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Personality

An overview of how the Enneagram describes personality

A colourful analogy

 Convention dictates that there are seven main colours in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Each colour spans a certain range of the colour wheel (Figure 1). For example, most people would agree that the bottom left quadrant of the wheel is blue. Notice how the colour "blue" spans a wide range of individual hues (navy blue, royal blue, cyan, sky blue, turqoise, etc).

In addition, it is hard to see where one colour ends and the other begins. Notice how each colour blends into the next. One cannot really say where the colour Red ends and the colour Orange begins.

Although we say there are seven colours in the rainbow for convenience, each of these colours spans a wide range of individual hues to produce an infinite number of unique colours.


Figure 1: Basic Colour Wheel 

The Enneagram's concept of personality type is analogous to the colour wheel. Like the seven discrete colours of the rainbow, the Enneagram describes nine distinct personality types. Like each of the seven colours, each personality represents a wide range of behaviours and traits, allowing for individual "shades of personality."

The colour green has some yellow in it, some blue in it, and something that is neither yellow nor green. Likewise, each personality type is a mixture of the types around it, plus its own unique characteristics. For example, the personality type Three has some characteristics of type Two and the type Four (the types on either side of it). This concept is illustrated with the colour wheel in Figure 2.


Figure 2: Enneagram Colour Wheel

In practice, people do not fall perfectly into any one of the personality types. For the most part, however, we adopt one of these types as our primary way of interacting and coping with the world.  We call this type our main type.

Of the other personality types, certain ones influence us much more than others. The enneagram symbol shows us which types affect us strongly.

The two types next to our main type are called the wings. For example, type One can have a Nine wing or a Two wing (and sometimes both). One of these types is usually much stronger than the others.  Just like each colour is a mixture of its neighbouring colours, each personality type tends to have traits of its neighbouring types. The wings play an important "second side" of our personalities. Sometimes the traits of our wing reinforce the traits of our main type; sometimes the traits of our wing conflicts with our main type.


Figure 3: Enneagram Lines

The Enneagram goes further than simply describing different personality types;  it explains the entire range of psychological health: from high functioning states to neurosis.  If the personality type is analogous to colour, then the psychological health is analogous to its brightness. Again, there are infinite levels of brightness for each colour. At the healthy extreme, the colour melts away into pure white; at the unhealthy extreme, the colour dissolves into blackness.

To summarize, the Enneagram does not describe static categories of people. Instead, it takes into account the unique mixture of traits that make up our individual personality.


Figure 4: Brightness