Out of the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram, Mary R. Bast, Ph.D. 
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised: January 18, 2012  

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Toss the Road Map

A much more interesting, kind, adventurous and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object or our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. (Pema Chödrön, Awakening the Heart)

"One of my friends had told me several times you can't fundamentally change -- all you can do is change your behavior," said David, an Enneagram Six. "I'd argued that point with him," he continued. "But I don't have to argue it anymore. I think transformation is profound change, to the point where you never want to go back."

David, at 60, had a late and rapid change. "I recognized I had to change a long time ago, for my own well-being as well as for those around me," he offered sadly. "I've been yearning for this for a long time. I just never found a way to do it. Frankly, when I first looked at your web site I thought, 'My God, this is some sort of cult!' It's that funny diagram -- I thought, 'What the heck is that?' Then I read what you wrote about a counterphobic Six, and I began to recognize that part of the reason my company hadn't been successful in our new ventures was because I had a tendency to state my objections in such a blunt and often challenging way, I put my partners on the defensive. That bothered me and I began to examine my own contribution to our lack of progress toward our strategic objectives, our ineffectiveness as a leadership group. I was so furious once about someone we'd hired, the President looked at me and said, 'You know, I'm worried about you; you're angry and accusing beyond anything that's called for.' He was brave to say that because usually I'd defend my position, fight to the death. But this time I said, 'This has got to change, for two reasons: I can't keep acting like this, and we're not effective.'"

David believed he'd made substantial changes earlier in his marriage, but these changes weren't so far-reaching: "I could complain, I could be sarcastic, and not even realize it. It was just the way I expressed myself. But I realized if I didn't make any changes at home I was going to lose my marriage, and I began a real campaign to do something about it. I think that was fairly profound, but I never carried it outside my marriage. I didn't care what other people thought about me. I was going to go get the job done, and fuck 'em if they didn't like the way I did it!"

At first David thought he was an Eight. After reading Goldberg's The Nine Ways of Working he said, "Goldberg wrote that 'Eights see black or white, friend or foe, strong or weak, likeable or not,' and these extremes in me bothered me. I was bothered by my anger, and by what my anger did to people, including me -- I probably took minutes or hours off my life every time I lost it." But Goldberg's statement that "Eights are apparently guilt-free," didn't resonate for David. "Along with the desire to change," he said, "I've carried tremendous guilt that I wasn't able to change effectively, or wasn't making any progress, or would revert. But I didn't have any real clue as to how to keep it going."

Historically David, like many Sixes, would dominate a conversation with nervous talk. After several coaching sessions he said, "This has taught me to look at somebody and listen to them and not to be in a hurry to overwhelm them with my answer. What happened to me this weekend was unbelievable. We had two huge training sessions, and from the minute I stood up in front of that 90-person group I felt different about them, what I was going to say, and how I was going to say it. I never paid any attention before to how people responded to me. But I watched their response and I found myself letting people answer their own questions."

It's been said of Sixes that they wear their emotions on their sleeves. Here's David's reaction to positive feedback about the changes he made. "One guy stuck out his hand, and said, 'Wasn't this a really great weekend?' I had to get in the car and put my dark glasses on. There were a lot of people standing around and I wasn't going to let them see the tears. This is so overwhelming, I don't even quite know how to think about it. I keep getting different responses in people. And I walk away with a different view of what happened because I've paid attention to how the person is responding to me. I'm far more relaxed. I used to get so upset over little things. Just this morning I went in the garage to put some stuff into the trunk of my car and the trunk was locked. My reaction a few weeks ago would have been, 'Goddamn it! Why is the trunk locked?' But this morning I just said, 'Oh, the trunk is locked,' and I walked around to the door and unlocked the trunk. This is the sort of thing that happens to me all the time now. I don't know where my irritability went, all that pointing of fingers at other people. One result is that I'm having so much more fun. A year ago someone told me, 'You never smile,' and I've thought about that a lot recently, because I find myself smiling all the time. 'Pleasant' doesn't even begin to describe it."

David's earlier experience with therapists had not brought about the change he wanted: "When I talked to the first guy about my anger he said, 'Ah, that's O.K. You're doing fine.' Here he was sitting across from me and I'm saying, 'I really get angry, SO WHAT!!!!' What the hell was he going to say? The next counselor I saw was not by choice either. The President of that company said, 'You go get some help or you're out of here.' But also, I was very dissatisfied where I was -- I could do superb work but that was offset by my relationships with other people, my tendency to light into people who didn't follow the ground rules. So this time the work with the counselor was good, but we just scratched the surface. We never got into the soul of what was going on. It was more techniques. For example, I'd put Post-It stickers on my dashboard to remind myself if something occurred I ought not to lose my temper. And it worked until the Post-It fell off, as they always do -- you know, things aren't permanent. And the next thing you knew, I was pissed off at some old lady who was in my way. It was a series of Band-Aids and I don't say that was bad, but it wasn't very satisfying, it wasn't getting me where I wanted to go. Yet I knew I really needed to make the profound change. I had no knowledge of the Enneagram, no idea I'm a Six, no idea where the hell the journey would go or how to even start. I knew I had to change for my own good, for my marriage, for my job, whatever -- probably mostly for my own good -- but I didn't know how to do it."

As David talked about his current work he emphasized the importance of trust in me as a coach -- a key element for Sixes: "What's so awesome about this to me is that for some reason I had absolute, almost child-like, unqualified trust in you, so I took what you said and I went in that direction, and I don't know why. Maybe it's because I had so many years of being ready to do this without having the roadmap to do it, but I also think that you can't be questioning or fighting with the person who's helping you.

The transpersonal element was new for David: "I marvel at two things: One, that I have been able to continue the process as profoundly as I have, and secondly, I don't care where it ends. It's a kind of surrender, which is very interesting, because growing up a Christian Scientist, one of the fundamental notions was, 'yield to God's will' and I always resisted that. I mean, 'Nobody's going to tell me what to do!' The notion of spirituality has gained a significance to me that I don't think it's ever had. What I've done here is yield to something that has let me change. There's this incredible sense of peace, and I've started praying. A lot of my prayer is just thanks, but part of it is a recognition that there is some sort of spiritual force -- relinquishing the notion that there's nothing out there or that it won't help us."

David found benefit in Gendlin's Focusing technique: "The interesting part about Focusing is that you're not self-condemning, you're simply noting. When I understood that, it was easy. It's tied to what I was saying before about yielding. You've got to accept it's the right thing and go with it. And don't have to sit there and think about what I'm doing. Focusing taught me how to be where I wanted to be anyway." He also read more about his Enneagram style: "I can go back, look at the behaviors of a Six, recognize how that relates to me and what I can do about it. The oddest part is that I haven't had to sit here and plot some kind of change. It has just sort of unfolded in front of me, and that has continued to awe me, the notion of yielding and letting it happen."

Self-disclosure also played a significant role for David, though its nature changed over the years: "Self-disclosure is something I haven't been reluctant to do, once I figured out I needed to change. I had looked at myself for a long time. On one hand I was pretty objective and on the other hand I was self-condemning. The objectivity is fine; I've learned that the self-condemning is a major impediment to change. That's the gorilla I've been wrestling with, and you don't easily get that off of your shoulders. But when I look at positive responses to the changes in me from people I've treated pretty badly, it's so rewarding I've begun to say to myself, 'Get off the guilt trip. There's nothing you can do about it now, other than changing your current behavior.' And I think I've made progress. I used to beat myself up pretty badly. I beat myself up about things I did to my wife. And I don't know that the pain of recollecting that is ever going to go away -- I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to say, 'It was all right.' I think I have more work to do there. If you want the ultimate transformation, it would probably be to let go of that."

When asked for a metaphor to depict his changes, David said, "If I sat here and tried to model this, I probably could, but that would seem artificial to me." His experience of the process was intuitive, diffuse, emotion-laden. "It's joy that moves it along. I don't know if it has stages. I didn't spiral into this, I didn't go up steps, I didn't go down steps, there's been no fight here. It's a process that goes on without conscious thought in my case. I'm not struggling or trying. I still find it amazing that I don't have to go through the great labor I'd been enduring for years. Whatever it was that was blocking this change hasn't fought back very effectively recently. Maybe it was tired. Maybe I'd beat that little mother to death!"

Finally, David spoke of the importance of being in the moment: "One of the things I've asked is, 'Where am I going with all of this?' I've gone through life always having to know where I was going; otherwise I wasn't going to do it. I mean, why the hell would we start if we aren't going some place, and someplace that we had defined and we knew? But I got to thinking about your question of where do you see this going and where am I in it? That supposes there is an end point, and I'm not sure I want to define an end point. Probably the most important part of all this is the continuing recognition that transformation makes sense, that it's 'right', and just to continue the process."