Myth Monday [15]:
 
“I’ve been studying the Enneagram for 10 years, so I really get it.”
 
People often say “I’ve been studying the Enneagram for 5/10/20 years” as if the duration proves depth, insight, or usefulness. But what does that actually mean? 
 
You can spend years reading books, watching videos, and collecting concepts without changing a single pattern in your everyday life. 
 
Time spent around the Enneagram is not the same as time spent using it.
 
For the system to become actionable, you do not need decades. You need roughly an hour of honest work: identify your instinctual bias, see which of the nine strategies you lean on the most, and start experimenting with doing something different in real situations.
 
From there, what matters is not “I’ve been studying the Enneagram for X years,” but “I’ve been applying it in my own life for years,” or, if you teach or coach, “I’ve seen the same patterns and the same kinds of solutions help people again and again.” 
 
That is where the value is: not in how long you have circled the theory, but in how consistently you have used it to change behaviour, relationships, and choices.

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