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The Essential Enneagram
 Contents
Forward and review
Cautions in test claims
Validity of the Essential Enneagram Test
Get started on self-discovery
The Essential Enneagram is the most fundamental guide to the Enneagram ever offered. It features an effective, paragraph-based self-test for the simple, accurate and confident determination of your own personality type. You are guided in a journey of self-discovery of your type and what it means for your personal development, relationships and well-being.
Brimming with empowering information on each of the nine personality types, this one-of-a-kind book equips you with the practices and tools to dramatically enhance your quality of life. It includes an entire section on what to do when you have discovered your type, offering the specific practices for each type and going far beyond mere suggestions.
The Essential Enneagram provides:
• The steps for discovering your type with precise probabilities for each type
• Key differentiators of every type from every other type
• Concise and comprehensive type description pages giving the basic proposition, principle characteristics, stressors and causes of anger, and steps in personal development
• Universal practices for all types
• Specific practices for each type on awareness, action practice, preview-review and reflection
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Contents
Forward by Helen Palmer
Section 1: How to Discover your Type
What is the Enneagram?
What is the Essential Enneagram?
The Process of Self-Discovery and Self-Development Using the Essential Enneagram
How to Begin
Essential Enneagram Test Instructions
Essential Enneagram Paragraph Test
Linking Paragraphs to Types
The Enneagram Figure
How to Proceed
Understanding the Type Determination Pages
Format of Type Determination Pages
Understanding the Type Description Pages
Format of Type Description Pages
How to Discover Your Type
Type One: The Perfectionist
Type Two: The Giver
Type Three: The Performer
Type Four: The Romantic
Type Five: The Observer
Type Six: The Loyal Skeptic
Type Seven: The Epicure
Type Eight: The Protector
Type Nine: The Mediator
Summary of Type Discriminators for Each Type
How to Confirm and Verify Your Type
How to Build Self-Understanding
Section 2: What to Do Now That You Know Your Type:
Part I: General Practices and Principles For All Types
Breathing and Centering
Five Basic Principles
Principle I: Three Laws of Behavior
Principle II: Three Centers of Intelligence
Principle III: Three Life Forces
Principle IV: Three Survival Behaviors – The Personality Subtypes
Principle V: Three Levels of Knowing and Learning
Elements of Personal and Professional Development – the Nine Cs
Part II: Specific Practices for Each Type
Practices for the Perfectionist: Type One
Practices for the Giver: Type Two
Practices for the Performer: Type Three
Practices for the Romantic: Type Four
Practices for the Observer: Type Five
Practices for the Loyal Skeptic: Type Six
Practices for the Epicure: Type Seven
Practices for the Protector: Type Eight
Practices for the Mediator: Type Nine
Appendix A: Additional Enneagram Resources
Appendix B: Validity of the Essential Enneagram Test
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Forward and review
From the Forward by Helen Palmer, renowned author and teacher of the Enneagram
The Essential Enneagram offers a groundbreaking and original approach to a key problem in personality study. How do you correctly find your place within a rich and complex system, when the choice itself requires knowing yourself beforehand?
The authors’ innovative method looks like a guided tour to discovering, confirming, and verifying your personality type. You are provided with key checkpoints along the way to make sure you stay on track, and a set of sensitive, practical exercises to aid your personal development once you’ve discovered your type. David and Virginia are the first authors to bring both scientific validity and reliability studies to the Enneagram.
This book guides you in exploring how your placement of attention and use of energy focuses your worldview, how you deal with stress and anger, and what you can do to develop yourself and receive support from others.
This book is rooted in David’s and Virginia’s extensive clinical experience and their understanding of people from the inside out. Their presentation of general methods for personal change and their type-specific practices are exceptionally valuable.
This long-awaited work is a must for anyone interested in effective communication, compassionate relationships, freedom from confinement of repetitive behavior, and, ultimately, the freedom to be a complete human being.
Helen Palmer
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Review by Arthur Hastings, Ph.D., professor, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA
This is a great compact book on Enneagram types, based on an innovative new test, describing how people experience themselves within the types, identifying deeper issues of the points, and presenting exercises and practices for personal development. Much therapeutic insight is compressed into these descriptions, which will be useful for counselors and those interested in inner work. The book is intentionally brief, so it does not exhaust the nuances and implications for the system. However, it gets to core issues, structures and dynamics, and offers ways to work with the qualities personally or as a therapist.
Arthur Hastings, Ph.D.
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Cautions in test claims
• When taking online tests be sure to check for validity and reliability information
• Sometimes reliability data is presented as validity data, e.g., “construct validity” is actually a form of reliability data
• Check to see if any external validity measures are used, i.e., measures other than internal statistical methods and comparisons with other tests
Validity of the Essential Enneagram Test
We designed a simple paragraph test based on logical constructs of the nine Enneagram personality types derived from the theoretical work of Helen Palmer and David Daniels. Each paragraph includes the:
• Overall worldview of the type
• Attentional style
• Dominant mental and emotional biases
• Central preoccupations
• Positive attributes of the type
We asked representatives of each personality type to review and revise their respective paragraphs to ensure that the paragraphs were congruent with their actual experience of being that type. We then reviewed their revisions to ensure that the paragraphs were accurate from a theoretical standpoint and were equally socially desirable.
We established the Essential Enneagram Test’s validity by testing 970 individuals throughout the United States who enrolled in Enneagram classes or volunteered for typing interviews. These individuals did not know their Enneagram personality type and were unfamiliar with the Enneagram. Sixty-five percent of the sample were women. Thirty-five percent were men.
We compared each individual’s Essential Enneagram Test self-rating to one of two “gold standard” ratings:
One of the gold standards used was a diagnostic typing interview conducted by certified Enneagram teachers who did not know how the individuals had rated themselves.
The other gold standard was the individual’s own re-evaluation on the Assessment Inventory after taking a 10-week Enneagram course or its equivalent.
The two gold standards produced similar results. These results are used to indicate the validity of the Essential Enneagram Test – the probability that users will accurately select their personality type from among the nine paragraphs.
We analyzed the results for each of the nine paragraphs separately. Each of the nine paragraphs, or personality types, has its own probability of accurately discriminating among the nine Enneagram personality types. The Type Determination pages in the Essential Enneagram show the validity of each paragraph. For example, the Perfectionist paragraph has a 66-percent validity. This means that two-thirds of the people who selected the Perfectionist paragraph as their type were also identified as this type by the gold standard – either by an expert’s rating through a structured interview or by their own re-evaluation of themselves following an Enneagram course.
People sometimes choose a paragraph in the Essential Enneagram Test that is not their correct personality type, but is one of the look-alike or similar types associated with their personality type, or is one of the four personality types connected to their personality type.
Four types are associated with each personality type according to Enneagram personality theory. They are the two wings and the security type and the stress type. For this reason, we also calculated the probability of individuals being each of the other eight types, if their self-rating was not correct when compared to the gold standard. The Type Determination pages in the Essential Enneagram show these other analyses. For example, eight percent of the subjects who chose the Perfectionist paragraph are actually the Romantic type, eight percent are the Loyal Skeptic type, seven percent are the Giver type, and five percent are the Mediator type. The remaining six percent of those who typed themselves as the Perfectionist are distributed among the remaining four types.
In addition to there being a specific probability associated with each personality type chosen and with each of the other eight types, the type Determination pages have specific step-by-step instructions for users to test the accuracy of their choices.
Note on statistical analyses
Each Enneagram paragraph was analyzed with respect to sensitivity (SENS), specificity (SPEC), predictive value of positives (PVP), predictive value of negatives (PVN), test efficiency (EFF), and Cohen’s Kappa test for intra-class correlation. Kappa statistics were computed for the test across all 9 scales as a measure of overall test concordance. Test validity as measured by congruency of respondents’ answers to the gold standard were statistically and clinically significant. The overall Kappa for the entire test was 0.5254 (p<0.0001), considered a significant degree of concordance. All analyses of individual items exhibited concordance or intra-class correlations significant at p<0.0001. Reliability analysis was performed with a small naïve group (n=62) of graduate students. Alternate versions of the test were given four weeks apart without an introduction of the Enneagram or without introducing any other bias. Analysis revealed a significant concordance, Kappa=0.589 (p<0.0001).
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