Your Enneagram number represents your false self--the self that protects, hides, and covers your truest essence within. Each of the nine Enneagram types are adaptations, or masks that we wear, that project the opposite of what's truest about us. Your Enneagram number is the best language we have to describe to yourself and to others how your personality leads you to perceive and respond to all of life's situations. Tests can be helpful, but the traditional way of discovering your Enneagram number is to immerse yourself in a long-form description (either written or oral) of all nine Enneagram types and allow your own inner guidance to direct you toward the discovery of which number describes your personality the best. 

The Enneagram is a personality system describing nine

different ways of seeing and responding to the world. The

Enneagram stands alongside many helpful personality tools

and inventories, like Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, DISC,

and Birkman. 

The name Enneagram simply puts two Greek words

together: ennea, meaning “nine,” and gram, meaning “figure.” So, the Enneagram is a figure with nine numbers

around it, representing nine distinct personality styles.

The Enneagram comes to us cloaked in mystery. We don’t

have a clear origin point or a linear arc of how the personality

theory developed. Instead, the Enneagram is a tool that has developed

and spread from teacher to student through many centuries.

We believe the tool began through the work of Evagrius

Ponticus, specifically through the language of his nine passions,

and students of his who came later. The Enneagram was not

developed in a methodical, organized way. Enneagram wisdom

has no universal authority. From Ponticus to Pope Gregory I

to Sufi Muslims to desert mothers and fathers trying to live

out a reimagined Christianity outside of the Roman Empire,

to the work in South America of Oscar Ichazo and Claudio

Naranjo, to the Catholic order where Ichazo first taught the Enneagram in California in the 1970s, to a spiritual director of Father Richard Rohr, to his spiritual directee Suzanne Stabile, to her apprentice Hunter Mobley—the Enneagram comes to us in this complex, old-fashioned way.

The Enneagram gives us language to tell the truth about ourselves with the goal of managing our personalities better so that they stop managing us.