Exploring the Mind, Heart, and Gut

Hi, welcome back to the Pastor Talk Podcast.
Glad you’re joining us.
We appreciate you listening as we continue to work our way through the Enneagram.
At this point in our study,
we have tried to give a good overview of the types.
In fact, if you haven’t listened to
the session on the types,
you may want to just pause this podcast and go do that.
That will be very helpful.
From this point on,
it really will help to have a pretty good
sense of at least one or two numbers you think might be feeling like a fit for you.
So today we talked,
Michael, about the Enneagram in the bigger sense,
how some of the numbers are related,
some of the connections.
As you look at the diagram that we have prepared
for you, you can find that on the website.
You can find that just about anywhere.
You will notice that within the circle and the nine points,
there are connecting lines.
That’s what you see inside the circle.
But that means something.
That has to do with the way
that there are some connections within the types.
As we move into this idea,
the first thing we encounter is the idea of a wing.
Michael, what do you make of wing?
What’s a good way to understand that for people?
I think one way that was described that was really helpful for me came with an art metaphor.
They were talking about these nine personality types as the primary colors of the Enneagram.
And the way that you might see that at first is that that’s restrictive,
that you’re not going to nail any one person down to one of nine things.
And wings is the first introduction
of how those primary colors mix.
In other words,
it’s not just each and every one of
us embodying one thing 100% completely,
but rather recognizing that if you are centered
in one of these numbers,
you’re going to start mixing with the numbers closest to you.
So just to make that very clear,
if you’re a number two,
you’re going to have some relationship,
some mixing throughout the course of your life with one and three.
And you may actually
be drawn more to one than the other.
You may have more three than you have one or vice versa.
And that’s just related to you living in life and sort of making your way into different
strengths and weaknesses that you bump into as you go.
So the basic idea then is that there are
not hard boundaries between the types,
but they are more like neighborhoods that spill into one another.
And as you move from one to another,
or as you find yourself in one,
it is very likely,
in fact, almost certainly that you will also find that you have a significant number of
characteristics from one of the numbers on either side of yours.
If you’re a seven,
you’re going to strongly identify with some of the tendencies of either eight or nine, etc.
And in the Enneagram,
these are called wings.
And so you will hear people talk about being
a five with a four wing,
a three with a two wing.
And what that means is that you have identified
your primary type, the place where you live,
the thing that really hits you the most.
However, you also get some of what is described in one of the neighboring numbers,
one of the neighboring types.
Clint, I was just having a conversation with someone last night,
and we were talking about
this idea of wings.
And they were trying to make sense of how you could have two of the deep core
needs at the same time.
And I think a way to understand this is,
it’s not that you have two
core sinfulness, that there’s going to be one of these numbers that speaks to you whose narrative just makes sense.
There’s then tendencies or propensities of these surrounding numbers then
that can blend naturally into that.
So for instance, you might be a five,
you might be someone
for whom observation standing back being at the edge of the room,
sort of hoarding and compiling
knowledge, because you live in an anxious world,
that maybe that is your home base,
you understand that, but you are maybe a little bit drawn to the idea of structure and institution and idea.
So you borrow some of the sixes assumptions,
and you work that into you,
you’re motivated by the idea
of knowledge, by the idea of observation,
by the idea of contemplation and intellect.
But you think that working your way up the corporate ladder or finding a good place within a particular
political party, that that’s going to be the solution.
So now you’re starting to blend
neighborhoods using your analogy,
Clint, you’re sort of working your way over,
drawing some of the tendencies and ideas of your neighbor.
But the thing that’s driving you remains that core thing
native to your number.
Right, and you may find that those nuances really give you a different
flavor and probably explain some places where you may not feel that you fit completely within your type.
If you’re one and you’re very concerned with order and perfection,
you may also borrow
from the nine that struggles to be motivated.
And you may find yourself sort of constantly
struggling with, on one hand, your core desire to get things done and do them well,
and this secondary influence of feeling a little overwhelmed and wanting to withdraw.
And all of us have some
of those places where the type that we occupy and the types next to us interact with one another.
And it creates some really creative,
individual and unique kind of recipes for how we are put together spiritually,
psychologically.
There’s a sense in which the Enneagram is spatial.
In other personality typing systems, there’s really not this kind of blending,
this kind of inter-talking that
happens that you have within the Enneagram.
So when you have a number like a nine,
it has on either
side of it an eight and a one.
And that positioning,
that spatial positioning on the circle
has meaning.
This idea of wings says where you’re at means that you’re closer to some things than others.
And we’re going to nuance that further when we get halfway through our conversation
here today.
But just for right now,
safe to say that if you’re a nine,
you’re much more likely
to identify with the eight or the one than a five or a four.
The idea is that those
propensities, those ways of being in the world are going to be less likely for you to make sense
than some of these numbers who are closer to your number.
Yeah, I think it’s the Enneagram’s way of compensating for the fact that none of us are purely anything,
that there is room within each type for growth, for movement.
And if you are at
a point in this study where you are starting to feel pretty comfortable with the number,
say you have identified yourself as a seven,
for instance, and that feels really comfortable.
You read the descriptions, you’ve heard the conversations,
and you think more and more,
boy, that really seems to be where I come from.
It might be interesting to take a look at the five and the six,
and you will almost inevitably find that in one of those types,
you will find some things that also seem familiar.
Not as striking, they don’t ring the chord the same way that your primary
number does, but you will find yourself saying,
“Yeah, I do some of that.
I get some of that.”
And that’s a good indication that you may have found your wing.
And the wing, by the way, as Michael mentioned, is always going to be adjacent to your number.
It’s always going to
be plus one or minus one from where you start.
One Enneagram teacher talks about the wings as
being a potential tool of identifying what number you are,
and the way that they describe that was
that sometimes you’ll have a person who will identify with three numbers,
and they’ll all be
next to each other.
They’ll identify with, say,
three, four, and five.
Well, this particular author said that’s often a good sign that you live right smack dab in the middle.
That you’re, in that case, probably a four with three and five wings.
And the idea is because you’ve, over time,
worked your way out.
One thing I would say here,
Clint, is I’ll just admit to those of you listening with us in
this conversation that when I first made my way into the Enneagram,
this idea of wings seemed to
me to be a little squishy.
I didn’t know exactly what to do with it because it felt a little bit
like saying, “Here’s all of these numbers.
Oh, and by the way,
there’s this complicated compilation
thing happening.” And it felt less helpful than it did feel helpful.
As I’ve now lived with it
for a little while and started to give some more thought and time to exactly how these typologies work in relationship,
I can say from this vantage that this begins to make more sense.
It’s less about just complexifying it.
And it’s more as you start to get a grasp of what the whole Enneagram
is trying to do.
This just is a natural part of that extension.
So if you come into this and this
sounds confusing, it sounds like you’re making something that was simple, more complex.
I guess my recommendation would be to stick with it,
try to learn the stuff that connects most
deeply with you and some of this will make more sense as you go.
I think there’s also maybe a
safety net in this,
Michael, in that it does complicate it and it can seem almost needless
at first.
But it provides a way of trying to avoid the mistake of thinking that once we have these
nine labels, we can slap them on anybody.
It’s, I think, helpful that the Enneagram says,
“Here’s where we start with these nine big picture items.” But don’t go from there thinking that you can
neatly categorize everyone because there’s more to it than that story.
Yes, a person may be a four,
but that doesn’t mean we understand who they are.
They may borrow from the three,
they may borrow from the five, they may be this combination of things that make people more complex, more interesting,
more frustrating in some sense.
But I think the Enneagram helps us because once we have
our number and we start getting the basics,
our temptation is to want to start labeling things.
And I think this helps us put the brakes on that a little bit.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I agree with that 100%.
And I think that these wings also provide an opportunity for us to recognize
how resilient we are as humans.
Because the truth is,
it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever heard of the
Enneagram before or not.
Once you use this tool to look back on your life,
you will be able to see
that throughout your entire life, without this tool,
you’ve been working towards in both positive and negative ways,
making up for your shortcomings.
We just intuitively try to make our lives work
better than they do.
We try to accommodate for weaknesses and the wings are a way in which
whether you know about the Enneagram or not,
you’ve probably been working on it,
you’ve probably found ways of trying to accommodate and that can be a positive,
a really great healthy sign.
You also have to say,
it can be negative,
you can share from your neighbors weaknesses as much as
you can their strengths.
So some of us have made some ruts in places where we would rather not.
I think your example,
Clint of the one borrowing some of the slothfulness of the nine is a good
example of that, that maybe the one’s accommodation to feeling like nothing in their life is ever the
way that it should be,
is to just sort of give up and lethargically say,
this isn’t worth it anyways.
Well, that’s not a positive appropriation of the nine, that’s a negative.
And so your awareness of
the wings can help you even start teasing out,
okay, this is a strength that I want to live into,
this is a weakness to be avoided.
I agree 100% Michael,
I think the wing thing,
if it doesn’t make sense to you at this point,
I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
I think it helps to be aware
that it’s a thing,
that it’s something that Enneagram people talk about.
I think if you have
questions, there’s lots of ways to follow up in that.
If you don’t feel like you have found your
number, so to speak, I would not worry about the wings at this point.
If you’re looking at your
number and you’re finding yourself saying,
I am that, but boy, I do that too.
And you’re looking at a category next to your number,
that’s a good indication that maybe at some level,
you are experiencing this idea of having a wing.
None of us are purely one thing.
And keep in mind that one
of the things that we hope happens as we mature is that we grow.
And as we grow,
we move into some
of the good parts of other numbers.
So you still may find that there are several things that apply
to you around the circle.
That’s okay.
In fact, that could be good news for you,
but you will likely find that you start from a particular place.
So let’s say you stuck with us this far.
You said, wow, it’s getting a little bit more complicated.
Remember, this thing was created by mystics.
We’ve not even scratched the surface yet.
So let’s make it even more complicated.
Enneagram teachers will talk about what they’ll call the triads.
Note that there’s nine numbers in the Enneagram typology
that being divided into three sets of three numbers.
And so once again,
this is a spatial
typology.
These numbers are connected spatially and numerically.
So you have three triads.
The first triad that we have is the eight,
nine,
and the one.
That triad has multiple ways of being
talked about.
So some of these descriptors are the type and place of the body where they are rooted.
Another way to look at them is their major faculty of living in the world.
So the eighth, the nine, and the one are called the gut triad,
but they’re also called the anger triad.
The two, the three,
and the four are called the heart triad.
They’re also called the feeling triad.
And the five,
the six, and the seven is called the head triad or the thinking triad.
And each and every one of these sets of numbers has a particular vantage from which they are connected
by the processing place in the body and the tools that they use to do it.
So maybe the best way to
do this is go number by number.
But before we do that, Clint,
any things that you think we should
know about the triads?
As I understand the triads,
Michael, or at least what’s helpful to me is to
think that there are these connected numbers,
these sets of three that kind of operate from the same place.
They’re feeling people, they’re thinking people, they’re instinctive or intuitive people,
and that that’s not true of the other sets.
So that a seven and a one are starting from a different place,
one being a thinking place and one being a gut place.
And a four is going to start from a
completely different place, a heart place, an emotional place.
And we all have all of those systems.
But I think the one that we trust the most,
the one that we use most instinctively,
the one that we by default go to,
gives us a sense of,
again, where our number might be
and what group we might belong to.
Maybe the only way to really understand triads
to go through the numbers and to talk about how they relate to each other.
So let’s just jump right into that.
Let’s start with an eight.
The eight, of course, is the challenger,
the one who is going to be first to press the boundaries,
to not back down to question another
person, to jump right in.
There may be the most obvious version,
would you say, Clint, of that idea of the gut people,
if you give that their default emotion is anger,
you can see how the
challenger is the one who’s going to respond to a situation quickly,
instinctively rise up out of a
constant feeling of discontent and anger.
And so therefore, their actions happen.
Would you say that’s fair?
Yeah, I think the eight,
the idea would be for an eight that they trust their
instinctive ability to discern right from wrong.
They don’t need to think their way to it.
They don’t feel their way to it.
They just function with the possibly misinformed belief that in any
given scenario, they know what’s right.
They just know that.
And you’ll hear eights or ones,
maybe possibly nines as well,
talk about I just follow my gut.
I vote with my gut.
I get in a situation
where I have to make a decision and I’m going to go with what my gut tells me.
I’m going to follow my instincts.
Other people are going to say,
I dig in and I do a ton of research.
That’s not where an eight lives,
not where a one or a nine lives.
They all hold to this idea that those
answers are found internally,
not externally.
Yeah, absolutely.
Maybe the odd one in that triad is the nine.
Agreed.
Because you would not initially think that the peacemaker,
the mediator, that these are the individuals who operate from a vantage of anger.
But bear with us here for a second.
You have people whose entire life experience is living in between,
whose natural giftedness helps them to see other people’s points of view,
that they can literally have conversations with
people diametrically opposed and hear both of them.
Well,
the problems that nine experience in
the world is that since they’re so good at that mediating,
everyone comes to them to be heard,
but almost no one takes the time to hear the nine,
to affirm the nine’s existence,
to say that I see
you, I know you are in the room, you matter.
And the nine’s live with this constant sense that
they’re not important.
They’re not special.
Nobody even knows when they walk in the room.
Nobody cares when they leave the room.
Can you see the nine is harboring some anger?
They’ve built up a large store throughout their life in which they’ve come to believe nobody cares and I’m angry about
it.
So I think the nine lives perfectly positioned in the middle of that spectrum,
Michael.
If you take frustration with the world or anger,
the eight wants to attack it.
The eight wants to overcome it
and stand up to it.
The one wants to manage it,
to organize it, to channel it.
And the nine wants to withdraw from it.
The nine just wants to step back and not deal with it.
But they all start with the same fuel.
They take it in very different directions,
but it’s the same reality
the three of those numbers are dealing with in very unique ways.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that’s a great summary.
So you’ve already said for the one that the ones desire is to channel it.
Say more about that.
I think the one takes their anger,
their fear of not getting things right.
And they want to bring order.
They want to bring balance.
So their anger tends to be internalized.
They tend to use it as fuel,
but they’re not going to be in conflict.
They’re not going to attack people.
They’re going to work their tail off to make things better.
And again, that’s often fueled by a sense of frustration because their innate suspicion is things aren’t the way they should be.
And that creates in them this frustration that drives them,
but they’re going to handle it very
different than an eight or a nine.
The eight’s going to blow up about it.
The nine’s going to
try to get away from it.
The one’s going to go to work trying to fix it.
Then let’s turn our
attention here to the next set of numbers, the two,
the three,
the four.
These are the heart
people, the people who are in some way driven by their core perception of emotion.
So we start with
the two who is maybe like the eight,
the most simple or most understandable version of this.
The two is constantly mirroring the emotions of those around them.
Remember, they’re the helper.
They’re the person whose entire life is literally lived from the narrative.
I’m as good as I am
helpful to other people.
And so for them,
when there is emotion in the room,
that emotion is not one
that they empathize with.
That is emotion they are tempted to have as their own.
They feel what others feel.
So in that way,
you might think of the feeling types that they’re big in their feelings
or that they have a particular feeling.
That’s not totally true.
The two in this instance is
going to be feeling what others feel,
whether that’s grief or joy or sadness or anger.
The two is going to reflect that and they’re not going to be able to separate between what they’re
feeling and who they are.
And so you see in this moment,
it’s a very confusing place to be because
the two is having a hard time discerning between who am I and who are the emotions of these people that I’m with?
Yeah. And again, I think there’s a sense,
Michael, in which it becomes an internalizing
or externalizing.
And the two is probably the epitome of externalizing feelings.
They’re the caregiver.
They’re going to reach out to others.
They’re going to constantly be informed by the
needs of others, the situation of others,
the feelings of others,
and they want to connect
outwardly with that.
I think they’re, in some ways, the most obvious of the heart triad.
They are feeling people.
They’re empathetic.
They’re sympathetic.
They’re compassionate.
They’re all of those things that you would expect,
a person driven by emotions.
The trouble is they sometimes
substitute other people’s emotions for their own,
but it’s all happening in their heart.
Absolutely.
Then you keep going down around the circle and we get to the three.
What is interesting about the three is like the nine,
they have a really odd relationship to the idea of feeling,
to the idea of heart,
because amongst all of the numbers,
all nine numbers, the three has the
least awareness of their own emotions,
which is ironic because what you’re saying is you have
one number of the feeling triad who doesn’t know their feelings.
But I think the flip side is
nobody is working harder to suppress their emotions than the three is,
and I think that’s
how they end up in this triad.
They’re not aware of them because they are working so hard not to deal with them.
Yeah, right.
Absolutely.
So when a three walks into the room,
they’re unlike the two
in that they aren’t feeling what other people are feeling.
The three is perceiving what other people
are feeling and they’re driven by their inner need to show,
to perform,
to put a face on it.
So if they see others are happy and joyful,
a three will instantaneously reflect the same.
If they see the others are grieving and need help,
the three will respond to that.
But it’s not empathetic
in the sense that they are feeling it with them.
It’s that they are perceiving it and then rising
up to show in light of it.
And that is a form of emotional quick changes.
And it’s not rooted in
any sort of internal foundation,
but rather in the constant need to externalize it,
which is, to your point, Clint,
a tool,
a mechanism, a way that the three has learned to avoid engaging
those feelings.
Yeah, is this fair, Michael?
Sometimes the three is called the performer.
And if you think of an actor,
that’s really the image here that a three is constantly aware of
emotions so they know which ones to portray.
They don’t belong to them.
They’re acting them out in
order to affiliate with other people or impress other people.
But it’s very much they’re looking
for the script.
They’re looking for what role am I playing in this situation.
So they are very
concerned with emotions.
They just don’t happen to be their own.
Exactly.
And it could be and is
oftentimes manipulative and deceitful,
but it’s also in another sense,
not those things.
Threes are obsessed with efficiency,
with getting stuff done and being successful.
And emotion gets in the way of that stuff.
It’s hard to be efficient.
It’s hard to get stuff done.
It’s hard to be the
absolute best at everything that you do if you’re always getting bogged down by those nasty feelings.
So the threes just compartmentalize.
They move on and they say I’ll get to it later and they never
get around to it.
So then we move on to the four and the four lives on the opposite side of the
feeling triad.
And in this place,
we see individuals whose feelings and focus on those feelings has
less to do with externalizing and more to do with the inward internalizing and reflection on their own feelings,
particularly their negative feelings.
Fours tend to be obsessed with some
of those deeper negative experiences and they’re very much heart people,
but their emotions tend
to be colored on the darker side of the spectrum.
Yeah, the fours experience of the world is that
there’s a lost beauty.
There’s something wrong with them that there’s something broken inside.
And so their externalizing is reaching out to create a reflection of the beauty that they
believe must be in the world.
That’s why so many fours are artists and creative people is because
for them, symbols and metaphor are rich pregnant opportunities for them to reconnect with what is
a lost beauty.
But when you encounter the world in that way,
when your world is full of lost
opportunity, you’re going to be mired and stuck in some sadness.
There’s going to be a constant
recurring kind of melancholy.
And so when fours are in the midst of their life,
even in some of
life’s most joyous, fun-filled moments,
the fours going to mistrust feelings of elation.
They’re going to think this isn’t completely true unless there’s a little bit of a bite to it.
And so that’s why fours as a number tend to always subvert what seems to be good,
looking for the bad in it because of this fundamental assumption that they have that
anything that is purely good is hiding something that’s not.
Could we say, Michael, that the four gets comfortable enough with sadness that it kind
of becomes their home base and they never are comfortable straying too far from it.
They like to keep an eye on that sadness and be close enough to it to get back to it.
They’re afraid really of those moments of joy because what if they run out or what if it’s not as good as they
thought it would be or they just seems to me like not to get too far away from the place
that they spend the most time which is that kind of melancholy.
Absolutely. And they’ve gotten there through some real self-reflection and self-questioning.
This is why fours don’t have much time of day for people who aren’t self-reflective.
The people who haven’t found some sadness in their life,
the fours really have no time for.
I would say fours maybe among all the types hate shallow.
They have a visceral reaction to it.
So that takes us to the third and final triad of the Enneagram.
Here we have the head,
we have the thinking triad, we have in these numbers the five,
the six, and the seven.
So we start with the number
five and the five is once again much like we had with the eight,
much like we had with the two,
maybe sort of the first what you might assume to be the person who lives in the thinking triad.
And these fives are those who live from the idea of observation and reflection.
Like you said on
Sunday, Clint, we don’t necessarily want to think of the five as all of the most intelligent people
in the world, though there’s lots of PhD fives.
The five is in the thinking triad because of their
fundamental assumption that the way to make it in a very dangerous broken world is to observe the stuff around you,
to think about it,
and to know it so that when time comes for you to protect
yourself or to make the right choice that you have all of the data that you need to do it.
So they’re the people who live on the outside of the room,
they’re sort of walking and surveying
the space, they’re looking and thinking okay so what are you doing,
what are you talking about,
what do I need to care about.
They’re the people who when you call and you say hey have you read
this article, they say yeah but have you read the four other articles that say this stuff,
have you thought about that?
Yeah and maybe this would have been helpful in the beginning of the
conversation Michael but it occurs to me that one way to think about triads may be where we escape
to and the five most of all escapes to their mind.
They don’t escape to their heart,
they don’t escape to their gut.
This is what I think distinguishes a five from a one.
When a one escapes they go to
their fundamental assumptions about right and wrong.
Fives are going to hide in their studies, their thoughts,
their mental life, and withdraw from the world.
So their escape path is most
clearly to the mind and I think they’re the epitome of the mind triad.
One author said that they often
give talks in conferences or retreats where they’ll help people find their number and learn about what
that means and they joked and said that of all of the numbers the five is the one to take all of the
handouts to put them in their binder to get all of the information by the books,
by the special DVDs and then take them home and then two weeks later come to the realization that they were a five.
That it just takes time to assemble the information,
to process it, to think through it
in four different ways and then realize,
“Oh, I guess I am a five.” Yeah,
if you deal with a five
and you’re asking them to trust your instinct or trust your heart,
“Hey, I feel this,” or “I just,
my gut tells me this,” they won’t understand what you’re saying.
You’re going to have to use thinking language,
data,
observation.
They can’t get there any other way.
That brings us to the six.
Michael, the six is an interesting one in thinking triad in that they are the loyalist.
They’re the person who spends a lot of time creating for themselves systems,
both of people and of structures that
help them navigate life and unlike the five who is obsessed with information,
the six is thinking
really manifests itself in thinking about those structures.
Who’s in my camp?
Who can I trust?
What is the right way to navigate life?
What political party should I belong to?
What school should I affiliate with?
What group of people will I throw my lot in with?
A lot of that
evaluation for them happens in the mind.
They approach that task.
It’s a very different task
from the five, but they approach it mentally.
Is that fair?
It is fair.
One way to distinguish
between the five and the six is the fact that the five wants to go to the ivory tower.
They want to go to the place with all of the books where they can hoard the information to themselves because
that’s a signal of strength and ability.
The six is not driven to isolation,
but driven to those select few who they can trust.
A six is assumption is the only way to get through life
safely is to bring a safe and trustworthy posse with you.
And so they’re both observing,
but for radically different reasons.
Six is observing to identify,
are you trustworthy?
Is there reason for me to throw my lot in with you or should I be throwing my lot somewhere else?
There is probably no other number so driven by anxiety as the six is.
They are living in an
unsafe world in which safety is paramount.
And the way that they push down anxiety and the way
that they try to get themselves closer to safety is through thinking is through carefully processing
and identifying who the people are,
who they’re going to bring with them on their journey.
You made the point last night,
Michael, that’s important that sixes do define themselves with
structure, but it could be in agreement with the structure or disagreement with the structure.
They can define themselves by being for something or against it.
But either way to get there,
they have to think their way to it.
They have to think about the structure.
They have to see its strengths.
They have to see its weakness.
They have to evaluate their response and their position.
And all of that’s happening in the mind of a six.
It’s an interesting place that they end up,
but I think when you,
to use the language,
think it through, it begins to feel fairly obvious.
Yeah.
And maybe we can all relate to some experience where someone’s come up to you
and they are a complete advocate for whatever the thing is.
Maybe it’s a news item or a political talking point,
whatever. And they come to not like the five with a whole list of articles and
books and a knowledge that relates to it,
that they’re trying to cross through in an analytical fashion.
The six comes to you and they say,
Hey, you have to believe this because this person said
this and because this person said this and this person said that,
and they’re an idiot.
So you need to be on the same team because we need to be together.
Once you’re having a conversation with
someone who’s a six,
you’re going to sense that it’s both simultaneously relational,
but it’s also deeply centered in how they’ve processed it in their mind.
Sixes are deeply afraid of gray
because they’re afraid that inside themselves it’s gray.
And so sixes can be very black and white.
And when they pick a side,
they’re in a hundred percent for better or worse.
Then we get to the
last number in the thinking tribe.
And this is another one of those numbers where you may not
initially see how it works.
You’ve got seven, they’re the ones who are out there,
the, the experientially driven people, the people who are always out to do something new,
to innovate, to always be striving at the edge of their life experience.
And they’re always trying to have
more fun and add more experiences in their life.
And you think someone who’s driven to all of these
experiences, that’s not really a thinking trait,
but when you open up the hood,
you look a little
bit closer, you find that the sevens have to work systemically and consistently to create a life
in which they can always be having these novel experiences.
In other words,
while a seven is
whitewater rafting in the middle of the experience with all of the water and spray and heart pounding,
all of that experience for them may be dull and gray.
And so they’re thinking,
well, what’s the next thing we’re going to do?
They’re creating in their mind the next experience that they’re going
to have so that they can avoid thinking deeper about an experience which they’re afraid is negative.
Yeah, the placement of seven as a thinker is,
I think, the least intuitive of all of the triad stuff, Michael.
But if you think about thinking,
not like the five as information,
but as the task
of planning, of anticipating the seven more than anyone else,
because they’re afraid of solitude,
they’re afraid to stop,
they’re afraid of their momentum being slowed down,
they have to constantly
be thinking about their next thing.
What am I doing after this?
To plan event and action after event
and action that keeps them moving because of this fear that if I slow down,
I’m going to have to face
stuff I don’t want to face.
This is a tricky one.
But I think when you think of it that way,
that thinking is planning.
It’s not knowledge.
They’re not after knowledge.
They’re not trying to understand stuff.
But they have to expend tremendous mental energy to stay sort of manically busy,
manically involved.
And that takes some organization that happens in their minds.
Which I think is also something worth noting.
If you know some of those people who are the life of
the party, they flip from one social group to another,
how they bring this constant energy,
you might bring the assumption that there’s not much thinking there.
And the truth is that maybe
there isn’t deep thought there.
But that’s been carefully constructed.
It’s not that they’re not
capable of thinking is that they’ve lived a life in fear of what they would find if they thought too deeply.
In our continued Lenten journey,
as we study the Enneagram,
we continue to go deeper into
the many layers that the Enneagram gives us.
And this coming Sunday,
we’re going to engage with the
reality of our brokenness with how the Enneagram frames these ruts that we’ve made in our lives.
So I highly encourage you to come and join us for that meal to tune in on Monday following,
because we’re going to actually see how our deepest brokenness connects to both our strengths
and weaknesses and the interrelatedness of these nine types with each other.
These things are all in conversation.
And it is both an avenue for personal self exploration,
but an opportunity to practice compassion for others who are living in the same place.
And just an honest warning,
we are at that point in the journey where the Enneagram has helped us perhaps find a number
and now wants to talk to us about how we got there.
And that for most of us probably won’t
be an entirely comfortable conversation.
There may be some moments in that that have some depth
and perhaps even some discomfort,
which isn’t a bad thing,
but it’s coming just so people are aware.
It’s not the best advertisement ever given,
Reverend Lovell, but we hope you come on Sunday.
Thanks for being with us.
We look forward to continuing the conversation
in our next Pastor Talk podcast.
See you soon.