Understanding your personality style can be a powerful tool to enhance your personal effectiveness. Knowing the Enneagram is even more powerful when exploring your relationships with others. Analyzing the characteristic interactions among styles shows how your habitual responses create self-defeating patterns. You can transcend these routines and create mutually developmental and self-renewing relationships.

The Interaction of Enneagram Styles

It's difficult to see how we create problems in relationships because each of us views the world through a particular filter. Our filters consist of many influences, both "nature" and "nurture," in the forming of our personalities, and that point of view dictates how we selectively attend to events and personalities surrounding us. Each Enneagram style has characteristic ways of interacting; responses from others will vary with different "numbers" as well.

People at Enneagram point Nine, for example, tend to go along with others' ideas, to a fault -- and when they do, resentment can fester inside. Consequently, they may have difficulty letting go of a perceived slight, obsessing about it for a long time. Enneagram Eights have plenty of ideas but often succumb temporarily to their enthusiasms and/or forget to include a Nine partner. So an Eight/Nine couple might be drawn together initially because of their mutual comfort with the Eight's providing structure, then both begin to feel some pain from that same dynamic: Eights get tired of having to hold up the world (a belief they create and sustain, of course). Nines get tired of being "invisible" (ditto).

Whatever the dynamics, more often than not we tend to blame the other person for problems we encounter. We need to transform ourselves within our personality styles in ways that enhance our relationships and not be satisfied with a static definition of who we are. If you understand how to overcome patterns that develop among different styles you can commit to mutual development. The following, three-step model illustrates how to do this:

Step 1: Each share with the other your understanding of your Enneagram style in general, and how, specifically, that plays out for you. What doesn't fit for you about that personality point? What are your gifts? What problems do you think your motivations and behavior create in the relationship? Ask each other for feedback and listen to it.

Step 2: Create a clear picture of what the transformed relationship will look like and commit yourselves to learning as you go -- pick two or three areas of mutual development (don't overwhelm yourselves with too many promises; set some priorities and work on them one at a time).

Step 3: Be alert to how you get in the way of your own progress and stay committed to the transformation--notice and affirm each other for the ways in which you stick to the plan. When one or the other of you gets hooked, instead of placing blame, try to understand how it happened and what either of you could do the next time to keep from getting caught up in the old pattern.

Click here to see how this might work with a Nine and a One.

How an Eight and a Two could improve their relationship.

Relationship issues with a Four and a Five.

Dynamics of an Eight/Six relationship

Dynamics of an Eight/Eight relationship.

Mutual development with a Six and a Nine.

And a bit about a Three and a Seven at work.