Re: The problem with Motivation

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: : How can you exactly determine motivation, when it is completely abstract and therefore open to subjective interpretation? For example, suppose there is someone who travels the world, is quite optimistic, can take things to an excess sometimes, and is constantly on the go. What is his motivation? "To be happy" (Seven) or "To understand the world" (Five)? : "To be happy?" "To understand the world?" Is that the extent of your understanding about these points? You need to read more books, or observe more people. : Here's a primer: : 5-7 constitutes a line in the "fear" triad. : 5: favor of concentrated attention due to fear of being overwhelmed = obsessive reduction of needs = "avarice." : 7: favor of widespread attention due to fear of monotony (in other words, 7's trash is 5's treasure) = obsessive desire for multiple options = "gluttony." : Observe, also, 8-5: feeling of abundant resoruces vs. feeling of scant resources, or "excess" vs. "avarice." : And, 1-7: the need to control the self vs. the need to be whimsical (people are rarely at the extremes, by the way, so 7 will experience varying degrees of the 1's motivation in this case, and vice versa), or "wrath" vs. "gluttony." : From this information, you might divine that a prominent issue on the part of the Five might be "Can I handle the world?" Here's where childhood upbringing - that much-ignored establisher of traits - comes in. A strong upbringing might produce a gregarious, self-confident Five, while a weak upbringing might produce a narrow-minded, stingy Five. : : And if you say Five, and I say Seven, who is to say is right? Does a person Have to be conscious of their motivation? : "It won't go away if you ignore it." (customary old saying) The same goes for being ignorant of it. : : As well the Enneagram presupposes that there IS a core motivation in the first place. It negates the possibility that people aren't constantly striving for something, and not reacting to their environment. : Unless you're talking about dead people, I must admit I'm mystified by that question. Is that supposed to be a Zen thing or something? : : Why does motivation have to be "for life"? Couldn't a person live their first half of their life as a Three, then as a Five, with different motivations? : Why not? Who knows? Psychologists and experienced parents declare that unalterable qualities of personality are fixed by the time you're 3 or 4 years old, and that given that foundation, people really don't change. And in my experience, Fives don't change into Threes, or vice-versa, regardless of how many "personal success seminars" they attend. : : Can knowledge of one's motivation be much help for change? Obviously if this is something that's engrained into us, it would be very difficult to curb. : I would use such knowledge to alleviate the influence of my pattern. But why would I want to switch from one destructive pattern to another? Assuming that I could alleviate "sloth" from my mind AND replace it with "envy," why would I want to do that? The first step is good enough. : : How sure are you that there are Nine "core motivations"? Why not Ten? Or Eleven? Or maybe there's only Six? : There could be a googol, for all I know (for trivia hunters, that's 10E+100, which is roughly the number of molecules in the known Universe). Yet, the interpretation of human passions via the Enneagram associates a triadic system in order to *loosely* apply a few (say, nine) general guiding points along the *spectrum* of psychological motivations. When I say "I'm on the line between 4 and 2," you might ask yourself, "How many distinguishable points are there on the line between 4 and 2? How many points are mathematically possible on that line? Get the "point?" Same goes for the statement "I'm on the outer circle between 3 and 4." : : Finally, behavior is Closely related to motivation. It really isn't that random. This means for the most part you can accurately find someone's motivation simply by observing their behavior. : Again, we must remember that the psychological motivations can be dealt with in any number of ways. Do you mean to say that if you heard, of a complete stranger, "He is feeling Envious," that you could predict his behavior as a consequence without knowing him? Forget situation specifics such as *why* he's feeling Envious. That's beyond the reach of the Enneagram's scope. All you know is that he's experiencing the psychological drive represented on or near point 4 on the Enneagram. You don't know a damn thing about his upbringing, his personal aptitudes, his cultural or familial programming. I'm sure you might say "Yes, I can predict the behavioral manifestation of Envy in any of the billions of various human beings on this Earth," in which case I suggest you give yourself a long, hard reality check. : : The reason observable behavior should be emphasized more is that it is more closer to an objective science than this subjective guessing of motivation. You can actually panel people by observable traits and see what patterns they would fall into. With motivation, it becomes more open to interpretation and personal bias. : Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, Cory. I might repeat your statement, except in the opposite fashion: you would seem, from what that statement may reveal of your character, to be a behaviorist. If that's so, then quit driving yourself crazy with the Enneagram. It speaks a foreign language to your ears, just as the MB speaks a foreign language, for a relatively large part, to me. I've watched you struggling for months over your Enneatype, rejecting this or that type because you didn't comply with the set of "traits" associated to it by the pop-psych press. : : I really would like to expound on this more, but unfortunately Extraverted Thinking is an inferior function of mine. =o) I got many more qualms about the Enneagram, although they're not much about the whole motivation issue. : You need to find an MB board. :) : : -Cory : So long, : pork (oink oink!)

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