The Big Picture: Part I

As a champion of individuality, I have always had strong resistance to relying on any personality system.  The goal of reducing the number of personality types to a number small enough for people to remember seemed offensive to me.

So it took a new angle on personality typing for me to even consider that all people could somehow be represented in a 9-type system.  Any other personality typing I have come across configures its different types independent of one another.  So that even if one human being has some kind of overlap personality, the actual ‘types’ themselves are designed to convey completely mutually exclusive human qualities.

The single conversation (in 2005) that informed my current view on human personality became memorable the moment I realized that we were talking about a perspective that allowed for personality elements to interact in what amounts to an infinite number of individual identities.  I now could imagine a vantage point that facilitated conflict resolution and predicted behavior without sacrificing what I held as the sacred truth of human individuality.

The conversation I had in 2005 was focused around a friend sharing his appreciation of the Enneagram system with me.  Although I never went on to study the Enneagram, I have taken all that I heard that day and forged my own approach to understanding the individual and interactive human experience.  The next post offers a broad overview of that understanding.