The Enneagram is a personality system. Like most personality systems, the Enneagram provides a construct for explaining your behavior and actions – how you navigate the world. Unlike other personality systems, the Enneagram focuses on the motivation underlying and driving our behaviors and actions. With the focus on motivation, our awareness of why we do what we do expands exponentially and makes meaningful growth and change easier to achieve and maintain.

The word Enneagram stems from the Greek words “ennea” meaning nine and “gram” meaning graph. Together, the word means “nine-sided” and is linked to nine interrelated personality types. We all have a bit of all nine types in our personalities. Though each of us has a dominant type, fueled by a core motivation, that impacts how we think, feel and behave.

The Enneagram uses awareness and understanding of these nine personality styles to 1) help us identify our dominant behavior patterns and how they may or may not be serving us well and 2) help us increase our understanding that those around us are differently motivated and therefore naturally operating with a different set of behavior patterns. The system also helps us identify strategies to change our behavior with effective and impactful results, and learn to optimally communicate with those of different Enneagram styles.