By Meg Dennison
Becoming a conscious leader asks you to become self-aware. Knowing your Enneagram type helps you understand yourself.
Welcoming feedback and learning your recipe for reactivity are two of the three essential practices to self-awareness for conscious leadership. And the third pillar is knowing your personality. My favorite tool is the Enneagram, a system of nine types that help you understand yourself and the world view of your colleagues.
So why is it that you struggle with some things while others make them look easy? One answer is that they are just wired that way.
Because even those of us with a growth mindset as lifelong learners have traits that may make us better at one thing than another. Personality assessments like Myers-Briggs, Strengths Finders and the Enneagram help us know ourselves better.
These self-awareness assessments help us understand why we favor one way of being over another. We learn about ourselves and understand our motivation. Then we can accelerate our transformation and be more compassionate with ourselves and others.
The Enneagram helps us understand the worldview of our colleagues
The Enneagram is a powerful tool for individual and collective transformation. My clients learn their Enneagram type so I can coach them more effectively. Teams that learn their types often experience deep shifts in compassion and appreciation of each other’s skills.
The Enneagram helps you understand how you respond to others in your life, at home or at work.
Each of the nine Enneagram types represents a distinct strategy for relating to the self, others and the world, with each type having a different pattern of thinking, feeling and acting based on their motivation or worldview.
You may think everyone thinks and feels about a particular situation just like you do, (or at least they should)! But when you understand a colleague’s motivation, it’s easier to understand and feel compassion for them.
The central tool of conscious leadership is self-awareness (so that we are conscious of what we are doing). Knowing our personality patterns is a powerful way to boost self-awareness.
Explore Your Enneagram Type With A Unique Coaching Session
If you’d like to know your Enneagram type, contact me for a 1.5 hour coaching session specifically for determining your type and understanding how it impacts your personal actions and view of the world.
Download Your Reactivity Recipe and find out how you personally get triggered in fear and distrust and what to do about it.
Photo courtesy of Joan Fabregat, Creative Commons