Using the Enneagram for Lifework Clarity

Austin Texas
Career and Life
Coach and Counselor

Using the Enneagram for Lifework Clarity

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If you live in Texas, call for a free 20-minute consult to find out how this approach to career and life coaching and counseling can transform your work, your relationships and your self-understanding:

(512) 633-5474

Career and Life Coach and Counselor Beth Arnold defines lifework as the essential work you cannot help but do, even when no one is formally recognizing the value of your efforts. Whether your work is personal, family, community, or commercial, paid or unpaid, it is your lifework if it engages your heart as well as your mind and it is uniquely meaningful to you.

When meaningful lifework seems out of reach or even hard to imagine, life itself can lose vibrance and joy. Ironically, what we are yearning for is often close at hand, but we can't see it because we lack something within ourselves: self-understanding.

Through the lens of the Enneagram we can start to see ourselves and the world more clearly. We can see how confronting certain habitual patterns can free us to make new decisions that engage us in the world in new and refreshing ways. As we understand more about ourselves we also become more able to open up to others. Through resonant connection with others, we will see new opportunities that can potentially address our deep yearning for meaningful lifework. The Enneagram helps guide us through this work.

The Enneagram is an age-old symbol that is used to inform different systems of knowledge, from cosmology and mathematics to psychology. In psychology of personality, the Enneagram illuminates nine distinct ways humans relate to their daily existence in terms of thoughts, feelings and reactions. Nine distinct personality types manifest from the way these nine perspectives develop specific predictable habits and behaviors.

All nine types reflect various aspects of the human condition, so we can relate to every one of the nine types to some degree. However, upon reflection we begin to realize that one type stands apart from the others as the most reflective of our life experience. We identify that number on the Enneagram as our basic personality type. Observing and reflecting on the habits and patterns of our type leads to a compassionate understanding of why we think, feel, and behave the way we do. Once we can see and understand unhelpful patterns, we have the power to change them, which frees up the world in new ways.

As the work deepens further, we begin to move around the Enneagram to adapt and integrate the strengths and virtues of other numbers into our personality. Obstacles once created by our personality to defend against fear, sadness and anger start to fall away. Movement forward toward satisfaction of our yearnings can be deep and lasting when challenges are viewed through the Enneagram lens.