Mutual Development
with the Enneagram
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.
A
Four is divorcing a
One.
Dynamics
of an Eight/Six
relationship
Dynamics
of an Eight/Eight relationship.
Mutual
development with
a Six and a Nine.
A
Nine and Eight couple interrupt a pattern.
And a bit about a
Three and a Seven
at work.
