Enneagram Me…

Posted on October 11, 2004 by Christine | 2 Comments

I heard about an Enneagram test recently on a TV show. I was curious, so I had to visit the Enneagram Style Enumerator to figure out my style.

Style Four
Fours are about authenticity. Fours have a deep and wide range of emotions and trust their subjective experience to make their life-decisions. They are frequently highly esthetic (not in talent, necessarily, but in concern), because they have a highly developed ability to think symbolically. This coupled with their emotional richness cries out for artistic expression.

Fours make a personal statement in many things they do, from the way they dress to their choice of Impressionist paintings. They rather enjoy not being part of the crowd and have a natural sense of aristocracy. Taste, they maintain, is not determined by votes.

When they are less healthy, their speech becomes lamentation as they claim their uniqueness because of their suffering. They often develop a spirit of entitlement to compensate for a feeling that somehow they are defective. This defect, paradoxically, is the basis for their claim that they deserve love. They make a claim on their friends’ love because they have suffered and this suffering has made them more authentic – and so more lovable.

Fours you may know: Shakespeare, Dennis Rodman, Nicholas Cage, Marlon Brando, Ann Rice, (Vampires are depicted as Fours), Kate Winslet, Vincent van Gogh, Eric Clapton, Michael Jackson, John Malkovich, Thomas Merton, and Allen Watts.

They point out that the answers from the test can change, which is an important note because a lot of my mental energy lately has been devoted to creativity, in my usual scattered manner. I want to redesign this site. I’ve been working with Jennifer to redesign Pixelog. I went out with Jason today, ready to take photos – only to be frustrated by a dead battery in my camera. As I drove from the museum district to downtown, I saw at least 20 photos that I wish I could have captured. I pulled out all of my cross stitch stuff last week so that I can work on a long-neglected Christmas picture and finally finish it. I want to start scrapbooking some of my pictures. I need to work on preparing a Stampin’ Up project day later in October, and in the process design my Christmas cards.

You might say creativity has been on my mind a lot recently.

So I’m a style 4 today – or maybe I’m a 4 more often than I like to admit (hey, the tagline here for some time was “To make a short story long…”) (and I am such a social 4) – but enough about that, what’s YOUR style?