Enneagram
The Enneagram test is a powerful tool for personal growth, providing deep self-understanding, identifying areas for improvement, enhancing relationships, achieving balance, and unlocking your full potential.
Self-Awareness
The Enneagram provides deep insight into one's core motivations, fears, and behavioral patterns. By understanding your Enneagram type, you gain self-awareness about your strengths, weaknesses, and unconscious tendencies. This self-knowledge is the foundation for personal development.
Identifying Growth Areas
The Enneagram not only describes your personality, but also highlights areas for growth and improvement. It can reveal blind spots, defense mechanisms, and unhealthy coping strategies that may be holding you back. Armed with this information, you can consciously work on transforming these limiting patterns.
Improving Relationships
The Enneagram helps you better understand the perspectives and needs of others. Knowing your own type and those of your loved ones can improve communication, empathy, and conflict resolution in your relationships.
Achieving Balance
Each Enneagram type has both healthy and unhealthy expressions. The test can guide you towards integrating your type's positive qualities while mitigating its less desirable tendencies. This supports you in developing a more balanced, integrated personality.
Unlocking Potential
By shedding light on your core motivations and inner workings, the Enneagram can unlock your unique potential and help you become your best, most authentic self. It empowers you to make conscious choices aligned with your values and aspirations.
Free Tests
- https://www.eclecticenergies.com/enneagram/test
- https://enneagramuniverse.com/
- https://similarminds.com/test.html
The Enneagram appears to be a hybrid of older traditions (Seven deadly sins, Kaballah, Sufi, Chaldean Seal, Gnosticism) based largely on intuition (in an unscientific era). Claudio Naranjo westernized it, and most current authors owe much of their work to his ideas.
Recommended Tests
The Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales (WEPSS) ($15)
or
Enneagram Institute ($12)
There are dozens of tests online - many pay for ranking on Google (which is a red flag) and are exploiting the enneagram (which nobody owns) for profit. Some even deceptively advertise a 'free test' only to hit you with the requirement to buy it after spending time answering all the questions (and I suspect many people pay up because they don't want to give up all that time the put into answer the questions).
You will receive a wealth of information in the report about your type (mine was dead on in many aspects), and here are the 9 styles (which are also contained within the report).
You'll get a report back based on your answer to 200 questions which took me about 40 minutes.
I already benefited greatly from this work... it revealed an insight about myself related to an event later this year I've been tasked to run this year - the Central Coast Writers Conference. When the role of 'volunteer coordinator' came up in my meeting, I immediately felt a sense of dread and recoiled... and my enneagram helped me understand why. Thankfully, knowing this now - I can put my energy into finding a volunteer coordinator for the conference so the responsibility doesn't fall on me.
Once you discover your type, the goal is to recognize our passion (habit) and move towards our virtue (discipline).
Style ONE: The Good Person
ONES are attracted to and value goodness. They endeavor to be good persons, seeking to make the world a better place to live in. They want to realize all of their potential and help others to do the same. For ONES, life is about doing your best, setting high standards and goals and living up to them.
Aka The Reformer
Passion: Doing what's right & avoiding fault
Virtue: Accuracy & fairness
Style TWO: The Loving Person
TWOS value and are attracted to love. They want to be generous persons, seeking to make the world a more loving place in which to live. Harmonious intimate mutual relationships are what life is all about for TWOS.
Aka The Helper
Passion: Being helpful to others
Virtue: Generosity & kindness
Style THREE: The Effective Person
THREES are attracted to and value efficiency, industriousness, and competence. They want to be productive persons, seeking to make the world a more efficient place to live in. Bringing projects to completion, accomplishing goals, and working effectively are what life is about for THREES. Recognizing that the cosmos is an orderly harmonious system, THREES work to keep it running smoothly.
Aka The Achiever
Passion: Being successful
Virtue: Adaptability & resilience
Style FOUR: The Original Person
FOURS are attracted to and value originality, authenticity, individuality, and artistic expression. They want to be sensitive, refined persons, seeking to make the world more beautiful. Valuing the inner journey, each FOUR is on the quest for the Holy Grail, his or her real self. Honoring your uniqueness and deeply connecting to others and to the world is what life is all about for FOURS.
Aka The Individualist
Passion: Expressing oneself & finding their identity
Virtue: Clarity & authenticty
Style FIVE: The Wise Person
FIVES are attracted to and value wisdom, knowledge, and learning. They want to understand the world and make it a more reasonable place to live in. For FIVES, life is about having insights, learning about the nature of things, and seeing how everything fits together.
Aka The Investigator
Passion: Gaining knowledge & understanding the world
Virtue: Inquisitiveness & objectivity
Style SIX: The Loyal Person
SIXES are attracted to and value loyalty. They endeavor to be faithful, conscientious, responsible persons, keeping their word and honoring their commitments. They want to make the world a safer and more reliable place in which to live. Doing your duty and respecting your traditions is what life is all about for SIXES.
Aka The Loyalist
Passion: Finding safety & security
Virtue: Loyalty & courage
Style SEVEN: The Joyful Person
SEVENS are attracted to and value joy, variety, and excitement. They want to be happy persons, seeking to make the world a more delightful place to live in. SEVENS want to experience all the possibilities life has to offer. Having fun and being positive are their central goals.
Aka The Enthusiast
Passion: Experiencing life & exploring possibilities
Virtue: Adventurism & enthusiasm
Style EIGHT: The Powerful Person
EIGHTS are attracted to and appreciate power. They endeavor to be strong, independent, straightforward, assertive persons, who use their strength and influence to make the world a more just place. They value equity, the equal distribution of power, and show a concern for the underprivileged and disenfranchised. EIGHTS are chiefly concerned with being their own person, doing their own thing, and protecting their own people and interests.
Aka The Challenger
Passion: Being self-reliant & being in control
Virtue: Self-assertiveness & justice
Style NINE: The Peaceful Person
NINES are attracted to and value peace, harmony, and unity. They want to make the world an inclusive, harmonious, and conflict-free place to live in. They like being peaceful, calm, and ordered, and they prefer to go with the flow. They are confident that events are unfolding as they should, and they see no need to push the river, recognizing that it's flowing fine by itself. For NINES, being at one with yourself and your surroundings is what life is all about
Aka The Peacemaker
Passion: Building harmony & creating peace
Virtue: Compassion & Integrity
Our 'Enneagram Expert' in our co-working office recommended these books (many of which you can probably find at your library):
practical ways to apply the Enneagram test for personal growth
1. Identify Your Core Motivations and Fears
Understanding your Enneagram type reveals your core desires, fears, and unconscious motivations. This self-awareness is the foundation for growth, as it allows you to recognize unhealthy patterns and work towards more balanced, integrated behaviors.
2. Recognize Your Strengths and Weaknesses
The Enneagram highlights both your positive qualities and areas for improvement. Knowing your type's typical strengths and challenges empowers you to capitalize on your gifts while consciously addressing your limitations.
3. Develop Self-Observation Skills
The Enneagram encourages you to "catch yourself" engaging in unhealthy thought and behavior patterns as they happen. Cultivating this self-observation skill enables you to make more conscious choices aligned with your values.
4. Set Targeted Growth Goals
Rather than trying to overhaul every aspect of your life at once, the Enneagram helps you identify specific, manageable areas to focus your personal growth efforts. This prevents burnout and promotes sustainable change.
5. Improve Relationships
Understanding your own Enneagram type and those of your loved ones enhances empathy, communication, and conflict resolution in your relationships. This supports more fulfilling connections.
6. Integrate Healthy Traits
Each Enneagram type has both healthy and unhealthy expressions. The test can guide you towards integrating your type's positive qualities while mitigating its less desirable tendencies, leading to greater balance and wholeness.
Recommended Podcasts
In 2018, Sleeping At Last did a series of 9 podcasts discussing each type. It is probably the best deep dive I've heard on all nine types (and he gets props from many who study the topic):
And of course, there are subreddits for each type:
But there are multiple reddits for each type :( because anyone can create a subreddit:
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Enneagram5/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/EnneagramType5/