Most people speak about the Enneagram as if it were just another assessment - something comparable to Hogan, MBTI, or Insights.
These tools have their place. They describe behavior, patterns, risk factors.
But they are horizontal models: flat, cognitive, descriptive.
The Enneagram, at its origin, is something else entirely.
It is vertical. Existential. Spiritual.
A map of how the ego is constructed - and how we can move beyond its limits.
The moment we shrink it into a “type system,” we lose its soul.
The original Enneagram was never about identifying yourself.
It was designed to illuminate how we disconnected from our essential nature - and how that disconnection shapes our personality, our defenses, and our suffering.
It shows the architecture of the ego and the path of return.
Yet in today’s coaching world, this depth is largely missing.
Many practitioners have never studied the fixations, the passions, the loss of Essence, or the essential qualities that lie beneath the personality structure.
Some don’t even know these dimensions exist.
And this matters to me - because the Enneagram has shaped my own inner work more than any other framework.
I studied with Sandra Maitri for many years, learning directly from someone who rooted the Enneagram in the spiritual ground of Being.
I trained extensively with Don Riso and Russ Hudson, whose work consistently honors these deeper layers.
This doesn’t make me special - but it does mean that I approach the Enneagram with the respect its transformative power deserves.
For me, the Enneagram is not a typology.
It is a living practice, a mirror, and a path I still walk.
It reveals blind spots, softens rigid patterns, and opens access to qualities of presence that personality alone can never provide.
This is what I bring to my work with leaders:
not labels, not identity reinforcement, but a deeper way of seeing and developing the self.
Reducing the Enneagram to a personality model doesn’t just diminish the system -
it diminishes us.
It keeps leaders trapped in ego structures instead of awakening to genuine presence.
It flattens a vertical map into a horizontal comfort zone.
If we want real transformation - personal, relational, or organizational - we need to reclaim the Enneagram’s depth.
Not with dogma, but with discipline.
Not with mysticism, but with grounded inner work.
Not with typologies, but with truth.
The Enneagram is a map of consciousness.
A doorway back to Essence.
A path of liberation - if we dare to use it as such.
And in times like these, we need that depth more than ever.