Master your personality
Last week, we discussed the importance of mastering one’s personality. Today, we will look at one of the popular frameworks that you can use to understand your personality type: The Enneagram of Personality. The Enneagram is a model of human personality that has nine different personality types with some interconnections between them.
Online, you will find a lot of free material on Enneagram, including tests you can do to determine your dominant Enneagram type. This way, you will easily identify your strengths as well as areas that you need to manage. In most cases, literature will indicate for each of the nine types, the positives, the negatives, the major fear, desire and so on.
Let us briefly look at the nine personality types according to the Enneagram. You need to pick up a book or download detailed material online if you are to master the Enneagram to a good level of detail and granularity.
Group one are referred to as the reformers. Their major focus is perfection. No wonder, their basic fear is corruptness, imbalance and being bad. Their basic desire is goodness, integrity and balance.
Group two are the helpers. They enjoy freedom. Their basic fear is being unloved while their basic desire is to feel loved. They enjoy to help others even at the expense of their own needs.
Group three are the achievers. They will do anything to achieve what they set their eye on. Their basic fear is worthlessness and their basic desire is to feel to be valuable. They will push themselves to always be ‘the best’.
Group four are the ‘Individualists’. They love originality or being unique. Their basic fear is having no identity or significance. Their basic desire is to be uniquely themselves. They will go to limits in trying to be unique.
Group five are the investigators. They like transparency and they love knowledge. They are comfortable when they have full information. Their basic fear is helplessness, incapability and incompetence. Their basic desire is mastery and understanding.
Group six are the loyalists. Their basic focus is faith. They hate to be without support or guidance. That is why one of their characteristics is that they will be indecisive, full of doubt and regularly seek reassurances.
Group seven are the enthusiasts. They love planning and wisdom. They hate to be trapped in pain or deprivation. Their basic desire is to be contented and satisfied. They will do everything possible to seek maximum fulfilment.
Group eight are the challengers. They love truth. Their basic fear is to be harmed, controlled or violated. They will do anything to protect themselves.
Group nine are the peacemakers. Their main focus is love. Their basic fear is loss or fragmentation and separation. They want unity at all costs. Their basic desire is wholeness and peace of mind.
The summaries above are not adequate for you to discover your personality type. You need to read the detail and then do the exercise or tests to identify your main type as well as the other couple of personality types that come close to what you are. This way, you can better understand what you are, and therefore, you can optimise your delivery, performance and success.
When you read the detail, you will also be able to easily understand the Enneagram Personality type for some of the people around you. This way, you will optimise your relationships and workings with others. Once you know people you work with, it becomes easy to relate effectively and to build on one another’s strengths.
Be there next week when we will look at a different model or framework used for categorising the different personalities of people.
