The Enneagram
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The Enneagram is primarily an instrument for self-knowledge and personal transformation.
Keeping a conscious focus on our motives and behavior helps us avoid the common pitfalls of our type. Self-knowledge demands continual inquiry into own agendas and defenses, and transformation requires courage to act against the structures and habits of our personality.
We can be a source of help for one another.
The Enneagram invites us to wake up from habits and recurring defensive patterns. In that sense we each serve to remind others of the differences among us and of the integrity of different points of view. Doctrine and theory are far less important than keeping the conversation open.
We allow others to discover themselves.
The Enneagram has profound effects on people. It is most effective when we allow others to discover their type rather than assuming that we know them better than they know themselves. We seek to be sensitive to their reactions, their changing picture of themselves, and their need to integrate new information.
Type does not fully describe an individual.
The Enneagram does not tell us anything meaningful about a person's history or quality of character, intelligence or talents. People are more than their type. We recognize that awareness of this is particularly important in the workplace.
The Enneagram is an important tool for compassion.
In seeing the intentions and logic of other types, we become less likely to dismiss, judge or demean each other. We listen closely to individual stories, recognizing that simply knowing each other's type does not mean that we know each other. Stereotyping is a sign of closed-mindedness in its assumption that we already understand a person's attitude and motivations. Stereotyping arises largely because of past negative encounters with an individual of the same type, and it limits our growth and opportunities in the present.
The Enneagram is a work in progress.
Many have contributed to it, and many will do so in the future; therefore, it is appropriate to be explicit about giving attribution to the work of others, naming your sources and honoring the originality and hard work of other contributors. We take it upon ourselves to maintain standards of scholarship, thus promoting a collegial atmosphere in the sharing of information.
No individual owns the Enneagram.
The Enneagram cannot be controlled, monopolized or withheld from public discussion. Restricting the right to communicate, develop and share information about the system is contrary to the Enneagram's liberating and empowering spirit.
The system encourages us to "walk the walk" of transformation.
The Enneagram challenges us to embody the work of transformation ourselves, to stand as living examples of self-inquiry and practical change in the service of spiritual liberation.