What is the Enneagram?

The Enneagram is a powerful system for understanding Human Nature. Like other personality type systems, the Enneagram describes different groups of behaviours and characteristic tendencies of people. However, the Enneagram goes deeper, describing the unconscious motivations underlying our behaviour. These motivations describe why we think, feel, and act the way we do.

Scroll below to see how various authors describe the Enneagram.

The Enneagram...

	... is a classification of nine personality types. -- Margaret Frings Keyes Emotions and the Enneagram
	... is a geometric symbol [that] refers to nine basic personality types and their interrelationships. -- Margaret Frings Keyes The Enneagram Relationship Workbook
	... is a powerful and dynamic personality system that describes nine distinct and fundamentally different patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. -- David Daniels The Essential Enneagram
	... acknowledges that each of us is unique, yet it identifies certain distinctive patterns of behaviour. -- Elizabeth Wagele The Enneagram of Parenting
	... groups people into nine interrelated categories or types according to their major motivation or desire and perception. -- Robert W. Olson Stepping Out Within
	... is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. -- Don Riso & Russ Hudson Wisdom of the Enneagram
	... tells us that people with each of these nine personality types live with an unconscious motivation that causes them to respond to life in a way so consistent as to become the driving force shaping their lives. -- Kathleen Hurley and Theodore Donson My Best Self
	...is such an accurate predictor or personality, motivation, and behaviours that people who discover it often feel they are having a psychic reading. --Herb Pearce The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Power of the Enneagram
	... is very useful as a method of identifying and clarifying psychological functions [but] its possibilities are far more powerful than this limited application -- A.H Almaas Facets of Unity
	... is the clearest, most accurate method available for understanding ourselves and those who are important to us. -- Don Riso Discovering Your Personality Type (Revised)
	... is a marvelous road map to the treasures that lie inside you... . -- Susan Reynolds The Everything Enneagram Book
	... is about people -- how we are the same, how we are different, what makes us tick. -- Thomas Condon The Enneagram Movie and Video Guide
	... explains why we behave the way we do, and it points to specific directions for individual growth. -- Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele The Enneagram Made Easy
	... is the map of human nature which people have long sought. -- Don Riso Personality Types
	... is like having a pair of special glasses that allows us to see beneath the surface of people with special clarity: we may in fact see them more clearly than they see themselves. Don Riso & Russ Hudson Discovering Your Personality Type
	... is a profound, elegant, and compassionate approach to people and their relationships -- Michael J. Goldberg Getting Your Boss's Number
	... can give you tools to help you change and grow, choose a partner wisely, or bring a troubled relationship back to life. -- Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele Are You My Type, Am I Yours?
	... teaches a clear method of letting go of the personality's limited world view and opening up to the gifts of sacred wisdom. -- Alan Fensin Spiritual Truth Using the Enneagram
	... is more than an entertaining game for learning about oneself. It is concerned with change and making a turn-around, with what the religious traditions call conversion or repentance. -- Richard Rohr & Adreas Ebert Discovering the Enneagram
	... helps us to let go of the limiting mechanisms of our personality so that we can more deeply experience who and what we really are. -- Don Riso & Russ Hudson Understanding The Enneagram
	... is a powerful guide to self-awareness and evolution, providing it is not used as an instrument of judgment and self-righteousness. -- Anné Linden & Murray Spalding The Enneagram and NLP
	... represents a journey into self. -- Maria Beesing, Robert J. Nogosek, Patrick H. O'Leary The Enneagram
	.. is a system of spiritual psychology that directs us toward a personal understanding deeper than we have ever known before. -- Kathleen V. Hurley & Theodore E. Donson What's my Type?
	... has been used to chart the unfolding of both cosmic processes and the human psyche. -- Howard A. Addison The Enneagram and Kabbalah
	...is a model of personality that describes nine worldviews or strategies -- nine intelligences. -- Janet Levine The Enneagram Intelligences
	... provides us with nine perspectives for viewing the world. -- Jerome Wagner Nine Lenses on the World
	...is an ancient and beautifully accurate description of human personality in all its diversity, and of how personality is directly linked to each person's spiritual self. -- Karen Webb Principles of the Enneagram
	...not only provides a great deal of help in the process of increasing self-awareness--by showing the "inner witness" what to pay attention to -- but also provides a method for how we can change and grow based on that vision. -- Beatrice Chestnut The Complete Enneagram
	...mirrors the complexities of human nature; and its symbol implies movement to depict growth, change, and development. -- Wendy Appel Inside Out Enneagram
	...is actually a profound map that illuminates the nine different architectures of the human personality. -- Ginger Lapid-Bogda Bringing Out the Best in Everyone You Coach
	...presents a fluid continuum for understanding personality patterns including high functioning expressions as well as spiritual potentials and capacities -- Carolyn S. Bartlett The Enneagram Field Guide
	...is a carefully observed account of the inner world from which people act. -- Mary Bast and Clarence Thomson Bringing Out the Best in Everyone You Coach