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Finding your Enneagram Type

Finding your type

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The best and most reliable way to work out your Enneagram type is to read and study the material recommended on this site to help you decide which is your lead type.

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On this website we use the words Type or Point. You’ll also hear people talk about Enneagram Styles, Patterns, Base or Home-base.  All are commonly used.

 

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The Enneagram personality model is complex and works at many levels - mental, emotional and somatic - and it can sometimes be difficult to recognise yourself definitively.

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We are often blind to our own deep-rooted patterns. More often than not we identify with aspects of more than one type. It is not uncommon to mistype yourself (and others) at first since we tend to see external, visible behaviours rather than our deeper underlying motivations. It may take a long time to peel away the layers and find your lead Type.

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All accredited, qualified Enneagram practitioners, including the Enneagram Alive team are trained to help people find their type using a skilful face-to-face interview. If you are struggling to identify your type, feel free to contact us for further guidance and contacts in your area.

Online Questionnaires - pros and cons

Using an online questionnaire to find our Enneagram type can make sense - it is convenient, inexpensive and quick.

 

We expect that we should be able to provide accurate information about ourselves, but questionnaires can have pitfalls. Firstly, if for example people complete a questionnaire in a corporate setting, they may tend to respond according to what they believe the company wants, even if their responses don’t reflect how they actually are.

 

Secondly, questionnaires are often built on the assumption that people are self-aware about why they do the things they do, whereas many of us are not aware of our motivations.

 

Thirdly, it takes a lot of understanding the expertise to write good questions, and testing for reliability and validity is time consuming and expensive.

 

For these reasons, there are relatively few high quality Enneagram questionnaires. Questionnaires can be useful as a starting point, as an indication of type, or as one piece of information on the journey, but using a questionnaire alone is not recommended as a way to find your type.

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Well-researched Type Indicators:

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