Incorporating The Enneagram Types Into Your Life

After spending many years exploring the Enneagram personality types, I've found that understanding and applying the types to one's life can be summed up in five parts. I've reorganized Dave's Enneagram website to provide web links and posts for exploring each part.

1. Understanding the Enneagram type system
   • The concepts of the system offer a common language needed for discussing the types with others and reveal possible paths for exploration of the types.
2. Describing the nine Enneagram types
   • Descriptions of the nine types give you a starting point for discussing and discovering the actual experiences of each type.
3. Determining your type and the type of others
   • Correctly determining your own type and the types of other people lets you know what type you may be observing in yourself and others.
4. Experiencing the nine Enneagram types
   • You go beyond the descriptions in the books when you hear the types describe their experience in their own words.
5. Going beyond type
   • The nine types represent nine aspects of ourselves. After you find some freedom from your habitual type, exploring the eight other types within yourself becomes possible.

Although they are numbered 1 through 5, these five parts of Ennea-type understanding don't necessarily proceed in the order indicated. In fact, there is much looping back and forth between the parts as one learns more.

Parts 1 through 3 are where most people begin with the Ennea-types. It's easy at this point to see the types as stereotypes or caricatures (ironically, some authors create actual cartoon caricatures and animations for their books and websites that can re-inforce the stereotypes).

In part 4, a true understanding of the types begins when you go beyond an understanding of external behavior to an understanding of internal experience. This can happen when you truly listen to a person of a given type describe their internal reality. Two difficulties here: 1) being sure the individual was correctly typed and 2) that what's being described has to do with type and not something else.

While part 4 is understanding the internal experience of each type within others, part 5 is understanding the internal experience of all nine types within yourself. This is not a mimicking of external behavior. This is an actual shift of inner experience.

I'm currently working on a book that simplifies the understanding of the nine types by systematically defining each type by their core inner experience. It also opens up and explores paths available for discovering all nine types within ourselves.

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