Working with the Enneagram: For Coaches & Counsellors

Much more than a personality profiling system, the Enneagram is a comprehensive system of knowledge for revealing our basic essence and our unique path for inner transformation. It provides us with concrete tools for identifying and working with how our personality – with all its fixated beliefs, passions, and behaviors – prevents us from living with freedom, ease, true self-expression, and deep connection with others. Working with the Enneagram is profoundly helpful for coaches and counsellors, both in deepening their own self-knowledge and presence and in supporting their clients to realize their capacity to live more fully.

Weekly three-hour online classes include advanced training, hands-on exercises, and feedback from experienced instructors Lindsay Robertson (MPCC, PCC, and certified Enneagram teacher) and Stacey Huget (RPC, PCC).

This eight-week program immerses coaches and counsellors in understanding and applying the wisdom of the Enneagram, as follows:

Week - Introduction to the Enneagram

Along with this overview of the structure, meaning, and intent of the enneagram symbol and teaching, we consider the importance of non-judgmental self-observation; transitionary levels of development; and an invitation to deep compassion for the efforts each of us must make to approach our true essence.

Week 2 - Introduction to the Nine Types

In our second week we provide an overview of the nine fundamental personality types, including their deepest motivations, fears, and desires. Our purpose is to reveal the challenges each type must face in overcoming inner barriers – predictable pitfalls of psyche and ego-driven emotional states – so that we may become more conscious and realize the unique gifts and highest virtues within us.

Week 3 - Deepening our Understanding of the Nine Types

In our third week we will address the influence of wings and of directions of integration as well as how types vary in their approaches to having their needs met (instinctive, feeling, and thinking types); to resolving conflict (assertive, withdrawn, and compliant types); and meeting with loss and disappointment (positive thinking, competency-based, and reactive types).

Week 4 - Identification & Reflection

Having been asked to complete the RHETI and IVQ assessments, participants share reflections and curiosities about their own distribution among the types.

Week 5 - Instinctual Drives

In week five, we explore the meaning, unique stacking, and adaptive / maladaptive expression of our self-preservation, social, and sexual drives -- and how these might impact inner work.

Week 6, 7, 8 - Working with Clients

Instruction and hands-on practice with:

· distinguishing personality from essence

· awakening presence / spiritual jump starts

· cultivating non-attachment

· working with object relations

· working with inner critic / inner rebel

· identifying and working with type-specific fixations / passions / personality patterns

· letting go of troublesome habits

· cultivating self-compassion

· type-specific red-flags and wake-up calls