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Enneagram Type 4 Board Archive Typing and motivationPosted by Jason on January 20, 2000 at 14:10:14: In Reply to: Re: Five/Four with a few questions... posted by Kyle on January 20, 2000 at 09:04:53: ::One reminder is to be careful on typing people as we can only observe behavior and not motivation. Motivation, I believe, is what the Enneagram tries to disect... Although it would not hurt your study of the Enneagram to play with typing people.:: True...however it seems to me that the enneagram really is an observational system. That is, it doesn't postulate CAUSES so much as it lumps people together based upon their observed behaviors. In my way of thinking, the "motivation" is really just "internalized patterns of behavior," rather than some intrinsic thing that we are born with...though at that point I suppose we'd be getting into AH/Ali's "essence" stuff, which also seems to have a lot of merit to it. The whole nature/nurture thing, behaviorists versus humanists and everyone else. What I find is, if I can ACCURATELY type someone (and certainly that is a subjective thing if they aren't typing themselves - and even then it's somewhat subjective), it gives me a great deal of insight into WHAT motivates them. Not being a 3/8/7, etc., before I knew about the enneagram I thought there was something "wrong" with them. Now, if I can successfully type them, I can appreciate their perspective much more; I can "put myself in their shoes" much more effectively, whereas before I'd just feel frustrated that I couldn't get them to agree with my perspective on things (that was MY enneagrammic/programmed motivation - to have the whole world think my beloved IDEAS or SYSTEMS were "right" and "important"). It's not that I want to be able to manipulate people...I want to be able to CONNECT with people, and the enneagram is the most useful system I've found for assisting that purpose (along with NLP). Though certainly my intuition could use a lot of work as well!
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