If you go deep into the Enneagram, you’ll also discover phrases like “wings,” “triads,” and “stress” or “growth” lines as well as subcategories called “variants.” These all add further nuances that can help you determine the specifics of your coping strategies, but the fear at the center of each main type is always the most helpful place to begin—and often, the most illuminating.
How is the Enneagram different from other personality tests?
Unlike systems like the Myers-Briggs, which describes how you think, the Enneagram aims to get at something deeper. Myers-Briggs explores how we process information and interact with the world; the Enneagram asks what of ourselves we’re unconsciously protecting.
Most teachers describe each Enneagram type as a “survival” strategy—a way of navigating life that once helped us feel safe, accepted, loved, competent, or in control. While those strategies are often incredibly effective, what once protected us can eventually begin to limit us. That’s why the goal of the Enneagram isn’t to become a better version of your type, but to recognize your type so clearly that you can opt to respond differently.
This is also what makes the Enneagram feel different from other personality frameworks: it’s not meant to be static. Built into the system is a map for growth: each type has a direction it moves toward when thriving, and a direction it collapses into under stress. Enneagram coach Jackie Contessa explains it this way: “The purpose of the Enneagram is to disidentify from your personality and be you.”
Why is the Enneagram suddenly so popular?
It goes without saying that we’re living in a culture obsessed with self-awareness. We ponder our attachment styles, examine our birth charts, decipher our Human Design profiles. Therapy-speak is everywhere; just think of how often the words “boundaries,” “triggers,” and “people-pleasing” get thrown around in everyday conversation.
It’s easy to reduce all of these frameworks to a shallow search for certainty in a chaotic world. But licensed therapist and CEO Keisha Saunders-Waldron thinks something else is at play. “People are exhausted from performing,” she says. “The Enneagram allows you to connect to the internal experience. The anxiety underneath the achievement. The anger underneath the people-pleasing. In a culture that rewards outcomes over honesty, it offers something rare: permission to understand yourself from the inside out.”
The same unconscious patterns that shape our inner worlds also shape our outer worlds: our relationships, our workplaces, our politics, our communities, and the ways we move through life. So before we can change how we relate to each other, we first have to understand how we handle ourselves—and the Enneagram helps to illuminate that.
Why it’s so easy to get your Enneagram type wrong
All this doesn’t mean it’s not super easy to get your Enneagram type totally wrong. For a decade, I thought I was a Three, but after taking the test recently, I realized I might actually be more of a Four or Nine. Enneagram practitioners say this is normal, and owed to the fact that most of us identify with our behavior rather than our deeper motivations. We answer the questions based on who we’ve become professionally, how we act in relationships, who we aspire to be, or the version of ourselves we’ve carefully cultivated over time. But the Enneagram itself asks us to look beneath all of that.
