A Window to the Soul

I'm writing a story for my high school newspaper about personality and the Enneagram. Please fill out the following brief questionnaire. I'm in need of quotes for my story.

What makes the Enneagram powerful?

People thirst for a sense of meaning and connection in their lives, above and beyond any immediate need to "become a better manager" or "get along better with my spouse." The Enneagram is powerful because the recognition of our key coping strategy or "style" provides an immediate guideline to recognize blocks that keep us from our essential selves. Many people experience this as an awakening (or even conversion). When used with its full scope, the Enneagram is a vehicle for transformation. Most spiritual disciplines and some psychological disciplines (e.g., Jungian psychology) focus on the discovery of Self (self-individuation): the ultimate goal is connection with the Essential Self.

Why is the Enneagram valuable? What practical uses does it have?

As you can see from some of my articles about building relationships and working with teams, the Enneagram is a wonderful tool for people to improve their relationships. As with any system that helps us identify and explore how people are different from each other, the Enneagram opens our eyes to how we've mistakenly assumed people who aren't like us are somehow wrong. The in-depth Enneagram character descriptions by experienced teachers can help us appreciate why, for example, someone seems so bossy, or so critical. Instead of taking it personally and reacting defensively, we can begin to respond to each other with more understanding and kindness, which tends to block the self-fulfilling nature of our more typical defensive responses. If your boss is an Eight, for example, it's easy to respond to his or her directives with anger or passive-aggressive behavior; but when you do that, you don't learn anything about yourself and keep the relationship at the level of "strategy" instead of moving closer to another human being).

What benefits and what downfalls result from classifying people by the Enneagram?

The benefits arise from using the Enneagram distinctions to better understand people and thus to interact in more mutually fulfilling ways. The downfalls result when people use the Enneagram to excuse themselves or rationalize the behavior of others (e.g., "Well, I'm a Four and it's hard for us Fours to pull out of our melancholy" or "Well, she's a Three, so you're never going to see her be a team player--she'll always want all the glory"). It's just not true that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." I had a student in an Enneagram class who is more than 80 years old and still very much engaged in becoming all that he can be. In fact he wrote a poem to me about how his type plays out for him!

Briefly describe the Enneagram's limitations.

Like any system, the Enneagram doesn't explain everything, though some enthusiasts act as if it does. But that's more a limitation of the users than of the system itself. In my experience the Enneagram is a powerful window to the soul.

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