Culture Diary: Numbers Game
How knowing your Enneagram number can tell you a lot about yourself
You’ve likely taken the Myers-Briggs personality test for a team-building exercise at work or school and if you’re like me, you’re constantly forgetting what your type is. Too many letters! And they don’t actually stand for words that make any sense! Confusing. (For the record, I’m an ISFJ-T, and I did have to just look that up to confirm. Again.)
Personality tests can feel reductive and restricting. It feels like being pigeon-holed, and who wants that? At the same time, getting an accurate result can also feel like being seen and understood. Personality tests aren’t just for those corporate workshops—they can sometimes actually help us understand ourselves better.
For me, the personality test that best helps me understand myself and other people is the Enneagram. Many have never heard of it—it’s nowhere near as common as the Myers-Briggs test. But the Enneagram feels more personal and more accurate to me.
The Enneagram was developed by a South American man named Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo traveled around South America and Asia as a young man, gathering traditional wisdom, before founding a school in Chile in the 1960s. Arica School was designed to be a place of self-discovery, pulling from psychology, metaphysics…
