What is Enneagram?

 
I met my Enneagram mentor, Clarence Thomson, after 1.5 years. He is still young and handsome at 88 years. I reached out to him because I am now ready to integrate Enneagram with RYD. I had reached Stage 2 (Active Learning) of Craft Mastery in Enneagram before I took a break from it as I got busy with learning Psychodrama and Yoga where I am currently at Stage 3 of Craft Mastery (Apprenticeship with a Master of the Craft to become an Expert).

In Stage 4 of Craft Mastery, we become a Mentor by learning through teaching and coaching Experts on our craft.

In Stage 5 of Craft Mastery, we become a Master of our Craft by learning through teaching and coaching Mentors of our craft.

Only at Stage 3 of Craft Mastery of a particular modality / field can I begin the work of integrating that modality with RYD. The first stage of integration is when I can offer that learning to contribute to my coachees. The next stage of integration with RYD is when I coach the RYD Coaches on that modality and they reach the level of expertise to contribute to their coachees through that modality, which is when that modality becomes available to the entire RYD Circle of Love.

Psychodrama and Scaling-up have got integrated with Centre for Coaching Excellence (CCE), the school for RYD Coaches. In the next one year, Yoga of the Krishnamacharya tradition will get integrated with CCE. Psychodrama becomes relevant for a coachee when they climb to Gear 2 consciousness of their Leadership Depth Journey. Scaling-up as a framework becomes relevant when our coachee's business has reached Mountain 3 on their Business Excellence journey. Yoga is an RYD Transformative Practise in Gear 3 of the Leadership Depth journey.

Each modality is interesting and provides massive growth but when you integrate Coaching, Growth Habits, Community, Enneagram, Psychodrama, Yoga, Aana Pana, Vipassana; the inner journey from good to great (Leadership Depth) gets accelerated with greater ease and grace as there's simultaneous growth across all our 5 bodies - physical, energy, emotional, mental and spiritual - one Gear at a time.

Similarly in Business Excellence, there are different frameworks. But, magic happens when we integrate different frameworks because a beautiful Simplicity of a Whole emerges which is more powerful and effective than the individual frameworks.

Back to Enneagram - What is it?

To grow as a leader requires us to be deeply self-aware and have a structure to keep seeing one's own blind spots. Growth can come no other way. Strengthening our Leadership Depth is a result of ongoingly deepening our self-awareness and uncovering our Blind Spots.

Understanding our Enneagram (pronounced as ANY-a-gram) Style helps us to catch our default limiting habits and responses, which have made us captive to our worldview. It is like literally being caught up in a box. Both professional and personal growth requires us to break free from this box.

The Enneagram is a study of the 9 basic types of people and explains why we behave the way we do and points to specific directions for individual growth. It is an important tool to understand ourselves and people around us better; which is our pathway to greater business success, happy healthy kids, and loving harmonious positive uplifting relationships at work and at home.

​Clarence is Enneagram Style 7, which is my Style as well. So, his idea of teaching is rather different. My first homework is to watch the Disney movie - Alladin, because both Alladin and the Genie are Style 7. This is going to be one fun learning expedition. Through the process of learning, I am looking forward to recovering the fun part of me, which got lost along the way.

Enneagram has roots in Sufism.

Research in the American Journal of Psychiatry describes the Enneagram as a personality theory that characterizes nine distinct strategies by which the human psyche develops a worldview, and relates to the self and others. The theory proposes that by adulthood, individuals have developed a predominant personality strategy to cope with the external environment. Each of the nine core types described by the Enneagram has an associated basic fear, basic desire, and predictable pattern of behaviour in times of stress and security. The Enneagram uses these basic fears and desires to describe the essential motivations underlying much of the resulting behaviour. It thus captures a range of behaviour for each type and is capable of providing a great deal of insight into an individual's underlying psychology for greater awareness and growth. 

Enneagram is focused on internal motivations rather than external behaviours. It helps us uncover our blind spots, our behavioural patterns that everyone else can see except our own self, and provide a pathway to break those patterns. 

Personality is not something we have to accept as something fixed in us. It is a box that we have trapped ourselves in to protect ourselves. We built this box to protect ourselves in response to hurts in our growing years. Our personality is our self-defense mechanism that we have strengthened over the years to protect ourselves from our fears. 

In our RYD Language:
Hole-in-the-Soul in the spiritual body leads to small mind in the Mental Body, which leads to limiting roles in the Emotional Body, which leads to low energy in the Energy Body; which leads to a certain Personality expressed through the Physical Body. 

The below is the limiting expression of my Default Survival Consciousness sourced in Fear. 

Having this depth of understanding provides us with a pathway to dissolve our fears in our conscious mind, sub-conscious mind and unconscious mind through RYD Growth Habits, RYD Transformative Practises and the various modalities integrated with RYD. This supports us to break free from the grip of the darkness of our fears; enabling us to journey towards Joyous Freedom of our Authentic Self, our undeniable greatness, our Inner Light, to make a massive positive impact through the spiritual playground of our business and through freeing our family of limiting patterns to support our children to realize their highest potential with ease and grace. 
 
Within RYD, we have the methodologies to dissolve expressions of fear from hole-in-the-soul in the spiritual body, small mind in the mental body, limiting roles in the emotional body and low energy state in the energy body. Enneagram helps to extend the RYD understanding to the physical body in terms of our default limiting behavioural patterns and strengths we have developed to deal with our fears, which together form our Personality. With greater awareness of our default limiting behavioural patterns and compensating strengths which also limit us since these strengths have been developed in response to fear, we can work on breaking free from our default fear-sourced behavioural patterns to give us greater access to our Power to Create Reality in alignment with our intentions and dreams.

With full understanding of how our Survival Consciousness, our default fears, show up in all our 5 bodies, our awareness about our own self expands supporting us to dissolve our fears and associated limiting patterns to realize our highest potential and make a massive positive impact by courageously living our Purpose through our work with greater ease, grace and velocity.

Here's the limitless expression of my Authentic Self. I am on a journey towards this limitless expression. ​

Our Whole Soul sourced in Love, the highest Spiritual Value, leads to limitless thoughts in our Mental Body (Big Mind), which leads to Peaceful Warrior roles in our Emotional Body. The Peaceful Warrior roles generate high uplifting, positive, creative energy in our Energy Body supporting us to live our Growth Habits through our Physical Body with joyous ease and grace. 

Simultaneously working to transform all our 5 bodies supports us to move forward on our journey of good to great with greater ease, grace and velocity. 

Greater understanding and awareness of our coachee through different lens would help us build a personalised journey for each one of our coachees to inculcate RYD Growth Habits and Rhythms from the entire RYD Habits Toolkit in a way that would most contribute to them.

In July 2024, Clarence will help each one in RYD Circle of Love to understand their Enneagram Style to have a deeper understanding about themselves. That would support our community's collective consciousness to grow and expand. Here are 2 easy-to-read books recommended by Clarence to wrap your head around Enneagram:

The Enneagram Made Easy: Discover the 9 Types of People
and
Are You My Type, Am I Yours? - Relationships Made Easy Through the Enneagram

Both books are by Reene Baron and Elizabeth Wagle

Here's an article that takes you one step deeper into what is Enneagram and the 9 different Styles - Understanding the Enneagram

Let's keep learning, uncovering and discovering to be more self-aware supporting us to raise our consciousness to joyously lead ourselves and our businesses from good to great, realize our dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way 💜

Loving you,
​j.