As the Enneagram gains popularity, its uses are becoming vast and varied. Unlike other personality typing systems, the Enneagram provides information for growth and stress indicators.
Knowledge of the Enneagram has many applications to help individuals navigate various aspects of their life more healthily:
- Interpersonal Relationships (marriages, friendships, partnerships)
- Careers (making the right choice)
- The Workplace (efficiency, coworker/client relations, roles/tasks)
- Volunteer Efforts (using your gifts to benefit your passions)
- and many more
While some choose to delve into their research, others may need additional support to work with a system as complex as the Enneagram or apply it to their lives. Understanding the unique service that Enneagram coaches can provide to benefit your life is crucial if you consider hiring a coach.
What Does An Enneagram Coach Do?
The service an Enneagram coach provides is mainly subjective to the client’s needs, but typically coaching can include:
- Enneagram typing to determine your type, wings, and instinctual variant
- Revealing blind spots and defense mechanisms inherent to your type
- Determining the client’s general level of health based on their type
- Talking through situations in the client’s life to determine familiar patterns
- Identifying client goals and paths needed to achieve their goals
6 Benefits Of Enneagram Coaching That Make It Unique From Other Coaching Services
1. Specialized Information About Your Type And Clarifying Insight To Help Apply It In Your Life
Enneagram coaches can help you find your type and then reflect on how it has played out in your life in various ways from childhood, as a coping mechanism, and beyond.
They may look at your behavior and focus of attention in relationships or the workplace (depending on need) to reveal your motivation in making your choices. This insight provides clarity and allows for reflection into your own life from an objective viewpoint.
2. Identification Of Subconscious Blind Spots And Defense Mechanisms You Use
One of the main strengths of the Enneagram is providing a lens into your life in a way that you may not be readily aware of or ever noticed. Blind spots, sometimes referred to as shadows, are characteristics each type has that they often do not see in themselves.
Likewise, each type also has a standard ‘go-to’ way of protecting themself called a defense mechanism. The blind spots and defense mechanisms are revealed during coaching to bring awareness to the client. Understanding these aspects can increase choices for the client in the future and help them make better decisions.
3. Analysis Of Familiar Patterns And Decision Making
Enneagram coaches can help surface patterns as they talk through the client’s experience in life, reflecting on how their type has played out through choices made, conflicts, defense mechanisms, underlying motivations, and the results.
Clients can start to understand their Enneagram type’s core motivations, how it influences their actions, and the results these aspects produce in their life. Again, from this awareness, they can decide how they would like to move forward in life more proactively, from a place of choice instead of a victim to circumstance.
4. Understanding Your Level Of Health And The Roles Stressors Play
One of the first steps of coaching (Enneagram or otherwise) is for the coach to assess the client’s general level of health. Each person can exhibit aspects of health and stress in different ways according to their Enneagram type. Evaluating one’s health can help the coach determine the proper coaching method to best help the client receive life-giving support.
For example, if the client is at a low level of health and under extreme stress, typically, a coach would not approach with a direct challenge question but rather provide a safe space to help the client share when they felt comfortable. This strategy offers time for the coach to consider the overall big picture of the client’s life and possibly help them determine how to remove stressors from their lives.
5. Help You Intersect Your Goals With The Actions You Take
Armed with information concerning the typical behaviors of your Enneagram type, your underlying blind spots and defense mechanisms, and your patterns, you can begin to curate your life proactively to align your actions with your goals successfully.
You can depart from your old standard thoughts and behaviors, carving out new thought patterns and actions that lend themselves more favorably to the life you wish to create. You can use this transformative information in any avenue of your life in which you had previously experienced struggle.
6. A Tailored Growth Plan That Utilizes Your Enneagram Lines Of Connection
Coaches can form a growth plan for their clients using the lines of connection within the Enneagram diagram. Specifically, you can work to strengthen three lines of connection associated with your Enneagram type:
- Your Dominant Subtype (self-preservation, social, or sexual instinct)
- Your Number’s Wings (number on either side of your enneagram type)
- The High Side Of Your Stress Number (the number you disintegrate to at your worst)
Creating a growth plan to help you strengthen your awareness and ability to move toward integration into your health number (the number you integrate to at your best) can be an excellent way to help individuals experience transformation.
While the Enneagram is a beneficial personality assessment tool, sometimes seeking additional support from a coach is necessary and helpful. A coach can help you explore areas of your life that you may be overlooking or are difficult for you to process.
If you’re ready to hire an Enneagram Coach, check out the post: 5 Tips To Help You Find The Best Enneagram Coaches To Work With to experience the most benefit from the experience.
You can also check out more of Katy’s work on the We Are All Humans Podcast, where she hosts deep, meaningful conversations with various people from all walks of life about their experiences so far, the lessons they’ve learned, and their visions for the future.
Enneagram Coaching Benefits Sources:
Chestnut, B. (2013). The complete Enneagram: 27 paths to greater self-knowledge. She Writes Press.
Lapid-Bogda, G. (2009). Bringing out the best in everyone you coach: Use the Enneagram system for exceptional results. McGraw Hill Professional.
