I gave Ted – a very articulate, literate, and creative
One – a box of magnetic poetry, along with the injunction that he
could chastise others whenever he felt they deserved it, but then he needed to create a
poem about them. I told him "I don't know if you'll ever ever actually do what
I'm asking, but that's not the point about gifts of metaphor. This image is so
strong it will stick and somehow change you."
Michael (a
Two) came to realize
he was doing the CEO's dirty work at budget time and alienating his
colleagues – even when he didn't agree with the boss's directions – because he liked
being the power behind the throne. Just back from a trip to Mexico, I
gave him a bandito puppet on strings as a metaphor for letting his boss
pull his strings. He named it "Miguel" and sat it in a prominent
place on his office bookshelves so he wouldn't forget.
One of my female
Three clients
had been given a copy of Kathleen Noble's The Sound of A Silver Horn. I gave her a toy horn I'd painted silver and
included the following excerpt from Noble's book:
There comes a moment in each quest cycle where
a woman finds herself poised on the brink of transformation... the pivotal decision to
embark upon an extraordinary journey of self-discovery... each quester who wins her way
through to the portal of transformation must discard some part of herself in order to
create a larger self and give birth to her own possibilities:
Better to see your cheek grown hollow,
Better to see your temple torn,
Than to forget to follow, follow,
After the sound of a silver horn.
(Elinor
Wylie, "Madman's Song," Collected Poems,
1932)
In the introduction to his book,
Waking Up,
Charles Tart writes, "We need to awaken to reality, the reality of the problems caused
by our fragmented selves, so we can discover our deeper selves and the reality of our
world, undistorted by our entranced condition." I gave this book to a
Four who was particularly entranced in his moody withdrawal from the
reality of his organization's culture. I suggested he place it face-out on the book
shelf across from his desk, so the title would remind him to "wake up."
A CEO who's a
Five needed to spend more time connecting with people
–
more "management by walking around." A
withdrawing
type, she found this very, very difficult. She was a life-long sailor who described
her most profound moments to occur at sunset on her boat – a time when she
was most deeply
in touch with her own emotions and higher purpose. I gave her a small ship in a
bottle to symbolize both the potential of her affection and how "bottled up" she
kept her emotions.
One of the
Sixes I
coached
kept herself conflicted about the actions of her peers, so we personified each of them with finger puppets, though she
made me promise not to tell anyone we played with dolls in her
office. We started with her opinion about those she disliked the most, isolating
their negative characteristics and giving each to a finger puppet: "officious,"
"cold fish," "gets the drop on you," etc. After some work
exploring these negative opinions as projections, she was able to
own those characteristics in herself. She then transformed each
finger puppet to represent the same cluster of traits but with positive characteristics: "well-spoken / articulate," "tremendous capacity for work / detail,"
"technically skilled / smart / capable," etc.
I often use symbolic
prizes with teams, such as T-shirts with relevant slogans or toys that represent
Enneagram dynamics. In an article on
team-work I
give more examples. One not mentioned there is the T-shirt I gave a
Seven depicting a frog that urged, "Kiss
me...I'm a prince!" This was a much easier (and to match the Seven's
style, more amusing) way to get at his narcissistic behaviors than direct feedback from his team-mates
–
which would probably have raised his defenses.
An
Eight I coached
was particularly interested in opening up his soft side. He
knew how tender he was and how protective he was of his
team. He also knew he could get outrageously angry in staff
meetings,
but he thought others over-reacted to his outbursts. It was
difficult for him to step outside of himself and observe how
intimidating he could be. So I gave him a teddy bear with
glued-on, paper teeth.
One of my clients had a triple-whammy problem with
distractibility – not only was she an Enneagram
Nine, but also had adult ADD,
making it
almost impossible for her to stay focused and to finish things she started. I gave
her a sandalwood prayer bead necklace I'd had for many, many years and asked her to
hold it in her hand when she had a project to finish.
