Worldview & Motivation

Driving your personality is the worldview that in order to gain love and approval you need to go along with others, blend in and keep the peace. You seek to maintain an inner sense of calm and connection to others by not rocking the boat.

As a type 9, your underlying motivation is to create comfort, peace and harmony for yourself and others. You avoid conflict and seek to smooth things over when conflict arises. You don’t like to make waves so you are accommodating, don’t speak up for yourself and often lose track of your own agenda.

Habitual Patterns of Thinking

Because of this underlying belief, your focus of attention is on other people and their agendas, needs or requests and anything in your environment that demands attentions. Your habitual patterns of thinking include overthinking, being scattered or foggy, and looking for ways to keep the peace and to make yourself or others feel more comfortable.

Your blind spots are your own needs, priorities, agenda and point of view and your own importance
or contribution.

To expand your focus of attention, practice becoming more aware of where your attention naturally goes. As you notice these habits of mind they will begin to loosen and allow you to intentionally shift your attention and be more open and available to the present moment. Develop a practice of intentionally looking for your blind spots in order to gain a more balanced perspective.

Habitual Patterns of Feeling

The emotional drive of type 9 is called sloth which refers to a sense of inertia or laziness particularly with regard to yourself and your priorities or agenda. Your tendency is to forget yourself and experience lack of energy with regard to your own needs, desires and purpose and to go along with others to keep the peace. In Enneagram language sloth is the Passion or Vice of type 9.

What is missing is right action, which refers to the ability to be fully engaged and take action in the moment with clarity of mind and purpose. It is the ability to intentionally focus on your own needs and priorities and take action in support of yourself. In Enneagram language right action is the Virtue of type 9.

The path from sloth to right action is to become more aware of the ways you habitually forget yourself. Practice letting go the your inertia toward your own personal development. Be intentional about being fully engage, speaking up in the face of conflict and taking action confidently and decisively.

Strengths & Challenges

As a type 9, you have many strengths which when integrated in a healthy and balanced way support you and your well-being. Paradoxically, these strengths can work against you when they are overdone or not
appropriately integrated.

When you are at your best, you exhibit these strengths:

  • You are easygoing, adaptable, accommodating and unselfish

  • You are oriented toward peace, harmony and everyone getting along

  • You understand and value different perspectives and are good at finding common ground and
    mediating conflict

  • You are inclusive, collaborative and good at building consensus

  • You are attentive to others, accepting, empathetic, supportive and trusting

  • You are balanced, steady, receptive and have a calming affect on others

When your strengths get out of balance or are used in unhealthy ways, they result in these challenges:

  • You are conflict avoidant and overly accommodating in order to keep the peace

  • You are too focused on others and lose track of your own opinions, desires and agenda

  • You have a hard time making decisions, overthinking the issues and not knowing what you want

  • You have difficulty moving into action particularly when taking action for yourself

  • Rather than feeling and expressing anger directly, you are stubborn and passive aggressive

Centers of Intelligence

The Enneagram recognizes our three centers of intelligence: the head center, which is the intelligence of the mind; the body center, which is the energy and sensations of the body; and the heart center, which is the intelligence of feelings and emotions. While we each have all three centers, most people tend to favor one center over the others. Ideally, we want to balance all three centers because each carries valuable wisdom.

Each Enneagram type is rooted in one of these three centers. The way this affects us is that we tend to perceive the world and rely most heavily for information from our own center of intelligence. We also tend to have the most dysfunction in connection with this center. It is both our strength and our weakness.

As a type 9, you are a body type and most likely filter information through your gut instinct. The underlying emotion of body types in anger. Type 9s tend to underplay anger by being passive aggressive and stubborn instead of directly expressing their anger. As a body type you are also tuned in to issues of control. which for type 9s shows up as resistance to being controlled. Body types also are self-forgetting, which is most evident for type 9s in the way they lose track of their own opinions, desires and agendas.

The path to growth is to balance the three centers of intelligence, which for type 9s means to get more in touch with your heart and to balance your reactivity with rational, objective thinking.