Myth Monday [14]:

 

“The more Enneagram labels I stack, the better I know myself.”

 

There is a strange trend of treating the Enneagram like a collection game. People introduce themselves with long strings of lore: instincts, wings, tritypes, stackings, variants of variants, as if the goal were to build the most elaborate Enneagram bio possible. 

In the extreme, you end up with something like “sp/so/sx 4w5 so/sx/sp 3 sx/sp/so 6w5 so/sp/sx 7 sx/so/sp 8w9 sp/sx/so 9”… which sounds impressive, but what does it actually do for you in real life?

 

The more labels you pile on, the easier it becomes to decorate yourself instead of changing yourself.

Every behaviour can be explained away by some extra code, and the focus quietly shifts from “What is not working in my life and how can I fix it?” to “How do I describe myself as precisely as possible inside the system?” It feels like refinement, but it often becomes a way to avoid the discomfort of picking one main strategy and one main bias and doing the hard work there.

 

Kept simple, the Enneagram does not need all that. You only need two dimensions: your instinctual bias (preserving, navigating, or transmitting) and the one of the nine strategies you lean on the most.

That is enough to illuminate a huge amount about how you protect yourself, how you relate, what you overuse, and where your life keeps snagging. 

 

From there the task is not finding more names, but noticing what is not working in your behaviour and trying to do something different. 

 

Most of the time, both the problem and the first steps of the solution will be found in those two places: how your bias pulls you, and how your favourite strategy keeps replaying.