Working with the Enneagram
The Enneagram in practice
One reason I continue to find the Enneagram useful is that it resists static explanations of personality. Rather than describing who we are, it draws attention to what we habitually do, especially when we feel pressured, uncertain, or disconnected from ourselves.
Enneagram patterns are best understood as adaptive strategies. They helped us navigate life in ways that often carried real strengths and wisdom. Over time, however, those same strategies can become so familiar that they begin operating automatically.
The goal is not to eliminate our patterns. The goal is to recognize when they have taken over and create more room for awareness, flexibility, and choice.
The goal isn't to eliminate our patterns.
The goal is to recognize when they've taken over.
Instinctual Bias and Attention
Over time, I've found it helpful to pay attention to what reliably matters most to us, especially under pressure. Beneath our personality patterns are deeper priorities that influence what captures our attention, where we invest our energy, and what feels most urgent or important.
The Awareness to Action approach to the Enneagram describes three instinctual domains: Preserving, Navigating, and Transmitting. We all draw from all three, but we don't tend to value or emphasize them equally. One usually receives more of our attention and shapes how we prioritize our time, resources, relationships, and efforts.
Preserving is concerned with well-being, security, and sustainability.
Navigating focuses on relationships, trust, belonging, and understanding how people fit together.
Transmitting emphasizes expression, influence, impact, and extending something of ourselves into the world.
Like our Enneagram strategies, these biases are neither good nor bad. They reflect legitimate human priorities. The challenge begins when one area receives so much attention that other important needs fade into the background.
Awareness helps us recognize what we habitually prioritize, what we may be overlooking, and when a situation calls for a different emphasis.
This specific framing comes from the Awareness to Action approach to the Enneagram developed by Mario Sikora.
Awareness doesn't change what matters to us.
It helps us choose what deserves our attention right now.
How I use the Enneagram
I don't use the Enneagram as a prescriptive map to follow rigidly. I use it as a tool for noticing: a way of recognizing patterns as they show up in real situations, with real consequences.
People are dynamic.
Patterns shift with context, stress, safety, support, and relationship. The work begins when we move from living inside a pattern automatically to noticing it with enough honesty and compassion to have a choice.
If you're curious what that looks like in practice, the next step is simple.