What is the Enneagram?

The Enneagram is a personality typing tool describing 9 distinct personality types. Each person likely relates to aspects of each of the 9 types, but there is one that we lead with from beginning to end of our lives. It is common to say "I am X type,” although many people more accurately say, “I present as an X type.”

Each of our types describes the psychological ego structure. When talking about a person’s “type,” it can also be described as their type structure, their ego, their ego structure, or their psychological ego structure. The terms can be used interchangeably.

The Enneagram simply describes the blueprint of our psychological ego structure. No type is better than another as each has its own inherent strengths and liabilities. Just like the architecture of a building or car, each structure has their own inherent strengths and weak points.

Many people use the Enneagram as a tool for self awareness and growth. Understanding yourself through the framework of the Enneagram is an enlightening way to understand yourself and how you operate in the world, celebrate your superpowers and what makes you unique. It is also helpful to understand your weaknesses to release yourself from shame and focus on those areas as an opportunity for growth.

Origin

The Enneagram of Personality Types is a modern synthesis of a number of ancient wisdom traditions, but the person who originally put the system together was Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo was born in Bolivia and raised there and in Peru, but as a young man, moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to learn from a school of inner work he had encountered. Thereafter, he journeyed in Asia gathering other knowledge before returning to South America to begin putting together a systematic approach to all he had learned.

Wings & Substypes

The Enneagram is a dynamic tool as each person has their dominant type, but also 2 wings. The wings are the 2 numbers on each side of your number that influence the way you think, feel, behave, and interact with the world. One wing is usually stronger than the other, so many people identify themselves as their dominant type with their wing. For example, if you are a type 3 with a stronger 2 wing, you would identify as a 3w2.

There are also 3 subtypes for each type based on our 3 instincts: self-preservation, social, and one-to-one. These instincts are in each person, but one is usually more dominant, one is oftentimes repressed, and the third lies somewhere in the middle. Your dominant instinct determines your subtype, and subtypes are important to consider since they can make 2 people of the same type look very different. For example, a social 6 and a one-to-one 6 might look very different despite sharing the same type structure.