In this post, I’ll share how to use the Levels of Development from the Enneagram to fuel your personal development efforts. I’ll tell you how to determine (and validate) your Enneagram type. Further, I’ll be opening my client vault to you and sharing some of the same Enneagram materials I developed and share with my clients.
I’m impressed with how the Enneagram often provides a “lights on” moment for the people I work with. That’s why I’m excited to share it with you. It is a little work, and takes a little time (like 30-60 minutes). But the Return on Investment can be very high. Here’s an example of the Enneagram in action, combined with small group development…
A Real-Life Glimpse into Small Group Development (As In, Today)
Just today I was facilitating a cohort, and this magic-of-the-Enneagram-in-personal-development thing showed up yet again. An executive was struggling with a situation that had significant repercussions for her organization. Big time. The stakes, incredibly high.
She knew her old way of acting in this situation wasn’t going to work—she’d done enough personal work to know she couldn’t go back down that same-old, same-old road that would inevitably result in the same old, bad result. But what was the new road? She couldn’t find it, alone.
She put this challenge and her struggle with it to her cohort. As she so earnestly and vulnerably laid this out to her cohort group (the five other people she meets with twice a month for two hours in an environment of breathtaking candor and psychological safety), she was looking for the new behavior to do. The new road.
Good-old-fashioned problem solving wasn’t going to work. And it wasn’t going to work because she was too emotionally triggered by the situation. The power of her emotions was trumping her great intellect and her well-intentioned motivations. Old imprints were bleeding through. And even if she managed to do some sort of new behavior, her internal state was going to infuse the attempted new behavior with negativity and too much emotionality.
In a typical meeting in a typical business, the group would *immediately* go into problem-solving mode… “try this”, “have you thought of this”, “if it were me, I’d do this…”, “the problem is that other area, not you.” This is how we typically try to “help” people who are in emotional distress—we can’t stand their distress nor our distress at their distress. So we try to make it go away as fast as possible by whacking it on the kisser with a “solution”.
But this cohort knows how to stand down from problem-solving and stand around one another in their growth. As tempting as it was to console her, to problem solve, to blame the bad guy, to “suggest”, and the like, they were able to keep bringing it back to how this situation presented a growth opportunity for her. And what her culpability in the problem was. That’s a personal development mindset, and it is something to behold.
In a cohort focused on personal development, someone presents a challenge, but instead of helping them solve the problem by brainstorming a solution the entire point is to help the person see their self in the problem. Solve for yourself first, in other words. Looked at from that perspective, the point is to help the person increase their awareness and therefore expand their perception. This enables them to find the answer inside their own self. It is not easy work.
Enter the Enneagram
As this executive was getting supported by her group, someone brought her Enneagram type into the dialogue (as often happens). “How does your Enneagram type tend to operate in situations like this?” As the group and the executive started to explore this—including the fears, anxieties, counterproductive behaviors, and worldview—the executive could “step back.” They weren’t asking how she operated in situations like this—that was too emotionally charged at this point to be an effective reflection. They were asking how the type operates in situations like this.
When we talk about type, it is less personal without being impersonal. For the eye to see the eye, it needs a mirror. A “type” is a mirror. A type is simply a way of operating, and people who tend to operate in that particular way are said to be of that type. Looked at from a “type” perspective, we realize we aren’t alone, and we aren’t crazy… it just sometimes feels that way!
Huge, lightbulb moment. By stepping back, looking at her “type”, seeing the fears and resultant behaviors of that type, with the support of her cohort, this executive shifted. Her insight created an opportunity to her to not-do the old behavior because she could so clearly see the fear and the assumptions that were driving that old, familiar, default behavior. These fears and assumptions—in effect— had her. That is why she’s not been able to transform the default behaviors. They would just happen. By default.
When we can bring the formerly obscured fears and assumptions that drive our old, counterproductive behaviors out in the light of day, we start to empower ourselves to *not-do* the old behavior. But, more importantly, she could now sense the new road ahead. She couldn’t see it, but she could sense it. And that was enough. That was all she needed. Because she’s now experienced enough to know that personal development at times is nothing more than the art of feeling your way forward in the dark through the places that scare you to the places you long for.
And the “answer” she was seeking emerged from within her. No one can give you the power you claim when you fight the good fight and pull the answer up from your own depths. At the end, in great relief, excitement, and awe, she said, “You guys cut me free! Thank you!” But what actually happened was that her mates, using the Enneagram along with their bracing candor and unwavering support, simply circled around her and supported her in cutting herself free.
Personal development is something you must do yourself, but that you cannot effectively do alone.
The courage and openness of this executive and the candor and support of her cohort would have blown you away. I swear. And this is a BIG company. I long for every person in every organization to be able to experience, participate in, and contribute to a process like this. Where flourishing people drive a flourishing organization in a way that serves the greater good. One can dream, right?
How This Will Roll
In this post, I can’t give you a cohort. I can’t teach you how to develop psychological safety and candor that power a cohort. (Sara and I hope to work on a course for that in 2018.) But I can help you start to access the power of the Enneagram. And that, my friend, is my objective here.
The steps in this process will be:
- Type: Determine Your Enneagram Type
- Overview: Educate Yourself on the Basics of Your Type
- Behaviors: Review the Potential Counterproductive Behaviors of Your Type
- Underlying Fear: See the Fear that Drives Those Behaviors
Off we go!
Step 1: Determine Your Enneagram Type
A. Start by taking an Enneagram Assessment. You can take one for $12 here, or there is a much more elaborate one here for $46. (I don’t make any money on these, BTW.) The less expensive one simply gives you scores for the nine types. The more expensive one gives you a pretty fancy, 20 page report with a lot more information.
Here’s the deal: Don’t trust the report. Neither of them. What makes the Enneagram so powerful to use also makes it hard to initially type even with sophisticated computer logic. The $46 report has more powerful logic, and appears more likely to get your primary type right from the get-go.
So why use an assessment at all? They are incredibly useful because they will help you eliminate 5 to 6 of the types, and may even actually determine your primary type. But it is worth taking a few minutes to read some one page comparisons between your top 3–4 scores and see which one sounds more like you.
B. Finish by doing comparisons. As a general rule of thumb, take your highest 3-4 scores and do some comparisons. Start with your highest score and second highest score, and read the comparison. After deciding which type sounds more like you, compare that one to the third highest score. Compare the “winner” of that to your fourth highest score. The “winner” of that sequence of comparisons is most likely your Enneagram type.
Access the comparisons here.
Way to go! You’ve got your type. Now what?
Step 2: Educate Yourself on the Basics of Your Type
This only takes about 10-20 minutes. There’s some great, free information here that will educate you on your type. If you bought the $46 report, and it managed to get your primary type right (fingers-crossed), you’ve got about 20 pages of fine reading to do. If it didn’t, many aspects of the report are still useful.
By the way, if a spouse, partner, or friend is playing along with you, you might take a slight detour and look at how your two Enneagram types tend to do in relationship with one another. You can see that, here. By all means, take this detour. And be prepared for some laughs as you see your interpersonal dynamics you thought were so unique to you and yours reflected back to you as simply being typical to two people who operate with the “rules” of your respective types.
Okay, you should now have a basic lay-of-the-land for your type! Now, I’ve got some good stuff for you. I’m about to open my personal client vault for you…
Step 3: Review the Potential Counterproductive Behaviors for Your Type
I’ve created one-page cheat sheets for each of the type, spelling out the counterproductive behaviors that tend to trip each type up. You can access those here and download my cheatsheets for all nine types. Merry Christmas!
I encourage you to look at these potential counterproductive behaviors in two specific ways…
A Key Focus: Think about what you’d like to accomplish over the next three, six, nine, or twelve months. What’s the #1 thing? Got it? (Since this is illustrative at this point, don’t make a science project out of choosing your #1 thing. If you don’t already know it, just go with your best guess for now.)
Now, which one of the potential counterproductive behaviors will make it most difficult (or impossible) for you to accomplish that? I suggest you do this to shift from seeing the counterproductive behaviors as something that is “interesting” to something that you see as important and can actually use. And honestly, connecting (1) what you most want to accomplish and (2) how you tend to make that really hard or impossible is one of the most important connections you can make. This is personal development made practical.
But we’re not quite done.
Accomplishing important things isn’t all there is to life. In fact, aren’t relationships and the impact we have on others actually more important?
Relationships: Think about how you’d like to change in the way you relate to other people over the next three, six, nine, or twelve months. What is the #1 change you’d like to make in the impact you have on others, or how you “show-up” in and treat others in your relationships? Got that? (Again, since this is illustrative, go with your first hunch for now. For bonus points, ask your spouse, partner, or best friend for input.)
Now, review the potential counterproductive behaviors for your type again. Is there a different counterproductive behavior that will need to be addressed?
If there are two different behaviors that came up in the above, which is the single most important one? Consider making improving in that area your focus.
Fear Drives Counterproductive Behavior
Here’s the deal. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that you know you shouldn’t do that counterproductive behavior. You may have even tried to change it—perhaps many times—and the change didn’t ever quite stick. Particularly when you became stressed or emotionally upset. So, intellectually, you know you shouldn’t do it. Yet, when under stress or when triggered, you can’t help yourself.
Why?
Simple as this. You have a fear of *not* doing that counterproductive behavior. That fear is trumping your intellect. And that fear is turning on the axle of some assumptions you have. This sum-total of emotions-feeding-thoughts and thoughts-feeding-emotions is driving behavior you know you should change.
This is the way it was for the executive in the introduction above.
Part of the power of the Enneagram is that it can help you see not just the counterproductive behavior, but the underlying fear. Further, if you study the Enneagram a bit, you can also understand the worldview of the type, from which you can begin to ferret out the related assumptions that feed the fear and justify continuing the counterproductive behavior.
How do you see these fears? Enter the Levels of Development of the Enneagram, written specifically for your Enneagram type.
Step 4: Review the Underlying Fears of the Type
Back to the client vault we go!
In one-page cheat sheets for each type, I’ve captured from the book *Understanding the Enneagram* the nine Levels of Development for each type. If you already downloaded the freebie above, you’ve got ‘em. If you skipped the download above, you can still get it here.
Before jumping into your one-pager, you might want to read my prior post on the Levels of Development here. It isn’t required, but you just might get more out of this when you understand the nine Levels of Development a bit more. That post had a handy one-page download of the nine Levels of Development in general, which you can snag here if you missed it.
Okay, so look at the rightmost column of your one-pager, labeled, “Fear.” When that fear arises for someone who has your Enneagram type, their behavior falls down to the next level down (or farther, in some cases) if the arising fear is not met with presence.
That last statement is very important — “if the arising fear is not met with presence.” If the arising fear is met with sufficient presence, the fear does not have it’s way with us. If we are asleep at the wheel, and the fear sneaks up on us and overcomes us, down the levels of development we go. And hopefully not into a free-fall.
If we don’t check the fear with presence then we start behaving at a lower level. Which behavior depends upon how far down the levels we fall. See the column that says “External Behavior” for the next level down.
And if that behavior doesn’t work to get what you want, the fear of that level gets activated, and you fall down another level (or more). That dropping-down process continues until a light bulb—or more likely, an alarm—goes off and we realize that we are behaving in an increasingly counterproductive (or even destructive) way. That “shock” usually starts to send our awareness back up through the levels of the development and we return to what we called our center of gravity in the prior post.
How this relates to personal development.
Firstly, when you are struggling with an issue or problem, scan down the External Behavior column and tune into the behavior that is tripping you up (or may trip you up) in that situation. Look over to the “Fear” column for that row, and also look at the fear one row above and below. One or more of these three fears was at play in getting you here, is at play right now, and/or may become at play if you don’t bring more presence online.
This is how to use the information specifically.
Secondly, on a somewhat regular basis, study the entire diagram. Really get to know it.Know the types of behavior that signal your current level of awareness in any given moment—External Behavior column—and the way you tend to see or sense yourself on the inside at that level—Internal Perception column. Over time, use the external behaviors and internal state descriptions as “red flags” to signal when you are falling down through the levels. Bring more presence online. Also, use them to notice that your awareness is increasing.
If you begin to consistently catch yourself falling, and either prevent the fall or increase the speed with which you move back up through the levels, you will begin to move your *center of gravity* up to the next level. That’s a really big deal. That is personal development. It takes time. It takes consistent practice. But that is the essence of personal development. And that’s why we said in the prior post that:
personal development = increasing awareness
In short, the one-pager you hold in your hand is a short-hand version of the operating system of your Enneagram type. It shows how very specific fears, unchecked, result in very specific behaviors. Make this map your ally and your companion. However…
Don’t Confuse the Map with the Territory
The Enneagram is a framework, a map. You, however, are a mystery. You are the territory. No map can ever adequately convey the mystery of the territory the cartographer intended the map to depict. If you and your honey want to experience Paris, you don’t just look at the map of Paris. You have to go to Paris to experience Paris. However, a map of Paris can be incredibly helpful if you are planning for Paris, or you are in Paris and trying to find your way around.
But just as you wouldn’t confuse a map of Paris with your experience of being in Paris, don’t get too mesmerized by the Enneagram. You can get lost in it, and it can constrain you. Yet, used properly, it can also provide a very, very useful point of departure in your personal development work.
Wrapping It Up
This was a little side-trip in our journey of defining what personal development is.We’ve been working on defining it, and in the last post we looked at personal development through the lens of the Enneagram’s Levels of Development.
We defined personal development — when viewed through that lens — as increasing awareness and stabilizing it at higher levels. And that is precisely what the resources shared in this post can help you do… by helping bring to awareness your counterproductive behaviors, the associated fears, as your awareness moves up and down throughout the day and between pleasant and unpleasant situations.
In this post, I wanted to make the Levels of Development much more real for you. To bring it alive. In essence, as you increase your knowledge of yourself by using this map called the Enneagram, you should have more specifics about what your counterproductive behavior might be, the fear that drives it, and the internal perception you have about yourself at each level of awareness.
In the next post, we will look at personal development in using a third lens—PEMS.What is happening to the four interconnected parts of us—the Physical, the Emotional, the Mental, and the Spiritual—as we “do” personal development? As we move up through the Three Stages of Adult Development, and move our center of gravity up the the Nine Levels of Development in the Enneagram, what is happening to our PEMS? That’s up, next.
Make it a good week.
Otis
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P.P.S. There are prior posts in this series.
Personal Development… Without Knowing What It Is?
My Mission: Help You Better Understand Personal Development