Skip to main content

Enneagrams

Image
By


I love Meg.  She and I don't do particularly well in person, but we are seriously the best of friends on the phone.  To be fair, she's a total extrovert, and while I think our relationship is unique, I think she has several relationships like mine with other people.  *deep breath* I'm not threatened by that, or jealous.  I reach out to a lot of people over the course of living, hoping that some lasting relationship will form, but I never could've known what my reaching out to Meg would become.

The other day she asked me about my "enneagram".  My what?  Did I get my annual mammogram?  Did I eat my Golden Grahams?  No, my enneagram number.  I had never heard of it.  I asked her if it was the Myers-Briggs test, and she told me it was so much more.  In fact, she had a lot to say about it, most of which I couldn't comprehend.  So in true Meg form (turns out, she's an 8 who "persuades others to follow her into all kinds of endeavors"), she sent me a bunch of links to podcasts and articles to learn all about it.

24 hours in, and I must admit that it's pretty cool.  From what the experts say, discovering your enneagram is a life-long process, but really it's a life long process to take what you learn and make your life better from it.  So instead of just being defined as something, the definition becomes the jumping off point to figuring out yourself and your relationships with others.  It's been really fascinating.


For the record, I'm a FOUR--like, I couldn't be more of a four if I tried--but I have a little bit of FIVE in me.  And one of the things I love about the "types" link below is that there is information about how you work with other numbers.  So say if I know that someone with whom I live is a SEVEN (with some hints of EIGHT, but really, the SEVEN is pretty dang obvious), I can get information about how the two of us interact, what things to watch out for, and what will be really great.  It's almost like someone has been recording our actions for the past 30 years and wrote exactly what is happening!

I'm hoping that John and the kids will jump into this pool with me as well.  It feels like it could go a bit hokey at times, being seen as something "spiritual", but I'm going to take what I can from it and see where it goes!

Enneagram Types

Enneagram Podcast Primer


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Like Dominos....

By
It all began with glare.  Simple, obnoxious, I-can't-stand-it-anymore glare. Our 60" rear projection TV in the family room was basically unviewable except after 10 o'clock at night.  The glare from the windows was making it impossible to see anything during my 10 minute lunch break each day, and something had to change. Too, the TV didn't fit in the entertainment center from Germany.  John, wanting bigger and better, hadn't considered that the space is only 40" wide.  For the past five years, I have been nagged by 6" of overhang on both sides of the TV stand. I went to Lowe's to price blinds.  $1,043 for five blinds, and that was at 20% off. I figured a new TV would be cheaper than that.  I was right, even with the state-of-the-art receiver and new HDMI cables that sly salesman told us we needed to have. But where to put the old TV?  It just needed a quiet, dark place to retire. Glo's bedroom.  Her TV was a relic from the paleoneoneand...
3 comments
Read more

The Quest for Birkenstocks

By
One of the main reasons I go to Germany every couple of years is to restock my supply of Birkenstocks.  I started buying them when I lived there, and I basically can't live without them now.  It just about kills me when a pair runs its course and needs to be thrown away.  I think in my lifetime, I've thrown away only three pairs.  One that never was quite right (the straps were plastic and would cut into my skin after a long day), one pair that I wore gardening one too many times (the brown dirt stains wouldn't come out of the white leather), and the pair that I was wearing when I broke my ankle (they were an unfortunate casualty of broken ankle PTSD because those purple and blue paisleys go down as one of my favorite pairs of all time).  I only threw out the garden ones a couple of days before I left for Germany, because I knew I would be getting a new pair. The only store where I have ever bought my Birkenstocks is Hoffmann's in Speicher.  (Well okay, t...
2 comments
Read more

Thinking Beyond Ourselves

By
In our church, most adults hold a “calling”.  What this really means is they have a job, or a specific way to serve within the local congregation.  We believe that this calling is inspired from God—it’s a specific way that he wants us to serve, so that we can either learn and grow ourselves, or so that we can help someone else. I have had more callings in the church than I can count, and with few exceptions, I have loved every one of them.  I have come to love people (adults, teens and kids) who I might never have met.  I have learned much--from how to organize a Christmas music program, to how to make a Sunday School lesson meaningful to apathetic teenagers.  I have served as president of the children’s organization, and I have been the leader of 30 young, single adults. With every calling comes a lot of work.  Of course, the amount of work one puts into a calling is up to an individual.  I choose to put everything into a calling.  I give up ho...
3 comments
Read more