The Dynamic Enneagram 1
How To Work With
Your Personality Style
To Truly Grow & Change
By Thomas Condon
Volume 1-Spring 2000 $14.95 / 252 pages ISBN: 1-55552-101-0
Volume 2-Summer 2000 $14.95 / 260 pages ISBN: 1-55552-102-9

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The Enneagram itself is a map, a map about maps of reality. It presents a psychology of the inner outlook, describing nine personality styles and their core points of view. The Enneagram maps out nine flat earths, nine versions of reality that people favor, nine ways the human unconscious creates and organizes subjective experience.

The Enneagram is a clear, exceptionally accessible version of what's called "ego psychology," and the part of us that sees the world as flat is otherwise known as our ego. Most of us have an intuitive, seat-of-the-pants sense of our ego though we may not realize its exact nature or depth of influence. We also may not know that our individual ego is similar to others, that there are species of ego.

The Enneagram describes nine distinct egos in a penetrating way, detailing the inner life, thought patterns and basic beliefs of each one. None is presented as better than another and each ego style has a range of healthy and unhealthy potentials.

Each Enneagram style offers strengths, gifts and advantages as well as limits, pitfalls and blind spots. Although each works from a different inner logic and supporting worldview, all Enneagram styles are designed to fulfill the same set of basic psychological needs.

Your ego generates your map of reality, and your sense of identity along with your core motivations, values and defenses. It controls a tight-knit cluster of guiding assumptions, offering you a general sense of direction and immediate ways to proceed.

Put another way the Enneagram shows a distinctive pattern to your psychological functioning, a central strategy that organizes your self-concept, personal history, family and cultural background, genetic heritage, and whatever idiosyncratic interpretations of the world that you may harbor.
Your Enneagram style is a lot like your nationality. Both define you, yet within them you're an individual. Both are deeply unconscious and shape your perceptions in involuntary ways. Both your nationality and your ego are simultaneously deep and yet shallow, parts of you that are apart from you at the same time.

While the Enneagram describes the sameness of people, everyone is unique. You have a constellation of qualities particular to your makeup - a distinct personal history, emotional temperament, genetic heritage and a soul. Your Enneagram style is only part of the picture yet, in another way, it's the key to everything.

Through your ego's inner outlook you accurately perceive a slice of reality - what author Richard Rohr has called "one-ninth of the truth." To some extent, each of us then mistakes our fraction of the world for the whole and gets stuck in a fixed point of view. In the bargain, we accidentally delete the other "eight-ninths" of reality and this omission lays the groundwork for most of our difficulties.

Once on a boat I noticed a little girl turn pale with fright as the engines revved up for departure. "What's wrong?" her mother asked. The child anxiously replied, "Are we going to get smaller and smaller and then disappear?" Every boat she had ever watched from the shore had done that.

Our limited personal focus means that we are very good at some things but weak at others, like someone on crutches who develops strong arms. While we excel with what we already know, our other potentials lie distant and buried. The Enneagram shows us our strengths even as it maps out the worlds of experience we are missing.

The Enneagram's nine styles are:
Ones - People who compare reality with what should be. When healthy, they are often morally heroic, objective and balanced. When less healthy they can be repressive, critical and perfectionistic.
Twos - People who see the world interpersonally and define themselves through service to others. When healthy, they are often selfless, loving and giving. When less healthy they can be dependent, prideful and hostile.
Threes - People who measure themselves by external achievement and the roles that they play. When healthy, they are often truthful, accomplished and excellent at what they do. When less healthy they can be conniving, competitive and false.
Fours - People who live principally in their imagination and feelings. When healthy, they are often artistic, articulate and inspiring. When less healthy they can be whiny, elitist and negative.
Fives - People who pull back from the world and live in their minds. When healthy, they are often wise, farsighted and knowledgeable. When less healthy they can be abstract, stingy and schizoid.
Sixes - People who anticipate the world's dangers. When healthy, they are often courageous, loyal and effective. When less healthy they can be cowardly, masochistic and paranoid.
Sevens - People who seek out multiple choices and positive futures. When healthy, they are often well rounded, affirming and generous. When less healthy they can be narcissistic, escapist and insatiable.
Eights - People who need to be strong, to prevail over circumstance. When healthy, they are often powerful, protective and committed to a cause. When less healthy they can be destructive, excessive and sadistic.
Nines - People who are receptive to their environment and play down their own presence. When healthy, they are often loving, modest and trusting. When less healthy they can be stubborn, lazy and soul-dead.

Why Study the Enneagram?
At first glance the Enneagram seems to be just another system for categorizing people, but look twice and you see its describing something pivotal: your core strategy for making sense of reality, your central life stance, the axis of your flat earth. As you compare the system's insights with your own experience, you may be amazed at their depth and accuracy.

When people first truly identify their Enneagram style, they often feel stunned that the core of their psyche has been so vividly exposed. Sometimes in life there are moments of creative breakthrough - what are called "Ah Ha!" experiences - times when you suddenly see the familiar in a new way. The typical first encounter with the Enneagram is more like an "Oh, my God!" experience - a mixture of enthusiasm and horror.

Like motel room lighting, the system seems to first highlight unflattering features. The Enneagram is uncomfortably specific about lies we tell ourselves, masks we wear for others, excuses we have for not getting what we want. It shows how we get trapped in habits of perception, wear glasses with limited lenses, defend our illusions and vanities. We have expectations, we make assumptions, we're sure of the world that we have in our head. But sometimes we get it all wrong.

While not for the fainthearted, the usefulness of these insights quickly emerges. As you learn more about your ego style you'll see more clearly why you think and act the way you do. You'll uncover deep beliefs that have colored your perceptions while formerly baffling aspects of your behavior will suddenly make sense. Right away the Enneagram will help you stand back and observe yourself with dispassion, to take your own behavior less personally, to get out of your own way.

You may see how your everyday actions are guided by a central pattern, almost like a thought you think all day long. To some extent, this pattern acts like a shadow government, unconsciously driving your behavior, sometimes usefully, sometimes in ways that confound your best intentions. Your Enneagram pattern is composed of habitual feelings, beliefs, attitudes, personal myths and memories, old-but-familiar self-images and, behind it all, an unconscious map of "the world."

Getting to know this pattern in detail is an important step towards making meaningful change. The Enneagram offers a dynamic framework in which to comprehend your behavior, allowing you unravel psychic knots that were tied early in childhood. Learning about your personality style can be a big step towards loosening rigid stances, shedding old defenses and creating new patterns of thought, feeling and action.

The Enneagram also points to your higher capacities, the creative resources that are present when you are happiest or at your best. You'll identify talents, aptitudes, and areas of expertise. Some you may already be conscious of, while others will surprise you. In this way, the system functions like a treasure map, offering many clues about where to find your gold.

Socially the Enneagram has dozens of uses, from understanding relationships to improving communication to handling difficult people. The same depth of insight that you apply to yourself will reveal the central patterns of people close to you: your mother, father, spouse, children, colleagues, and friends.
The system will help you understand current and past relationships and make it easier to avoid conflicts in your personal and professional dealings. It will also clarify a lifetime of intuitions and lessons you've learned about human nature and explain why you're attracted to some people and have trouble with others.

It's sometimes shocking to realize how sincerely different maps of reality are; when two people do or say the same thing, it's not the same thing at all. If you have friends from other nationalities, you know that on one level you are very aware of the difference between their culture and your own. On another level, you understand each other in a deeper way that bypasses how your cultures make you different.

I have a friend named Werner who is Swiss German. Whenever I teach workshops in Switzerland Werner and I spend time together. We have much in common and are deeply fond of each another. Werner's English is not great and my German is worse but we understand each other anyway.

Every once in a while Werner does something or says something that is absolutely, immutably, unalterably Swiss. It can be just a gesture, a look on his face or a way he responds to an event. At such moments, I'm aware of a mysterious gulf opening between us. I know that the way Werner is thinking and feeling when he is at his most Swiss is something I am never going to completely understand. Werner has told me there are times when I, as an American, seem just as alien to him.

Once I told an American joke in a Swiss workshop: "How does a single woman get rid of the cockroaches in her apartment?" The joke's answer is, "She asks them for a commitment."

In American culture, this joke has a bitter-but-funny meaning to many single women. They often experience American men as shy about getting married or making commitments. When I told the joke in Switzerland the audience just sat and stared.

Intrigued by the lack of response I asked Werner to help me find the Swiss equivalent of the joke. He came up with: "How does a Swiss woman get rid of the snails in her garden? The answer was, "She asks them for a date!" The next day that was fairly funny to the Swiss audience but it was my turn to sit and stare.

The gulf between cultures, like the gulf between Enneagram styles, points to what might be called "the paradox of true difference." In daily life you are connected to the people that you know and love, and yet there are fundamental differences in your worldviews. The Enneagram shows you these differences clearly, but how you choose to react to them is crucial. It's possible to use knowledge of personality styles in a bigoted way, to simply reinforce your biases.

But if you accept that personality differences are genuine and involuntary then you can usefully anticipate the way they will arise in your relationships. As friends, Werner and I can accept and enjoy our cultural differences while remaining connected. We can "budget" for how our different reactions might arise, instead of being surprised or offended by them. The more we accept each other's differences, the less they matter; Werner only occasionally seems Swiss to me, I am only sometimes American to him.

I could even try to bridge the gulf by learning more about the inner experience of being Swiss. I might, for instance, imitate Werner, to try to understand his inner experience, to discover what it would feel like to be Swiss and see the world through "Swiss eyes." The more often I have done this, the better I understand our differences. By contrast, I have also learned more about being an American.

In the same way, the Enneagram's depth and accuracy makes it possible to change places with other personality styles, to compare your inner outlook with people from other "nationalities." This can form the basis of greater compassion: you won't suddenly love everyone but you will understand them better. Knowledge of the Enneagram can also enhance your capacity to forgive or, at least, help you comprehend what you can't forgive.

A last good reason to study the Enneagram is that it's going on around you anyway. Once sitting at an outdoor cafe on a beach overlooking a quiet, placid bay, I looked up from my breakfast to see a large gray whale break the water's surface, breathe, and then disappear. Astonished, I looked around at the cafe's twenty or so diners and realized that not one other person had seen the whale. If I hadn't looked up from eating I wouldn't have seen it either. The whale, however, would still have been there.

Evidence of what the Enneagram describes surfaces all the time, passing us on the street and in the workplace and at home. Whether we realize it or not, psychology rules the world, and as you learn about the Enneagram you'll see a deeper hidden logic to private and public events.

When I was in college it was often said that psychology majors were only interested in the subject because they were "trying to solve their own problems." The idea was that people without problems would study something completely unrelated to their psychological make-up.

Actually, no human creation or enterprise has an objective existence. Our interests, intellectual and political opinions, career choices, whom we marry and befriend, are all influenced by our personal psychology in both obvious and subtle ways. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "people seem not to see that their opinion of the world is a confession of character."

There's an old saying that goes, "When you see a situation that you can't understand, assume there's a hidden economic reason for it." Knowing the Enneagram we might add, "and assume there's a personality style behind it." We all know intuitively that ego plays a role in what people do, invisibly shading objective circumstances. The Enneagram will give you a "secret decoder" of events, an extra dimension of insight that will even help you make sense of the evening news.

A Dynamic Approach
Although it's often billed as a method of change, the Enneagram is really a system of diagnosis, a powerful set of insights. As most of us know, just understanding our behavior often isn't enough to change it. Otherwise we would have shed our limits that we understand so well.
Often a question instinctually forms in students of the Enneagram, sometimes after a month, sometimes after a year of absorbing the system. People wonder, "What do I do now? How do I really apply this to my life?" The Dynamic Enneagram starts from this question.

This book is about change. The Enneagram is an excellent map of subjective reality; to go somewhere new, however, you'll need more than a map. No one would confuse sitting at home reading an atlas with taking an actual journey, but it's possible to get bogged down in the Enneagram's diagnosis and forget that it's supposed to lead somewhere. Like a physical voyage, the journey of change requires motivation, responsibility, and planning. The trip will cost something, and you'll need transportation. This book offers a number of possible vehicles.

The Dynamic Enneagram blends the Enneagram's insights with concepts and techniques taken from various schools of change and therapy, especially NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), Ericksonian Hypnosis, and Brief Therapy. These disciplines all share a process oriented approach to change, meaning they are heavy on technique but light on diagnosis. The Enneagram is the opposite - a superb diagnostic tool that lacks much in the way of method for getting over the dilemmas it describes.

This book uses the Enneagram as a springboard to personal change. It applies the system's insights so that you can find movement, vitality and especially choice in how you respond to the world through your personality style. I've selected techniques from a number of therapies and modified them to address the needs and pitfalls of each Enneagram style. The result is something like a tool-set for personal change - useful practices and ideas that you can adopt to transcend limits, solve problems, and enhance the gifts of your style.

If you are a counselor, therapist or "people helper," I'll offer methods that can work powerfully with your clients. If you deal with people on the job, these same principles of change can be usefully adapted to your professional specialty.

The Dynamic Enneagram is based on my seminars and years of active research. I had a private NLP practice for 11 years and have since taught perhaps 500 workshops on subjects related to personal change. This is a report on what I've learned; what has and hasn't worked, both the successes and failures.

My area of expertise is in how people change which dovetails with psychotherapy but also resembles education. I call what I do "changework." My original training was in NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis and I learned about the Enneagram at nearly the same time. Deep Change Repatterning is my name for the synthesis of these disciplines plus other discoveries I have made along the way.

In a sense this book comes in through a side door, offering an outsider's perspective on therapeutic change, a different look at something familiar. Since none of what follows has been proven scientifically, the main test of its value will be its usefulness, whether it helps you or your clientele change and grow.

The material in this book has been widely field tested but I try to be careful not to invest techniques alone with too much power. Self-help books routinely overpromise and underdeliver, usually by touting some new miracle technique.

This book isn't "The Enneagram Diet;" it's tools and ideas won't magically transform you, especially against your will. Motivation to change is just as important as good techniques and you'll have to take full responsibility for how you use the material. Otherwise, the enclosed principles of change can be quite powerful and life enhancing.

The Dynamic Enneagram contains enough introductory material to make sense to beginners. If you are already familiar with the Enneagram I will offer a different perspective on the system, one that emphasizes choice and possibility. There are already too many books that just repeat the Enneagram's categories so I've stuck to what is distinctive about the way I see the material.
Although often presented in a spiritual context, the Enneagram is really a system of psychology. You can use it for any part of your life that you are motivated to improve.

Whether the Enneagram becomes a spiritual tool depends on your aspiration, what you are motivated to work on or have for yourself. The system is comprehensive enough to apply at different times at different levels according to need. Often working on surface expressions of your Enneagram pattern leads to deeper changes since the system describes something so central.

I'll also describe the Enneagram in a plain and straightforward way. Sometimes the system suffers from presentations that are too esoteric, theoretical or rarefied. The Enneagram is not the Truth, nor is it a theory. It's a highly useful description, a way to understand yourself and others that can be applied to your life on many levels, from the mundane to the profound.

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