The Enneagram as a tool for Getting to Know Yourself Ep 64

3 min read

In episode 64 of Fresh Tracks I speak with Beatrice Chestnut of The Chestnut Group about the Enneagram. The Enneagram is an ancient tool that shows where your focus of attention goes. When used correctly, the Enneagram can be used to get to know yourself, allowing you to create Fresh Tracks from a place of strength. Beatrice shares that understanding the habitual patterns of your personality and where your attention goes can be essential to your personal growth and development. Your focus of attention is often a coping strategy and understanding where it goes, as well as what you avoid focusing on, will help you become a better leader of yourself.

Getting to know aspects of yourself that you can’t see is important to understanding where you are now in life. Can you identify what have you been doing that works and what have you been doing that isn’t working? The Enneagram helps in identifying what motivates you and highlights your blind spots. It can also assist in identifying tools you might add to your toolkit to more easily accomplish your goals.

Show Notes:

3:40 – What is the Enneagram and why is it a powerful tool?
7:30 – How to use the Enneagram to understand what gets between you and a better life.
10:20 –Identify unsupportive patterns so you can determine what strategies to add to your toolkit to grow.
16:30 – Understand the role emotional intelligence plays in achieving success (EQ).
22:00 – Examples of how the Enneagram can help you work through obstacles.
27:00 – What it means to be a leader and how we get stuck in unsupportive habits because we don’t recognize what’s blocking us.

Beatrice Chestnut, PhD MA is a licensed psychotherapist, coach, and business consultant based in San Francisco. She has a PhD in communication studies and an MA in clinical psychology and is founder of The Chestnut Group, which offers coaching, leadership development training, and team development services to empower change through the use of the Enneagram. A student of the Enneagram system since 1990, she is author of the books, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, and The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21^st century Workplace. She was President of the International Enneagram Association (IEA) from 2006-2007 and offers trainings on the Enneagram internationally, focusing on using it as a tool for personal transformation.