Читать книгу Enneagram For Dummies - Jeanette van Stijn - Страница 106

The difficult part of finding your type is learning to interpret what you perceive. In determining your dominant type pattern, the important aspect is the degree to which you, for example, value perfection as a Type 1 and the extent to which that limits your freedom to act.

Christina is glad that her presentation turned out perfect and she earned the highest possible grade. But simply having created a perfect presentation and being happy about the good grade doesn’t turn her into the Perfectionist Enneagram type. Most people appreciate a good evaluation of their work, including Christina. She didn’t strive to create a perfect presentation and certainly didn’t aim to earn the top grade. Nor did she work on it excessively. She isn’t driven by outside success. The grade is the result of her simply having fun with the presentation. That Christina is capable of creating a perfect presentation doesn’t make her an Enneagram Type 1, the Perfectionist.

Spending a great deal of time working on a presentation can likely be done only by someone whose attention is so focused on perfection that they can’t stop as long as they see anything that can still be improved. The Perfectionist group includes people to whom perfection is the top priority and whose focus is therefore continually (at least several times a day) directed toward things that aren’t good (enough) and must be improved on. Someone who simply delivers a perfect performance, like Christina in the example in this section, doesn’t belong to the Enneagram Type 1 only because of this achievement. To determine whether you belong to this Enneagram type, you need to consider whether your attention is directed mainly toward perfection and improvement. Conversely, it’s just as possible that someone has this Enneagram type but isn’t actually capable of achieving perfect performances. What matters are the underlying driving force and the desired goal — not the actual implementation.

Finding your type can lead to various complications. If such complications were to occur, the support of an Enneagram trainer might help. Here are a few examples:

 Two types can show the same behavior or be similar to each other in certain respects. You recognize yourself in this behavior but can’t find out the underlying reason in your case.

 People who belong to the same type can appear differently to the outside world. They might then recognize themselves in the type description but not in other people of the same type.

 You have acquired and discarded all sorts of habits in your life. Maybe you were raised by parents who were of different types from you but conveyed their strengths to you. This makes it difficult to recognize what is actually at the core of your being and what you've acquired.

 In books about the Enneagram, including this one, the individual types are described only in summary, which expresses the lowest common denominator of that type. The books present an average version of this type, so to speak. This isn’t really possible any other way because every type shows a great variety. If such books are to remain readable and fulfill their goals, the authors have to limit themselves by focusing on the common denominators rather than the exceptions. Reality has many more layers, and your version of the type can vary greatly from the average.