Out of
the Box Coaching and
Breakthroughs with the Enneagram,
Mary R. Bast, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1999. All rights reserved. Revised:
October 05, 2008
What's the Point?
I'm trying to decide if I'm a Nine or a Five. I see in "Distinctions Among Styles" (Key Behaviors/Fixations) the talk style of the Five is "dissertations" and the talk style of the Nine is "epic tales." How are these different?
A key distinction is that a "dissertation" from the Five is well-organized and logical (and intended to directly influence one's thinking about a concept). This reflects the way a Five's mind works: Fives will collect a mountain of information and synthesize it, cull it down (they can even be too reductionistic). This style shows up in their language and the metaphors they use as well. A good example is in Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept. In contrast, an "epic tale" from a Nine wanders. Nines can be distracted by one thought, then another, and go off on tangents and may even forget what point they were trying to make. Or they may tell a story to illustrate a point and tell the story from start to finish in sometimes agonizing detail. This reflects the way a Nine's mind tends to work: somewhat like a Chef's Salad when you stir it up - it seems to get bigger and bigger.
As illustration, notice all the various sections of this web site (I'm a Nine). You could start with one article and eventually link to most of the other articles at the site. I asked my computer-whiz daughter for feedback a few months after I started this, and she showed me how the linked pages didn't have any identifying information about me or how to contact me or return to the home page; and the links were full-frame instead of the "windows" I have now. So, for example, you could go from my Home Page to the Case Description of the One, from there link to the article on Anger, then to a link I used to have to the Albert Ellis web site, and thus have left my site completely! She gently pointed out the need to put my site name and link to key categories on every page; otherwise readers could get completely lost.
(Note: When I first wrote this response in 2004, every section of the site had different background colors, fonts, and designs. With each page I was having fun learning, without thinking of the lack of clarity and focus for readers. Now that I have more than 500 pages, even I was getting lost; hence the change to a consistent format with a trail back to the beginning.)
More responses to readers' questions