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An Overview of the Enneagram
Amanda: The enneagram is one of my favorite topics and I’m just so pumped to bring it into the business world a little bit more. But before we begin, I want you to go ahead and introduce yourself, tell everyone what it is you do and who you are and who you serve.
Callie: Thank you so much for having me on I’m so pumped for this conversation too. My name is Callie Ammons. I live in Colorado Springs, Colorado with my husband. We’ve been here for four months and we’re loving the mountain life. It’s so awesome.
And I’m an Enneagram life coach. And what that looks like is I helping people figure out their type and more importantly, figuring out how the Enneagram actually applies to our day to day life so that we can thrive. And so I do that through the form of a membership that I have a lot of people in there where we’re just growing ourselves and this is huge community of women who want to become more like Jesus and understand ourselves through our Enneagram type. So in short, that’s what I do. I do podcasting all the fun, social media things as well. And I love it. It’s been awesome.
Amanda: Okay. So if there’s anyone who doesn’t know what the enneagram is, can you give us a quick rundown of what it is and just a tiny bit about each type?
Callie: Absolutely. So the Enneagram is basically a nine type personality assessment. And so like you’ve probably heard of Meyers Briggs or StrengthFinders, these different like tests you can take to figure out who you are and the Enneagram is similar in that, but it’s different in the fact that it really focuses on your internal world.
Meaning why do we do what we do? So Amanda and I could both be super outgoing. We love helping people. We run businesses that help people, but her and I can be completely motivated for different reasons to do that because of our Enneagram type, which is what that internal motivation is. So there’s nine types, which you just mentioned, and those nine types are:
The type one is called the perfectionist. The type two is the helper. The type three is the achiever. The four is the individualist. The type five is the thinker or investigator. The type six is the loyalist. Type seven is the enthusiast. Eight is the challenger. And then nine is the peacemaker. So that is just like quick title for them all.
And it goes so much deeper than just those titles. If you hear that and you’re like, Ooh, I’m a perfectionist. Like I might be that person. You could be a one, you could be someone else who’s just really high driven and has perfectionist tendencies. And so how you figure out your type is you really just educate yourself about each enneagram type and you’ll resonate with that core motivation, meaning why each person does what they do.
And so I’m a type three on the Enneagram, the achiever, and that person is really motivated by success and not failing. And you can see how that can be a good thing sometimes and a terrible thing sometimes. So that’s the beautiful thing about the Enneagram is we see these healthy traits in each type, in unhealthy traits.
Enneagram Types in Business
Amanda: So swinging this around to more of a business aspect. What are some trends that you’ve seen within each type and how they run their businesses?
Callie: Oh, my word. Okay. I’ll deep dive into each triad. So, there’s a thing called triads. There’s the gut triad, the head triad, and the heart triad.
The Enneagram Gut Triad
The gut is types: eights, nines, and ones. So that’s a huge trend that can be positive or negative is type eights, nines, and ones who are really in tune with their gut. Incredible business leaders when they listen to that and play into that intuition because it surpasses logic sometimes. And then the downside is if they’ve suppressed that, and haven’t been practicing, listening to their intuition, they lose touch with it.
And so they might get so caught up in like comparison or what everyone’s teaching that you should be doing in your business, which is having their business suffer because they’re not listening to their gut.
The Enneagram Heart Triad
The heart triad is tied to twos, threes and fours. So that’s the one I’m in which means we just lead with our heart. Our emotions can really take over. And what I see for business owners who are twos, threes, and fours is we can just get so caught up in like art image or people pleasing or caring so much what people think.
So two threes and fours, especially in the online space, have a really hard time taking criticism. If they’re not healthy, like that is some deep work I’ve had to do and still am doing it’s just so you can have a hundred great comments. Like the one rude person it’s let me go cry for a week. Like it just destroys them. And so that’s where that can be a negative trend, but a positive trend is those leaders really know how to lead with their heart and connect with people on such an empathetic and emotional level. And in business, you want people to connect with you emotionally.
As someone feels like an emotional pain point or something that makes them want to buy because you’re going to solve a problem for them. So it’s incredible when it’s used in a healthy, in the right way, and it’s not manipulation when it’s truly being used in a way to serve that person and help them overcome some barrier that you can help them overcome. Growing that thick skin is the work that twos, threes, and fours have to do.
The Enneagram Head Triad
So then that takes us to type five, six and seven, which is the head triad. That is my husband’s triad. He’s a type five. And it’s so fascinating watching how he runs his business compared to mine, like so different. But what is awesome is like they’re super logical.
So they really think through everything 10 times over and they make very calculated decisions. And so that can be great because sometimes we need to lean into that.
And that’s where five sixes and sevens, I would just say are a lot more grounded. They’re practical.
And the cool theme with all of these triads I just went through, is it doesn’t mean that I can’t access my gut or I can’t access my head, but it’s this deep work of just being aware of, okay, these are my natural tendencies and these are ways I can grow in. Like I mentioned, I’m working on growing my gut. We can grow in that. And that makes you a well-rounded business owner. When you just continue to pull from all three of those.
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