What’s Your Enneagram?

Hi, friends! I thought it might be kind of fun to share a little about my Enneagram scores with you.

I find that I tend to talk about this type of thing with soooo many of my friends IRL so I thought why not chat about it with you all?! Plus, I would LOVE to hear what your Enneagram is if you’ve already taken the test.

If you’ve never heard of The Enneagram Institute (or test) before, please visit their website for way more information that has been more thoughtfully written than I could ever explain properly.

But the Cliff Notes version is it’s a personality test where the types are a single number. Maybe you’ve seen memes of this online? If not, you must be following way different people than me. 🙂

There are free and shortened versions of the test you can find online, but I took the RHETI version on their website. It has 144 questions and cost $12.

Again, take a free version if you like, but I personally thought the $12 version was well worth it as they email you a 26-page document afterwards that is all about your top three scores with lists of tips, advice, and ideas for self improvement.

Just FYI, we don’t have an affiliate or make any money from you taking the test; I’m just sharing my experience and opinion for fun here.

To me that’s what any personality test can be useful for—a self-improvement tool. Sometimes, I’ve heard people use their “personality type” as basically a way to justify their behavior. Or even worse, they will view their type/score as a limitation.

They will say things like, “Well, I’m just a type “XYZ” so I can’t change _________.” I really think this is missing the point.

I really want to understand myself and those I am close to, and I also want to grow as an individual for my own happiness and hopefully to grow the happiness around me (for those my life can affect in some way).

Anyway … here’s my scores from the test:

I probably identify the most with Type 3, but I certainly felt a lot of connections and saw things in the Type 9 description that felt like me too.

Obviously, all the types are awesome—this isn’t a Griffindor or Slytherin thing. 🙂 But I did feel sort of proud of my type(s).

Type 3 – I love that I am a driven, goal-oriented person. I’m proud of things I have achieved in life so far, and I look forward to many more of years of to-do list making. Ha.

I also recognize that I do have a tendency to value what I can accomplish more than I value just me. I can take it really hard when I fail. I do have a lot of negative self talk in my head that I have been working on changing and will continue (probably for life, and that’s OK).

One bit of advice that my type document gave me was to take time out of my day to connect with others and generally to work on my social awareness and be more social. I can get very caught up in all the things I want to accomplish that I have in the past neglected my relationships.

One of my goals this year is simply to get more lunches (or coffees, or happy hours) with individual friends or very small groups. I want to invest more in the people I care about in addition to all the “doing” I am prone to do.

Type 9 – I actually think I have a very healthy mix of this type in my life. I think when I was younger (like high school and early college age), I was more prone to “just getting along” and not necessarily expressing my true feelings to those I was close to.

I think I’ve grown a lot in this area over the last 10 years or so, and I am much more assertive and honest.

That being said, I do think my gut reaction to fights or emotionally difficult situations is sometimes to disengage. So I can still grow in this area.

One piece of advice my type document gave me is to workout frequently. Interesting, right? But it talked about how this can help me be more aware of my body and emotions. Probably good advice for everyone, but I’ll take it!

If you haven’t heard any of Ryan O’Neal’s (Sleeping At Last) songs about the Enneagram types, you need to! Ryan is such a talented musician—it’s very possible you’ve heard one of his songs in a movie or TV show already.

But, he creates really moving personal work and I love his thoughtful exploration of the types through his music. His Type 9 song isn’t out yet, but listening to the Type 3 song definitely had me feeling all the feels.

He talks about the songs and the types in his podcast (and on our podcast) and I LOVE how he describes the project as nine stories of redemption. That’s exactly what it should be.

Let’s learn better how to love ourselves and love everyone around us; not limit ourselves or create dividers.

I also think it’s hilarious that my lowest score was Type 7— that’s Elsie’s type. So, that’s probably why we make such a good team. xo. Emma