Abbreviated Descriptions

We'll keep the General Principles in sight over in the column to the right, for extra clarity.  Endeavoring to offer quick, abbreviated descriptions, for quick reference only, the descriptions will err on the side of generalities and traits from different levels of development within the same type.  You won't fit all of the description to a tee, but you'll notice when it pretty much has you pegged.

Remember, this stage is where you need to apply the "Three Criteria Rule."  Each Type has a distinct shift in perspective when moving from an average state to a stressful state, or to a secure/confident state.

If the description is accurate for your average state, but totally wrong for your stressful state, that disqualifies the shape.  The same rule goes for how you feel when you're totally confident and secure.

This process effectively "triangulates" your position, just like when you give someone an address, and give them the two streets the address is between.  Even if that address could be found elsewhere, only the one between those streets is the correct one.

One - Perfection/Correction

Having a rational, yet idealistic approach, with a deep sense of responsibility, you’re usually orderly and highly principled.  You have an intuitive ability to see potential for improvement, noticing what is right or wrong, and you are strongly motivated to improve it.  You often get frustrated by people “breaking the rules,” or "doing it wrong."

Focus of Attention:  What’s wrong and how it can be improved?

You are responsible and dependable, priding yourself on your honesty, integrity, and work ethic.

The Dark Side:  Your attention to error can lead to a compulsive need for criticism, judgment and “correcting” of yourself and others.  Sometimes this sounds like a "running commentary" to those around you.  It’s often hard to see when something is good enough.  You have a tendency to engage in black and white thinking: relationships, tasks, even life are judged either good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair. You often take on too much responsibility and feel resentful that others don't do their share or come through with their commitments.  Forsaking pleasure in favor of what "should" be done adds fuel to the fire of resentment that burns inside.  Fear of making mistakes or appearing foolish can lead to procrastination in decision-making.

When Stressed Out:  Suppressing your anger about things being wrong, and not being able to change them, pushes you to feel much more emotional, melancholy, even depressed, and less connected to your intuition.  You feel the pull to withdraw from others in your moodiness.

When Relaxed and Secure: You want to try all sorts of different things, and feel more adventurous.  Rules don’t feel as imperative to life anymore.  The black and white thinking goes Technicolor.

Two - Giving/Approval

Having a caring, nurturing, giving nature with a drive for approval and connection, you have a natural ability to “read” others empathically, and a desire to fill their needs, while postponing your own.

Focus of Attention:  Other people’s needs and feelings, connecting and approval.

You are driven to connect emotionally and fill others’ needs.  You enjoy facilitating and enthusiastically supporting others in reaching their potential, and prefer being the power behind the throne.  At your best, a warm and caring true altruist, where giving is as natural as breathing, and free of expectation.

The Dark Side:  You are often so tuned into other's needs/ feelings that you’re not aware of your own. As a result, you can find yourself drained, resentful, and even angry (usually showing up as passive-aggressive behavior, so as to not alienate anyone and get disconnected).  You may give to get, and at times may give to those who’ve not asked for help or don't want what you offer.  Feeling you know what others really need and that you can provide it can be a source of pride.

When Stressed Out:  You feel like you need to take charge and make sure everything is taken care of.  Sometimes it shows up as a flash of anger, feeling taken advantage of or not listened to.

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel like you can just immerse yourself in your emotions and feel everything more deeply.  Crying from happiness or witnessing "grace," comes as easily as from pain or sorrow.

Three - Accomplishment/Achievement

Having a pragmatic, can-do, adaptable, competitive and ambitious nature, you like to get things done, as you identify your sense of self with your accomplishments.  You feel impatience with anything preventing those accomplishments.

Focus of Attention:  Success, the goal-oriented task at hand, and coming out looking good. 

A multitasking, high-energy person, you get things done. You can adapt to any situation or group with a chameleon-like ability to match the environment. You can inspire and motivate through charm and presentation of a successful image; a natural salesperson. 

The Dark Side:  Focused attention on goals and tasks can overshadow other aspects of your life.  Feelings are often stuffed in the service of doing.  An underlying “win at all costs” motivation may increase your feeling of competition, and invite cutting corners to complete goals or projects, in a “just do it” manner. 

When Stressed Out:  You may start to feel disengaged and run on autopilot, oddly vague, unfocused, drained, and un-prioritized. 

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel less competitive and more cooperative, with more satisfaction and joy coming from team accomplishments than your own.

Four - Aesthetics/Longing

Having a deep connection with aesthetic and emotional issues, you can be sensitive, withdrawn, individualistic, artistic,  and expressive  You’re very drawn to the aesthetic: beauty, music, etc. and may have little tolerance for any lack of emotional authenticity.

Focus of Attention: 

What’s missing in the present?

You have a singular ability to be present and comfortable with life's more intense situations: grief, death, and depression. Often blessed with a strong sense of the dramatic and/or aesthetic, you want your contributions in life to be unique.  When you’re feeling optimistic, you feel that you will achieve the nice things in life that you deserve.

The Dark Side:  You crave emotional intensity and connection. Highs and lows, and a tendency toward dramatic presentation/affect can be perceived as "too much" for some, perhaps alienating them.  Attraction to melancholy and the "darker" emotions can seem like wallowing to others. At its worst, melancholy can slide into depression. Insistence on exhibiting uniqueness or difference can be counterproductive to your own goals and off-putting to others.

When Stressed Out:  You become a people-pleaser, reassuring yourself that you haven’t alienated others.  Sometimes you become angry about things being done wrong or being wronged yourself.

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel much less self-conscious of your feelings, and more in tune with objective principles. You really enjoy doing things precisely and right.

Five - Detached/Observation

Having a cerebral, perceptive, “scientific,” withdrawn and solitary worldview, you have a natural ability to detach from feelings, needs, and other people.  You strive for clarity and a cool head prevailing in situations where others are emotional or succumbing to chaos.  Privacy is very important to you.  Human interaction can seem unimportant or even troubling.

Focus of Attention:  Detached for the situation, step back and analyze.

You are independent, self-contained, and enjoy delving deeply into areas of knowledge that excite you.  You have a highly developed capacity for analyzing and synthesizing complex information.

The Dark Side:  Your approach can be overly mental when a more feeling approach is appropriate.  You can appear distant, withholding or emotionally unavailable to others, preferring the mental realms to interaction. Your strong need for privacy can extend to isolation and compartmentalization of life: compartments for work, relationship, and leisure each with their own time limits.

When Stressed Out:  You feel more scattered, impulsive and less grounded.  You might suddenly want to escape the sense of stress by connecting socially, or engaging in other "extroverted" activities, which you are not really all that comfortable doing.

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel exceptionally grounded, confident, and in charge.  You feel that your knowledge can direct you to act and lead others well, and that you belong in this leadership role.

Six - Safety/Security/Doubt

Having a Safety/Security-oriented mind, you easily see the pitfalls, downside, or dangers of any situation.  This can make you a masterful planner, as you visualize ways to deal with or avoid these dangers.  You can be quite engaging and responsible, all the while doubting, and perhaps doing a bit of testing.

Focus of Attention:  What could go wrong, worst-case scenarios, and problem-solving. 

Your problem-solving nature and ability to see what could go wrong may lead you into your career (many engineers are this Type).  Being contrary is one of your ever-ready testing methods, as trust is an issue.  Once trust is established, You can exhibit tremendous loyalty to a cause or person you believe in.

The Dark Side:  Your highly developed sense of danger can be activated when the actual potential threat is low. Others may feel that you are a naysayer or an excessive worrier.  Questioning and second-guessing can extend to your own ideas or work, where you can become your own obstacle.  Using thinking over intuition, loyalty can be misplaced and reinforce your sense of betrayal. 

When Stressed Out:  You tend to bury yourself in your work, without slowing for questions.  Very auto-pilot.  You sometimes feel more competitive. 

When Relaxed and Secure: All of your questions feel less pressing.  You feel more peaceful, open to others, and the here and now.  You can actually enjoy yourself “vegging out” and not necessarily doing anything specific.

Seven - Variety/Planning

Having a fun-loving, enthusiastic, approach to life, you love to sweep others up in your enthusiasm.  You enjoy envisioning possibilities and options, and can feel physically trapped by limitations of choices.

Focus of Attention:  Planning the next fun, interesting thing to do you can see the bright side of any situation. High energy and upbeat, your enthusiasm is your strongest suit.  You are a great idea person, spinning out endless visions and potentials, and a synergistic thinker, making connections between seemingly unlike things.

The Dark Side:  Your focus on the bright side of life can lead to neglecting other realms of experience. Sadness, pain, loss or difficulty is avoided.  You want to rush to the next experience or sensation in child-like fashion, but don’t necessarily follow through to completion.  May experience your own inability to stay focused as a kind of “attention deficit.”  Deep beneath chasing fun and experiences, is the fear that you will miss out on something.

When Stressed Out:  You feel more need for order, and people doing things wrong really tries your patience.  You want to think the best of them, but they get on your last nerve.  Highly critical.  Difficult to see options.

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel quieter, slower, easier, and more interested in going deeper into experiences.  You don’t feel a drive to chase happiness.

Eight - Force/Power/Will

Having a powerful, assertive, self-confident, and decisive nature, you are a straight-forward, direct, what-you-see-is-what-you-get person of action.  You take charge and make decisions quickly.  Confrontation is comfortable for you, as you prefer the directness of it.

Focus of Attention:  Strength of will, power, and getting what you want.

You can inspire others to do more than they thought possible by sheer force of will. You often act as protector of the weak and promoter of justice.  You tend to see confrontation as just another way to connect, (if you see it at all) and it’s nice to have something to push back against.  Below the surface is a deep wish that you didn't have to confront, and feeling the need to do so adds to your frustration and anger.

The Dark Side:  Your direct, no-nonsense approach can be perceived as brutal and controlling to others. Unaware of your impact, you can potentially be a steamroller. Decisions made quickly by gut instinct may not be as thought out or feelings-tempered.  Your lust for life may lead to excesses. Others can see you as too much, too loud, too everything.

When Stressed Out:  You feel more reclusive and emotionally withdrawn, wanting to get away and get space to strategize and better assess before acting.

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel warm and compassionate, and genuinely want to help, protect, and uplift others.  Being nurturing or being nurtured doesn’t feel like weakness to you now.

Nine - Peace-seeker/Avoidance

Having an easy-going, calm, receptive, and generally optimistic approach, you avoid conflict and confrontation, preferring to maintain that peaceful state.  You have an intuitive under-standing of other’s internal states to where they can feel as if they might be your own, creating a sense of not being sure.  The attention on others seems to reduce conflict, so it becomes a cycle of comfort.

Focus of Attention:  Other people’s agenda, positions, and needs. 

At your best, you’re open and accepting of others without judgment, and you’re capable of deep connection with them. Through your understanding comes an ability to see all sides of an issue and play peacemaker. You value being (vs. doing) and often live in the present moment.

The Dark Side:  Submerging your own preferences to the agendas and priorities of others leaves you with unmet needs. Prioritizing is quite difficult. Seeing all things as equal, and identifying with all parts, can hamper decision making. Your desire for peace can curtail sometimes necessary conflict.  You sometimes appear low energy or sluggish to others. 

When Stressed Out:  You feel more anxious, reactive, and nervous.  Your ambivalence in decision-making becomes more like second-guessing. 

When Relaxed and Secure: You feel assertive relaxed, and sure of your knowledge and talents, and want to do things that show them. (teach or run workshops, lead discussion groups, etc.)

General Principles 

Sure you can relate to all of them.

We can reflect all Nine Types, but five of them are what I would call "indigenous" and the other four reflect learned survival strategies.  One Type is your primary core lens, even if we can see ourselves thru several if not all of them.

If you threw a rubber ball into a box, it would likely bounce off of every wall, but it would hit one wall first.  That would be your Primary Type.  From there, we are an amalgam of those five indigenous types: your Primary (how you usually take in the world around you), your two adjacent Wings, (which have differing levels of influence) your lens in Stress (you know how you see the world differently when you are totally stressed out?) and your lens in Security (once again the world looks very different when you feel confident and secure).  Obviously, your own blend is what makes you unique, and yet allows for deeply shared experience.

Age and Experience – Think of yourself as you were at age 25 or younger.

As we progress through our lives, we take on and learn coping strategies from those around us.  We are sort of like a giant snowball rolling downhill picking up more and more snow, and yet that core in the very center (which is still you) hasn’t changed.  It can be hard to sort out what your own original strategies are unless you place yourself at the age before this process got under way.  If you are 25 or younger this is a breeze, but for many, it’s kind of a stretch.  This is the age that most people really take their original coping strategies “on the road,” and the “cross-contamination” that can confuse the assessment usually begins.

Motivation not Behavior – Don’t focus on what you do.  Focus on why you do it.

The real magic of the Enneagram is how it addresses who you are on a much deeper level than defining yourself by what you do.  You and I could do the exact same thing for completely different reasons, thus the behavior itself doesn’t tell us nearly as much.

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General Principles 

Sure you can relate to all of them.

We can reflect all Nine Types, but five of them are what I would call "indigenous" and the other four reflect learned survival strategies.  One Type is your primary core lens, even if we can see ourselves thru several if not all of them.

If you threw a rubber ball into a box, it would likely bounce off of every wall, but it would hit one wall first.  That would be your Primary Type.  From there, we are an amalgam of those five indigenous types: your Primary (how you usually take in the world around you), your two adjacent Wings, (which have differing levels of influence) your lens in Stress (you know how you see the world differently when you are totally stressed out?) and your lens in Security (once again the world looks very different when you feel confident and secure).  Obviously, your own blend is what makes you unique, and yet allows for deeply shared experience.

Age and Experience – Think of yourself as you were at age 25 or younger.

As we progress through our lives, we take on and learn coping strategies from those around us.  We are sort of like a giant snowball rolling downhill picking up more and more snow, and yet that core in the very center (which is still you) hasn’t changed.  It can be hard to sort out what your own original strategies are unless you place yourself at the age before this process got under way.  If you are 25 or younger this is a breeze, but for many, it’s kind of a stretch.  This is the age that most people really take their original coping strategies “on the road,” and the “cross-contamination” that can confuse the assessment usually begins.

Motivation not Behavior – Don’t focus on what you do.  Focus on why you do it.

The real magic of the Enneagram is how it addresses who you are on a much deeper level than defining yourself by what you do.  You and I could do the exact same thing for completely different reasons, thus the behavior itself doesn’t tell us nearly as much.

Back to Top

General Principles 

Sure you can relate to all of them.

We all embody all Nine Types, but one Type is your primary core lens.  If you threw a rubber ball into a box, it would likely bounce off of every wall, but it would hit one wall first.  That would be your Primary Type.  From there, we are an amalgam of at least Five Types: your Primary, your two adjacent Wings, (which have differing levels of influence) your lens in Stress, and your lens in Security.  Obviously, your own blend is what makes you unique, and yet allows for deeply shared experience.

Age and Experience – Think of yourself as you were at age 25 or younger.

As we progress through our lives, we take on and learn coping strategies from those around us.  We are sort of like a giant snowball rolling downhill picking up more and more snow, and yet that core in the very center (which is still you) hasn’t changed.  It can be hard to sort out what your own original strategies are unless you place yourself at the age before this process got under way.  If you are 25 or younger this is a breeze, but for many, it’s kind of a stretch.  This is the age that most people really take their original coping strategies “on the road,” and the “cross-contamination” that can confuse the assessment usually begins.

Motivation not Behavior – Don’t focus on what you do.  Focus on why you do it.

The real magic of the Enneagram is how it addresses who you are on a much deeper level than defining yourself by what you do.  You and I could do the exact same thing for completely different reasons, thus the behavior itself doesn’t tell us nearly as much.