Part One: Who Am I? Enneagrams

With the new year have come thoughts of what I want to do, and not do, with my days. I’ve built intentions for my mind, body and spirit. In this first week of the year, I am doing pretty well implementing them, but I’ve noticed a lack of focus or a sort of half-heartedness in my attempts. Doing for the sake of doing. I feel like I need to show up.

But who, exactly am I?

During my book browsing I came across a book about enneagrams and how to use your scores to grow and be your best self. I remembered hearing about this personality assessment before and it prompted me to do some more digging. Before I knew it, I had spent a few hours reading about and taking the Enneagram Personality Test, the Myers-Briggs TypeFinder Personality Assessment and the Big Five Personality Trait Assessment. I took these through Truity.com and while you can take the tests for free and get some basic information about your results, you do need to pay to get a full-detailed report.

I am bringing this up because I am enjoying digging into my personality type, attributes and the strengths and weaknesses that are associated with my type. I did find the results to be accurate in describing my tendencies and qualities and feel like I can use this information to help propel me in the direction I want to go. And that direction is forward. Through these days and months, acknowledging my shortcomings and areas of growth but also using my strengths to create a life that is in harmony with and honors my true self.

In this post and the two that follow, I will provide more information about the assessments I took and my results (in a nutshell, not the detailed breakdown I paid to see). If you haven’t heard of or taken them before, it might inspire you to do a little self-analysis as well.

Enneagram Personality Test

Taken from the Truity website: The Enneagram is a personality system that aims to reveal how emotions drive our lives and how we engage with others in an effort to get what we want and need. The Enneagram defines nine personality types, each with its own set of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for personal growth.

Your Enneagram type reveals what motivates you on a very deep level, and illuminates the path you must take to achieve a higher of self-actualization.

What I Discovered:

• I scored a 98 percent match with Type 9. Nines are defined by a desire to live in peaceful harmony with their environment. They want a sense of balance and calm, and aspire to a kind of homeostasis where nothing disturbs their inner peace. They tend to be easygoing and accepting of what is happening around them, but can become resistant and willfully oblivious when something in the environment threatens to throw them off balance. It’s like they are in my head.

• The nine types of Enneagrams are divided into three groups of three types each: Body Types, Head Types and Heart Types. Each group is considered to be driven by a particular center of intelligence and a particular core emotion. I scored in the Body Type, which is driven by instinct and turned into their five senses as a primary means of gathering information. I find this to be true as a writer in how I take in, and communicate information. The core emotion for Body Types is Anger. That made me pause, but then I read that, “this does not necessarily mean that body types experience anger frequently…some body types repress their anger, however it is still a driving force in their thoughts and actions.” Yes to that. I am queen of repressing my anger or acting out behaviors that will prevent anger in others. I need to sit with this for awhile. The core emotion for Head Types is fear, and Heart Types is sadness, by the way.
• As with all nine types, nines have Strengths and Challenges. Strengths include: agreeable and accommodating, easygoing and likeable and good at finding compromises and middle ground. Challenges include: out of touch with own needs, meet problems with passive resistance instead of head on, and trouble taking decisive action (i.e. staying in unhealthy relationships too long, spending almost a decade trying to break up with alcohol.). Seeing these challenges laid out before me is helpful because now, while working on my intentions and what I want to do, I can make sure that I am staying in touch with my needs, working on boundaries, and taking decisive action.
• There are many areas that the results touch on including how your type is at work, in relationships, childhood origins and emotional life. There is also a section of results called The Spectrum of Health, and this shows how a Stressed version of yourself operates as well as an Average version and a Thriving version. This was interesting to me because the depicters of my Stressed self were all traits that my drinking brought out: Dissociated, Disinterested, Unaware, Negligent, Unconscious, Impotent, Oblivious, Recalcitrant and Lethargic. This was me, on drugs. The question is, did the drinking cause these behaviors or did they magnify them? I don’t even know if it matters, but it was eerie how they described my life back then.
• The Average nine can be conflict avoidant, easygoing, resistant, passive-aggressive, stubborn, complacent, disengaged, inattentive and vague. This is what describes me if left to my own devices. It is the set of behaviors that I am, for the most part, trying to change right now. I want more. I need to be more.
• The Thriving nine is who I am interested in being, and it’s really come to the forefront with this new year, and having these results set out before me in black and white. I feel like I can and have been all of these things, but I want to exist in the space where these traits define my regular state of being: humble, accepting, calm, creative, patient, supportive, receptive and cooperative.
• The results provided also give you a path forward, with bulleted growth tasks to help you break the patterns that are limiting you and help you become happier, more effective and more actualized. A few of mine included: tuning into my preferences, doing simple things that give me pleasure, expressing my opinions, challenging myself to take action and use my voice. I find I’m good at opining on paper or screen, but my actual voice often goes unheard.

In conclusion, I’m happy I took the time to learn about and take the Enneagram assessment and I plan to use it as a guidepost for growth and to continue to refine my intentions in the coming year. My next post will discuss the Myers-Briggs TypeFinder test.

Love and light.