The Enneagram is a powerful personality typing system can be used as a personal development system, and also as a powerful tool for working with your coaching clients at a deeper level.
It divides the human ego into 9 distinct personality types, 3 different ways of taking in the world (heart, mind and2238 body), and 3 different subtypes (social, 1-on-1, and self preservation) that describe how we interact with the world and others.
If you are a coach that wants to help your clients transform their lives, then you will need to help your clients go deeper into themselves. Together, you'll need to explore their hidden assumptions, belief structures, and ways in which they react to the world.
As you're helping them do this self exploration, you're sometimes a step in front of them, leading, and sometimes you're a step behind them, following. You are always encouraging, holding space, and being present with them as they go in deeper and deeper. It's a fine dance.
As their coach, you can help them take the next more easily by building trust. You want to give your client the experience of being deeply seen, heard, and understood. To help them take the next step into themselves, you want to develop the skill of seeing deeply into their world. You can then be their guide as someone who's been there and knows what to look for. Together you'll explore their deeper reaches.
One of the greatest gifts of the Enneagram is how it provides a precise map of that interior territory - of the hidden beliefs, spaces, and places they haven't explored.
With the insights provided by the Enneagram, you can talk with them about their internal experience in words they've never even used before. It enables you to put a framework around what's happening inside their bodies, minds and emotions, and allows them to experience themselves in a new way.
It lets you know what's going on inside them, and this is huge.
Your clients relax. They go, "Wow. Thank you for seeing me so deeply. Thank you for holding me with so much compassion. You see me. You know me. You validate me. Now I can open to you. Now I'll let go of my old beliefs and my version of the truth and step with you."
The Enneagram is a system that allows you to see into the pain, the agony, the suffering - and the grandeur and the bigness and the light and the greatness - of each of your clients. Bringing this to your clients is huge!
As an example, let's study just one of the nine types. Type 2 on the Enneagram is called The Giver. They tend to help other people and lose themselves in other people's needs. They can easily give their power away and lose their own agenda. What they want, where their strengths are, who they are - all this gets lost in helping and serving others.
This can lead to problems for Type 2's in leadership and management positions. Because they are focused on pleasing and helping other people, and they may have a dozen or more people reporting to them, they can create unrealistic - and unnecessary - demands on their time and energy.
A common response from Type 2's is, "I find myself constantly going out and wanting to please, help, and give myself to other people. And I get so lost. I can't find myself in it."
One of the ways of working with a Type 2 is to help them uncover the belief they must give to get. We want to help them see this unconscious pattern they use as a way to get others to like and appreciate them.
Almost everybody can get edgy about seeing their shadow side. A Type 2 will resist seeing this side of them until they trust you. But once we bring it out of the dark and into the light, once we demystify it, they'll likely go, "Wow, so that's what's going on!"
Then the coach we can start to work with it. Now they can challenge those assumptions, get underneath it, and enable their client to let it go. They can release it and open the door to move into other ways of being.
As a Type 2 comes out of their story, their whole life changes. They start to take care of themselves and embody their own self worth. They learn to set limits and boundaries. They relax into being okay going after their own goals and dreams. They gain the self-empowerment and conviction to hold themselves accountable, and can look in the mirror and say, "I matter."
Once this happens, all their relationships will likely transform - in both their personal and work lives.
Transformational coaching can impact all areas of a person's life. When people transform, their worlds change. And then you get that "Thank you." As a coach, you receive the appreciation and warmth that comes from having such a deep impact on a person's life.
And this can be a powerful driver of your business's growth. They tell their friends about you, who then call and ask, "Will you coach me? I have this thing I'm trying to work through. I want to hire you."
As coaches, we like being able to charge what we're worth. We like being able to help people transform - and make good money doing it.
This article was co-written by author Doug Greene and Enneagram Coach Benjamin Saltzman. Doug's work has appeared in numerous publications including the NY Time, LA Times, American Counselor, and others. Benjamin is a business, life and relationship coach who also teaches other coaches how to use it through seminars and information products. For a free report about coaching with the Enneagram, and a 7-part audio series on transformational coaching, visit the TheUltimateCoachingTool.com
Julia Cameron
No comments:
Post a Comment