Reading People

by Anne Bogel

  The Strengths Insight and Action-Planning Guide gives ten “ideas for action” for each of your five themes. To show you what that might look like, here’s what I highlighted for my Input theme:

  Schedule time to read books and articles that stimulate you.

  Look for jobs in which you are charged with acquiring new information each day, such as teaching, research, or journalism.

  Partner with someone with dominant Focus or Discipline talents. This person will help you stay on track when your inquisitiveness leads you down intriguing but distracting avenues.5

  The action points made it easy for me to see how I was already using these themes in my life. From Ideation: “Schedule time to read, because the ideas and experiences of others can become your raw material for new ideas.” From Intellection: “Take time to write. Writing might be the best way for you to crystallize and integrate your thoughts.” From Input: “Identify situations in which you can share the information you have collected with other people.” Me, me, me again.

  But the real purpose of the action points was to help me decide what to do next.

  Making an Action Plan

  The purpose of the StrengthsFinder isn’t to identify our talents for the fun of it. The point is to develop them into genuine strengths—signature areas where we excel. Raw talent alone doesn’t make a strength; instead, our natural abilities are bolstered by the right knowledge and skills. With this end goal in mind, how do we move forward?

  The Insight and Action-Planning Guide suggests paying attention to which action items speak to us and highlighting the actions we are most apt to take. For this, I recommend the “Create Action Plan” tool available on the StrengthsFinder website. The tool presents your ten ideas for action for each theme, just like in your guide, with one important difference: each action item contains a check box next to it. I clicked the ones I wanted to prioritize—I chose three or four for each insight—printed my personalized plan, and taped it to my computer monitor.

  I appreciated the reminder to focus on building my talents. But I’ve been here before, as this wasn’t my first time going through the process. I’ve had the opportunity to learn to operate from my strengths, so now let’s look at examples of this strategy in action.

  The Strengths at Work

  My results shone a light on the strengths at work in my own life, of course. It feels good to see a list of all the things you’re great at. But the StrengthsFinder also helped me see how I fit into the world around me. My results focused on my five top themes, which means there are twenty-nine others I don’t have.

  But just because the Achiever theme, for example, isn’t prominent for me doesn’t mean I don’t need this talent in my life. That’s where other people come in. I appreciated how my results specifically suggested that I partner with people who have themes different from mine so that, together, we can accomplish things I wouldn’t be able to do on my own.

  In this sense, the StrengthsFinder affirmed much of what I had already discovered. As a strong Ideation/Intellection/Input person, I need grounded, detail-oriented people to balance me out and help bring my ideas to life. This could mean something as simple as hiring an accountant, photographer, or professional organizer to handle the things in my life that I can’t take care of myself.

  I found the assessment useful in another way too. I was telling a friend all about my results, and she said, “I hope now you understand why I don’t read as much as you do.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, sometimes I feel like a slacker next to you because you read ten books a month and I read one, if I’m lucky. But your report says reading is a great way to build on your talents. Your report. Not mine!”

  She had a point.

  Bringing People of Different Strengths Together

  The StrengthsFinder can help us understand the dynamics at play in our relationships. A friend told me she’d felt increasingly brushed off by one of her neighbors, a local visual artist. My friend was working on a big community project and was deeply involved in the planning stage. Her team had spent a great deal of time reflecting on the nature of community, including its joys and challenges. She was giddy about the project and eager to talk about it. But every time she raised the subject of her work with her neighbor, her neighbor said, “I’m just not interested in that kind of thing.”

  My friend thought her neighbor was brushing her off because she wasn’t interested in her. But then my friend took the StrengthsFinder assessment and discovered her top two themes are Intellection and Futuristic. According to her Strengths Insight and Action-Planning Guide, people strong in Intellection “are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.” People strong in Futuristic are “inspired by the future and what could be.”6

  My friend realized her neighbor didn’t share her interest in intellectual discussions. She was an artist who lived very much in the here and now, who enjoyed making tangible things with her hands instead of dreaming about ideas. With this insight, my friend was able to appreciate her neighbor for who she was instead of continuing to perceive her disinterest as displeasure.

  Let’s also look at a simpler example. When a friend found out one of his wife’s top themes was Achiever, he realized why it was so important to her to check things off her list every day. She’s a stay-at-home mom for now, and he has a demanding job, but they work together to make sure she has time every day to get a few things done. When she’s operating out of her strengths, it helps her feel happy and fulfilled in her work.

  More of What You Already Are

  While I was working on this chapter, a friend came to my home for coffee and spotted StrengthsFinder 2.0 on my coffee table. “Is that the happy-clappy book that tells everybody how great they are?”

  “What, don’t you want to find out how great you are?”

  She paused. “You know,” she said, “I was totally making fun of it just then, but you know what—I do. All I ever hear, and all I ever think about, is what I’m doing wrong.”

  Many frameworks—including the ones in this book—focus on the problems that are plaguing us and how we can escape them. The StrengthsFinder isn’t like that. It’s focused on making us more of what we already are and on building on what we’re doing right for a change.

  “No pain, no gain” doesn’t apply here. Don’t feel bad about it. Just enjoy it while it lasts.

  Because we’re about to confront your junk.

  9

  Confront Your Junk

  the enneagram

  I was thirty-one, and I’d decided to go to counseling.

  I called the counselor’s office—the one provided by my husband’s employer—and briefly explained the reason I wanted to see someone. Although, looking back, I can’t imagine there was anything “brief” about it. I’m sure I rambled on and on, apologetic and embarrassed, doing my best to explain why I was calling, feeling like an idiot the whole time. It was bad. I told myself that mine surely wasn’t the worst phone call she’d had all day. Probably. Hopefully.

  The receptionist put me at ease by saying, “I think you should see Patty. She’s really good with boundary issues.”

  I was taken aback. Nowhere in that whole conversation had I used the word boundary. I’d never thought of my situation as a boundary issue. What had I said to the receptionist that had made her see it as one?

  That phone call was the beginning of a long journey. (I feel as though that’s a euphemism. Maybe I should throw the word painful in there to give you a better idea of what you’re in for with this chapter.)

  Years later, I understand every bit of that conversation perfectly. I get why the receptionist heard my request and thought boundaries. I can clearly see the work I had to do—on myself, I mean—and why. I can see why the receptionist matched me up with Patty (which you and I both know isn’t her real name). I can see how I’ve come a long way and how I still struggle with this stuff o
ccasionally. Okay, regularly, but not as regularly as I used to.

  Looking back to that time, I can see I was about to get comfortable with the Enneagram (pronounced any-uh-gram), a tool that helps unlock the murky parts of our souls. Like any good personality framework, the Enneagram fosters the self-awareness and self-examination necessary for personal and spiritual growth. It is known for emphasizing each type’s negative qualities, which makes it strikingly different from the other frameworks in this book. Exploring our glaring weaknesses and constant stumbling blocks can be a big downer, so please remember as we move forward that this uncomfortable first step flings the doors to positive change wide open.

  It took me a long time—a year or maybe more—to become clear on my Enneagram type. I remember the exact moment it clicked for me. But we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s talk more about the Enneagram’s origins.

  What You Need to Know about the Enneagram

  Like other personality frameworks, the Enneagram serves as a map that helps us better understand ourselves, the people who are important to us, and the groups we’re involved in. Its exact origins are murky, but we do know it’s been around a long time.

  According to Catholic priest Richard Rohr, the roots of the Enneagram’s nine types stretch back to a fourth-century Christian monk, Evagrius Ponticus, who listed eight (or nine, depending on the text) vices that impede the way to God. These are anger, pride, vanity, sadness, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and laziness.1 Two hundred years later, Pope Gregory I used these nine vices as a template for the Catholic Church’s seven deadly sins. The Enneagram has been used in monasteries for centuries, although it can be and is used by those with different doctrinal beliefs.

  While the Enneagram’s origins are unclear, we do know that Ivanovich Gurdjieff is responsible for bringing the Enneagram symbol to the modern world, although he didn’t go so far as to teach the personality types.2 Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo are responsible for the Enneagram of personality types in use today.3 Helen Palmer, Don Richard Riso, Russ Hudson, Elizabeth Wagele, and Richard Rohr have also contributed to the theory.

  The Enneagram is represented by a circle with interior lines connecting the nine types.4 The nine points on the circle represent nine personality types that interact with the world in their own unique ways. Think of each type as seeing the world through a unique pair of glasses. These glasses sometimes bring us clarity, but they can also distort our vision in big and small ways.

  Using the Enneagram, we can look at our glasses and understand how they affect the way we see and respond to the world instead of just experiencing the world through them without realizing there are other ways to see. The Enneagram can be misused, but when we use it correctly, it can bolster our self-awareness and understanding of the factors at play in our relationships.

  Many people say that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator excels at highlighting our strengths, while the Enneagram unmasks our weaknesses. This isn’t exactly true. When I quizzed my friend and Enneagram enthusiast Leigh about this analogy, she corrected me. The Enneagram pinpoints not our weaknesses but our motivations—the underlying reasons that drive everything we do. These motivations can be so much a part of us that we don’t even think about them or realize they’re driving our behaviors. This is why it’s difficult to type someone else on the Enneagram; our type is based not on external traits but on underlying motivations. The external traits are only partial giveaways.

  Our motivations are rarely pure. Some practitioners, such as Rohr, even call our persistent driving forces “root sins.”5 The Enneagram relentlessly focuses on the brokenness of our human motivations, our core struggles, our fatal flaws. It shows how we’re inclined to go off the rails in specific, predictable ways.

  Discovering our central weaknesses won’t make us feel warm and fuzzy. Nor should it. The idea is not to lock us into certain types of behaviors but to pinpoint these behaviors to gain freedom from them. Naming any behavior pattern is the first step in loosening its power. For this reason, the Enneagram has been called a negative system. It’s about exposing the bad stuff within us—the things we’d rather not think about or maybe would like to just pretend don’t exist.

  The Enneagram helps us confront our junk by first showing us what kind of junk we’re dealing with. Exposing that hidden stuff we would rather keep covered up is no fun, but it’s better to expose it—even though it’s painful. Think of it as the diagnosis that comes before the cure.

  If you ever hang out with writers, you’re sure to hear them say at some point that they hate writing but love having written. (If you know a writer who claims to enjoy the process, tell them to keep their thoughts to themselves, please.) Writing is hard and messy and painful; few writers relish the process. But having written is something else entirely. In the same way, Enneagramming is brutal. But having Enneagrammed feels pretty great. (Those aren’t real verbs I just used, but you get my point, right?)

  Once we’re ready to Enneagram (the verb), the first step is to decide which of the nine types we most identify with.

  The Nine Core Types in a Nutshell

  Each Enneagram type has its own basic fears, desires, motivations, and core needs. There is nothing wrong with any of these; the problem is the unhealthy ways we try to dodge our fears, chase our desires, act on our motivations, and fulfill our needs.

  It’s normal to see a little bit of ourselves in each of the nine types, but according to the Enneagram, we all have one core type that doesn’t change. However, each type contains a spectrum of emotional health: a person can be emotionally healthy, average, or unhealthy. These levels fluctuate. We tend to go up and down the levels of health on a day-to-day basis. Some moments we’ll be average, some moments we’ll be healthy, and some moments we’ll dip into the not-so-healthy range. Our current level depends on our self-awareness and progress in our personal growth. Please note that for these purposes, “average” is not “healthy.” Pretend you’re back in school; “average” doesn’t sound so bad, but would you want to bring home a C? Probably not. Most of us have a lot of work to do to achieve emotional health.

  The types are called different things depending on the author or resource. The labels I’m using below are from Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, founders of the Enneagram Institute and authors of The Wisdom of the Enneagram.

  Here’s a nutshell description of each type:

  One: the Reformer (the need to be perfect).6 Ones have high standards for themselves and others and a strong sense of right and wrong. Healthy Ones are conscientious and discerning and strive to make things better in appropriate ways. But when Ones go off the rails, they are likely to be critical, resentful, and inflexible and to repress their anger until they explode. Ones naturally seek to gain love by doing things perfectly.

  Two: the Helper (the need to be needed). Twos are caring and helpful, inclined to gain love by being indispensable. It’s easy for women to mistype themselves as Twos because they’re socialized that way; mothers of young children are especially liable to make this mistake because helping their children is such a big part of their lives in this stage. Unhealthy Twos repress their own needs to tend to the needs of others, but at their best, Twos delight in appropriately caring for others and loving them unconditionally.

  Three: the Achiever (the need to succeed). Threes are ambitious, achievement-oriented types who put their energy into getting things done. They are competitive and image-conscious. Unhealthy Threes, driven by a strong need to be recognized, will take these qualities to the extreme. Healthy Threes can strive to perform well without tying their self-image to the results. Threes naturally seek to gain love by being successful.

  Four: the Individualist (the need to be special). Fours often focus on what’s missing from their lives—or what they’re missing out on—instead of what they actually have now, in the present. At their best, Fours are idealistic, empathetic, and highly creative, but when unhealthy, they verge into self-pity and despondency and can’t stop
longing for what they feel is missing.

  Five: the Investigator (the need to perceive). More than any other type, Fives want to live in their minds, where they store up knowledge so they can competently face any challenge. They are brilliant analysts and intellectuals, driven to be independent and self-sufficient. At their best, they are perceptive and open-minded visionaries, brilliant trailblazers who seem to notice and understand everything and know what action to take in response. But when unhealthy, they wall themselves off from others entirely, sunk by feelings of inadequacy.

  Six: the Loyalist (the need for security). According to Rohr, a full half of the population may be Sixes. Because they are prone to view the world as a dangerously unpredictable place and focus on what could go wrong, these cautious types crave security. At their best, Sixes are responsible, loyal, and trustworthy, but unhealthy Sixes disproportionately perceive the negatives in any situation and doubt themselves excessively.

  Seven: the Enthusiast (the need to avoid pain). Sevens are gluttons for the good stuff of life, whether that’s interesting ideas or exciting experiences. They want to experience life to its fullest, so they throw themselves into everything they do, which is why this type is sometimes called the Enthusiast. While healthy Sevens do this in a positive fashion, unhealthy Sevens seek these experiences to numb their pain or distract themselves from the unpleasant aspects of life.

  Eight: the Challenger (the need to be against). Eights are powerful, dominating types who aren’t afraid to assert themselves; they downright fear being weak or powerless because they’re under someone else’s control. Healthy Eights can be effective crusaders for the causes they believe in, but left unchecked, this same underlying quality can make them aggressive and power-hungry.