enneagram Can Benefit You
Anytime we can better understand ourselves, our loved ones, and the people we work with daily, we can cultivate more compassion for how we may function differently. This allows space for our unique selves to live in our own ways. The Enneagram system gives us deeper insights into our personalities and conditioned behaviors, as well as their consequences, that we otherwise may have been unaware of without having the Enneagram structure to clearly see them.
How to Get Started
There are many free assessment tools online, which are estimated to be about 60% effective at determining one’s Enneagram type. These tools can be useful in helping us weed out the types that we are not, but not necessarily in the type we actually are. It takes a lot of deep introspection and honesty about all aspects of ourselves to fully discover our own types. Anyone can do this on their own with the plethora of free information on social media and online. Enneagram typing sessions with an Enneagram coach are also an option for people who don’t want to go through all of the information independently and want the guidance of an expert in discovering their type.
Diving Deeper
Each type’s core fear and core desire are the foundational aspects when determining your Enneagram type. But there are many more layers to the system that can be useful in better understanding and uncovering your type. Some of these aspects include:
- Wings
- Centers of Intelligence
- Arrows
- Instinctual Variants
- Harmonic Triads
- Hornevian Triads/Stances
- Relational Styles
- Trifixes
If you’re curious about digging deeper into some of the main foundational aspects of your type, you can download the FREE GUIDE that I created to help organize the main points you learn about your own type!
Final Thoughts
The Enneagram is a very insightful way for us to become more aware of our own conditioning and how we unconsciously behave and react to people and situations in our lives. Once we have insight into these patterns, we are empowered to choose whether we want to continue relying on them or to choose a different path toward growth.
With Love,
Karrie