Enneagram Interviews: What It's Like To Be You

UPDATE: Kaisa's Heart Fix has been updated from 3w4 to 3w2. Kaisa is a psychology and neuroscience graduate student and Enneagram enthusiast with an exceptional ability to articulate her experience of being a Sexual 9w8. Enjoy. WATCH THIS INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE The Enneagram School Timestamps 0:00 Intro 2:56 Kaisa's typing 5:10 Flatline (935) vs triple reactive (846) overlay, 9 core withdrawn v...

Gray and I have similar typing, and in this episode we explore what social 3 is "really wanting," underneath the stereotypical social 3's polish and comportment. This conversation gets to the heart of the Social 3 in a way that meant a lot to me personally. Enjoy. WATCH THIS INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE Gray's YouTube Channel Learn the Enneagram at The Enneagram School Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:05 Dropping...

Sam is an essayist and poet who recently discovered he is a 7, having mistyped as a 4 for years. Before this interview, Sam sent me his beautifully articulated thoughts on being a 7 -- a link to which is below. This conversation explores the Gestalt Therapy session that "got underneath" Sam's mental buzzing and helped him encounter his lonely inner child. Sam is mid-process in a tectonic shift in...

Joseph Salteri is a Type 4 (SO/SX 4w3 461) and is part of the team that runs Enneagrammer.com. He wrote all of the (excellent) content on the Enneagrammer website, including the written typing test, and he is one of the trio of typing experts that runs Dark Arts Academy --  weekly classes where they take you under the hood of their experiential typing process by typing a celebrity in real-tim...

Ikraam Ali is a Type 7 (SO/SX 7w6 793) who works in local politics. She also has her own YouTube channel focused on Objective Personality System (OPS). This conversation challenged the stereotype of 7s as “positive” types and reframed the 7 pattern “positive outlook” way of being from a frustration lens — in particular, frustration with negativity, which paradoxically creates its own kind of negat...

Dr. Mary Bates is a Type 6 (SP/SO 6w7 692) primary care doctor, writer, and mother of 2. Mary discovered she is a 6 with the help of the Enneagrammer typing team after having mistyped as a 2 and a 9, the other two types in her trifix. More than anything, this conversation awoke in me a new reverence the 6’s sense of sacred responsibility and “core of humanity,” which permeates Mary’s life and way...

Jess is a Type 5 (SO/SP 5w6 538) writer and artist “based on the internet.” Like many 5s, she prefers her privacy and requested that I mention no signifiers of her identity beyond the above. She originally typed as a 7, which given the way she presents, is no surprise. Jess takes on a a whimsical romp through "pleasure gardens," symbolic objects, and the terror of soul-dead zombie-people. This con...

John Luckovich is one of the most brilliant and authentic Enneagram teachers of my generation. His teaching is clear, challenging, thought-provoking, and comes from sincere desire to illuminate the psyche and immersion in his own inner work. His book, The Instinctual Drives and the Enneagram, presents the first ever coherent theory of instincts that incorporates evolutionary biology and developmen...

Kelsey Bishop is a Type 3 (SP/SO 3w2 378) whose shift from chasing "The Dream" to discovering her dream tangibly illustrates the 3's growth journey. She is the Founder of Candor, a new kind of professional network dedicated to increasing fulfillment at work by helping you discover and share "how you work." I find Kelsey inspiring and refreshingly self-revealing. We get into some good core 3 stuff...

Niklas Wilkens is a humanistic depth psychologist practicing in Germany, and he’s been working with the Enneagram for 14 years, although only 2 years ago realized that he was an Enneagram 2. Niklas honestly blew me away with his very personal and high resolution description of his 2-ness (despite mistyping as a 5 for 11 years!). We get into why 2 is a rejection type, the "inner hope machine," why...

David Gray is the most original voice in the Enneagram world today. His impressionistic, symbolic, elemental thinking style has produced utterly fresh insights about the Instincts, trifixation, typing processes, and the Enneagram symbol itself. David  kindly emerged from the cave of primordial darkness to subject himself to invasive questioning for about an hour. His purple shirt on purp...

Emeka Okorafor is a Sexual 8, and he is a world expert in Enneagram typing. He co-runs Enneagrammer.com, co-hosts the Big Hormone Enneagram Podcast and the Dark Arts Academy -- weekly classes where you can watch the Enneagrammer team type a celebrity live. WATCH THIS INTERVIEW ON YOUTUBE Learn the Enneagram at  The Enneagram School Enneagrammer Website & Typing Services Watch Emeka &...