120: Are there 9 Types of Leaders? Exploring the Enneagram with Dr. Beatrice Chestnut

Pete Mockaitis
Beatrice, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Beatrice Chestnut
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to dig into this subject here because it’s fun. I’ve had mixed experiences with your area of expertise, but I think you are the person to talk to, to set the record straight. First off, you were the President of the International Enneagram Association for a period. Can you tell us what is the Enneagram, and how is it that you have come to love it so much?

Beatrice Chestnut
That’s a great place to start. There’s really two answers to that. On the one hand, it’s a symbol that comes out of ancient wisdom teachings that is kind of a, it’s a symbol of change. One of the sources of the Enneagram called it a symbol of perpetual motion. So, there’s the symbol part of it that has deep roots in the past and that is very profound. It has a lot of meaning in it.
However, the other meaning of it and the meaning that I write about and that I work with is a system of personality types, 9 types that are arrayed around the diagram using this symbol as a framework for these interconnected personality styles that can be used as a tool for self-understanding. So that’s what it is in a short, few sentences.
How I got into it is also an important story. In 1990, I was heading off to graduate school at Northwestern to study Mass Media and Politics. That’s the direction my career was going in. Through a personal friend that I had known in junior high in high school, my friend David Daniels, I met his father also named David Daniels, Dr. David Daniels who was a psychiatrist based at Stanford University. I was at dinner one night at the Daniels house and Dr. Daniels had been getting really interested in the Enneagram personality. He was starting to teach a professional training program in the Enneagram, along with Helen Palmer who was one of the people who wrote one of the first popular books about the Enneagram. I think her book came out in 1988 or 1989.
Just over the dinner table one night, Dr. Daniels told me a little bit about the Enneagram and told me what he thought my personality type might be, and gave me Helen’s book in case I wanted to read more, so I was interested. I’d never really been interested in Psychology as an undergrad, because it always seemed to me like kind of obvious stuff that they put jargon-y names to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Beatrice Chestnut
So I hadn’t really been studying Psychology, but when I read about the Enneagram and I read about my type, it totally blew my mind. I never dreamed there could be something that described how I knew myself to be so clearly and in such detail, and also things that I knew to be true about myself but then a few things that I barely kind of was aware of, that were more what I would say blind spots or things I was a little embarrassed about. It totally described what those things were and why they were there, so it had a huge impact on me because it sort of really at once affirming but also challenging, and I got very interested.
I started reading a lot about the Enneagram and some of the wisdom traditions behind it.
Came back to Dr. Daniels about a week later and had a lot of questions for him. He was sort of surprised I’d gotten so into it so fast, but was just really captivated. When I moved to Chicago to go to Northwestern, as fate would have it, one of my cousins that lived there was really, really also into the Enneagram, and really into again some of the philosophy and wisdom teachings behind it. I started studying more the roots of it and studying it more deeply, and by the time I came back to California in the mid-90s to finish my dissertation and sort of see what was next, I had gotten more into the Enneagram, and actually went through the Enneagram professional training program that was conducted by Dr. Daniels and Helen Palmer.
I got so interested in it that I decided to totally refocus my career in Psychology I and went back to school to get a Masters in Psychology, so becoming a therapist, learning about Psychology. It was really neat having the Enneagram in my mind before I actually studied Psychology in graduate school, because what happened is everything I learned, all the theories, all the Western theories that you learn when you study Psychology, Depth Psychology, they all fit into the Enneagram. I could see where the Enneagram was almost like this larger model that you could fit different kinds of psychological theories into it and make sense of, in an even clearer way.
Becoming a therapist sort of deepened my appreciation for the Enneagram. When I started actually doing therapy with people, I found it to be an unbelievable tool because whereas sometimes when you start working with someone, there’s a long process, okay what’s going on with this person? What do we need to attend to? What’s going to help this person the most? That can take a while. I found the Enneagram to be an incredible accelerator. I could focus in or hone in very quickly on what’s going on with this person, make sense of it in a clearer way, and also really understand in a very efficient how best to help and support that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well that is some compelling stuff so thank you for that line-up Beatrice. Now, I want to get into it a little bit. I had an experience of being facilitated through an Enneagram session, and I walked away not digging it so much. Part of it was I had some bias coming in, because I’m a certified Myers-Briggs practitioner and I thought “Myers-Briggs is awesome. Can they even compare?” So, I guess we had a little bit of a confirmation bias going on in the mix.

Beatrice Chestnut
Of course, that’s natural.

Pete Mockaitis
But nonetheless, I was interested because I had some other friends who were super into it. This one guy joked, “Oh yeah. If you really want to know yourself, you need to do your Myers-Briggs, your strengths finder, your Enneagram and then get a blood sample, urine sample, stool sample.” His quest for self- knowledge is bold!

Beatrice Chestnut
That’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought that was fun. So I went in there, I was kind of excited as well but then I guess the holdup is like first of all, and maybe they were using a sub-optimal version of the assessment, but as we took the assessment and then sort of read the descriptions, just about everybody in the room had this sense of not really being sure. It’s like “You know, I’m kind of like a 5 but you know, 2 and 3 are also pretty close.” That was sort of the sense amongst many, and then also I think the facilitator said something like “Well yes, you can really spend a lifetime trying to determine which spot on the Enneagram you best fit.” I thought well, maybe it’s not good if no one’s quite sure what aligns to them and it takes a lifetime to land on it. Maybe it’s not valid in the sense that there are in fact 9 archetypes of people. I’ll pause there. How do you respond to these kinds of critiques?

Beatrice Chestnut
This is what I would say. First of all, your experience is completely understandable. The tricky thing about the Enneagram is, so there’s a good news and bad news element to how well it maps the complexity of the human personality. On the one hand, one of the reasons I think the Enneagram is kind of unique in its depth and its clarity once you do find your type, is because it does have these interconnected types and it can tell you a lot. However, there is a learning curve and there is sort of a learning process that needs to happen when you get into it, and especially finding your type can be tricky.
Now I wouldn’t say it takes a lifetime. I think it can happen quicker than that. However, I think there’s a lot of people get excited about the Enneagram and want to teach it and spread the news, but not everyone has the skill to sort of manage the complexity and present it in a clear enough way, and help people navigate the process of finding their type in a way that works. I think a lot of times, what happens is either people have a presentation by someone who’s maybe not skilled enough or experienced enough in presenting it in what it is and what it isn’t, and also that process of helping you find your correct type can not go well.
A lot of people get mistyped in the beginning. I think until you have that experience of really finding which type is your core type, it can seem confusing. It can be hard to access the real of power of the system, and that’s a tricky process. I think even some more skilled facilitators of the Enneagram can struggle to help you find your right type, because I think the truth is it’s normal and natural to relate to more than one type when you first encounter the Enneagram, because the truth is we have a core type but we also have relationships with 4 other types based on the diagram, and there are also lookalike types.
On the level of behavior, several of the different types will sort of do the same behavior, but what the Enneagram I think accesses in a unique way is motivation. I just taught a course with a friend of mine this week and he uses the example that say, 3 people can get up at 5 in the morning to mow the lawn, but one of them might be doing it to piss of their neighbor because they were making noise the night before. The other one might be trying to get out of the house because there’s so much chaos with kids and wife getting ready for work, and another one because they have so many things on their list of things to do that that’s the time they pick. The nice thing with the Enneagram is it accesses motivation, but in the beginning when people are introducing it, you have to be highly skilled I think and have good instruments and good ways of helping people find their type in a way that’s both efficient and effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now, can you answer me this? I think there’s a number of assessments out there. Which one do you think is the gold standard, highest probability of nailing it for folks?

Beatrice Chestnut
Okay, so most Enneagram assessments that you’ll find online, if you just go in and Google Enneagram assessments, are not very good … most of them. For a long time, I actually wouldn’t even use one of those assessments and I would actually discourage people because sometimes they give you … and people want an assessment. They want kind of like the Myers-Briggs. They want something where you fill out a questionnaire and then it spits out a type. I think some of the assessments a, can spit out the wrong type, and some of them can spit out like 4 types like in a bar graph that they’re all kind of the same, and then what do you do?
So I think it’s very difficult to devise a good Enneagram assessment because it’s so complex, and because one of the things the Enneagram is good at is highlighting blind spots. In a self-report assessment, oftentimes it’ll ask “Do you do this,” and you may say “No,” but that might be a blind spot, so it also  depends on the level of self-awareness of the person taking the test.
That all said, I do a typing interview with people which is 90 minutes of asking systematic questions. That’s one way I sometimes assess a type. I sometimes use typing cards when I’m working with a team and doing people in a group. However assessment-wise, the best one out there, the one that I have started using the most is one that was developed by a friend of mine based in South Africa, called the IEQ. It’s the Integrative Enneagram Questionnaire. It is more expensive, but it does produce a report. Even that test which I think is by far more accurate than anything out there, is not 100% accurate. It’s designed for use by a coach, to be delivered and debriefed and sort of interpreted with the help of a coach, which is I think a good thing because again, it might not get your type right either although I would say percentage wise, it’s much more accurate than anything else out there.
Again, there are reasons why it can be wrong, even the most accurate assessment, and that’s why I like the fail-safe that they built in, encouraging people to sort of use it in a coaching context. It gives you more information, and it is in my view a very complex test. It takes a longer amount of time. It takes about half an hour, but it’s probably the best one I’ve used.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now it sounds like some work is required to get into it.

Beatrice Chestnut
Yes, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So maybe you could highlight then the true value there. I guess what I dug about the Myers-Briggs is in some ways, it felt intuitive like “Oh yeah, I could see there are some folks energized by extroversion, talking to different people and others by being by themselves. Yeah, I could see some people like to plan things out in advance and others like to just sort of go and improvise. Ok, got it.” There’s also some cool validity I see again and again in terms of “Hey, if I’m working doing Myers-Briggs workshop for a bunch of psychiatrists, there’s a bunch of feelers, Fs in there, engineers, more so Ts thinkers and their type tables are showing the variations of types and different fields will sort of correspond with that. So is that similar? Does the Enneagram have some hard-hitting data along those lines that shows, sure enough as we’d expect, different types show up disproportionately in careers that would make sense for it?

Beatrice Chestnut
I wouldn’t say there’s that amount of hard data at this point. I think the Enneagram is a little bit newer on the scene, so there hasn’t been as much research done on it. One thing that I find is that when people really get a good introduction to the Enneagram and find their type, what they tend to say is it’s self verifying. Once you sort of find your type, you can look at what you do and sort of say “Wow, this really matches up.”
An example I’ll give, kind of an answer to your question is one time I was working with a senior leadership team at a venture capital firm, and we did an Enneagram exercise. It was the first time I worked with them. There was a guy there that was really, really skeptical and was asking me a lot of questions, a lot of very good questions, but we did end up finding people’s types. Finding their types led to an incredibly productive conversation between two people on the team who had been a bit at odds with each other, but suddenly understood why they had been at odds with each other and were able to come to a much deeper understanding of their differences and how they could really work together well.
A year later, I come back and I do this again and I’m introducing it. One of the guys in the team said “Well, what about data and validity?” The guy who had been the skeptic at the earlier one interrupted and said, “You know what? You don’t really need validity studies for this. This is by far the best thing we ever did. I was skeptical at first, but once I found my type and we had a conversation about our types, the understanding we got out of it in a short amount of time was amazing.”
I think there’s a way that yes, we want more data, we want to be doing that kind of study to really verify what’s going on here. I don’t think we have as much of that right now as we maybe do for the MBTI. I went to a conference session a couple of years ago about a guy who was sort of an expert in both the MBTI and the Enneagram. One of the things he pointed out is, one of the differences is that the MBTI kind of measures more the mental level and a lot of assessments measure more of the behavioral level. One of the things that’s different about the Enneagram is it’s very much descriptive of the mental level, the emotional level and the physical or body-based level, and that’s one of the things that makes it a little bit different. It is more complex, a little bit harder to study, a little bit newer on the scene but my hope is that as it becomes more accepted and widely used, we’ll be able to do more of that study.
Pete Mockaitis
Sure, thank you. One more hardball question and then we’ll wrap up that segment.

Beatrice Chestnut
Bring it on, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious to know, these 9 types, I guess I’m just wondering why 9? Do you buy that in fact 9 is the number? There’s not 8, there’s not 10, 9 is the magic number that kind of is a handy set of bins that is indeed collectively exhaustive for the major archetypes of human people.

Beatrice Chestnut
Yes, I do believe that 9 is sort of the magic number in the case of the Enneagram. There’s a really solid interesting mathematical basis and geometric basis, and it actually comes out of sacred arithmetic and sacred geometry along the lines of the things that Pythagoras did. There’s some evidence, although the exact origins of the Enneagram are still a bit mysterious, there are connections to what we could call sacred math or sacred geometry.
One of the things I’d like to point too that’s just kind of an interesting thing and I actually point this out in my new book, a lot of times businesspeople when I’m presenting it to leaders, aren’t really that interested in the history of the Enneagram or don’t like to take a lot of time for it. But one of the things I like to point out is that in Homer’s Odyssey, we have an interesting piece of evidence that the Enneagram may go back a long time. In Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, this was one of the first actual epic poems, pieces of literature written down in the history of the West, the idea being that these pieces of work were written down but had been transmitted orally through this kind of oral storytelling of the core values of the culture for hundreds of years perhaps.
If you look at the Odyssey, it’s a story of how Odysseus is coming home after the Trojan war. It’s a metaphorical story of coming home to the true self, and what do you know? He visits 9 lands on his way home from the Trojan war. If you study the themes of these mythic lands that he studies on the way home to the true self, the themes of these places and these characters he meets there match the Enneagram exactly, in order. He goes to the land of the Lotus Eaters which matches up with type 9. He goes to the Cyclops which matches up with type 8, again the themes of the character, the blind spot. Then he goes to Aeolus which matches up with 7. The he goes to Laestrygonians, so here you have the first time this is written down and there’s the Enneagram in it.
I like to point to that because again, it’s a piece of evidence that maybe perhaps this has gone back a long way. There’s a mathematical basis. We don’t have time to go into it but for instance, if you divide certain numbers into 1, 142857 you get the repeating decimal 142857 in that order, which are the types excluding 3, 6 and 9 that are the types not in any inner triangle. There’s a mathematical basis to it, there’s connections to sort of … if you look, there’s books about sort of patterns that repeat in nature, geometric patterns. According to the Greeks, the sacred meaning of certain numbers, they tie in perfectly with the Enneagram and they reflect sort of the geometry of the Enneagram.
So again, I think these are just hints that there’s sort of this grounding in ancient wisdom and philosophy and teachings about some of the basic patterns of life. The Enneagram more than anything else, is about patterns. It’s about recognizing patterns in your behavior, patterns of thinking, patterns of feeling and patterns of behavior, and how they’re interconnected with each other in certain ways in these different personalities.
A lot of the study of the things I’ve looked into behind Enneagram have given me a real window into the real depth that is behind Enneagram, and the structure of it and the making of it that’s very complex, but that I think sheds a little bit of light on why 9 is sort of both symbolically and historically the number that kind of makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty cool, the Odyssey piece because I do think that literature that has withstood the test of history and has become classic over centuries is speaking to something kind of core in the human experience, otherwise we would have forgotten about it, chucked it out and stopped reading it.

Beatrice Chestnut
Exactly, exactly. By the way, it’s also in the Divine Comedy and I even do a workshop every year in Florence that highlights the Enneagram path of transformation and its parallels in Dante’s Divine Comedy. You can sort of see again the same teachings and understandings of the Enneagram are encoded in the Divine Comedy. So again, here are the 2 epics of Western literature and like you’re saying, when they stand the test of time, usually it means there is some real timeless themes and lessons in there that are relevant in a way both to the past and the present.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, interesting. Thank you for going there with me. I usually don’t subject folks to this much scrutiny. I think some listeners really do love the stuff that’s maybe “Out there” or “Oh yeah” and then others are like “Give me the data.” It’s kind of trying to cover all the bases, so thank you. Now, you talked about some timeless books. We also have a timely book. Your book, The 9 Types of Leadership just came out days ago, prior to this conversation. What’s the scoop with this and some of the most powerful takeaways folks who want to be awesome at their job should know?

Beatrice Chestnut
Sure. I wrote this book as an introductory book to people who are curious about the Enneagram, but most of all people that want to improve their leadership ability. I think more and more people are recognizing that what really makes a great leader and what makes you awesome at your job is self-awareness, consciousness and what we might call emotional intelligence. Do you understand yourself at a deep level? Do you have some insight into why you do the things you do, why you feel the way you do, so that you can manage your feelings, express yourself in clear ways and also understand other people, and the ways they might differ from you, the typical ways you might come into conflict with people, and the typical ways you might collaborate well with people.
I do a lot of coaching and business consulting, and people are really interested in knowing how do I get along with my teammates? How do I understand them better? The motive for writing this book was really bringing the insights of the Enneagram to businesspeople, to leaders, to help them understand themselves better so they can leverage their strengths, but also understand their blind spots and develop themselves and grow, so that they can be more emotionally intelligent, have better relationships that work, navigate different situations with more clarity. It’s both an introductory book, sort of introducing the Enneagram in hopefully clear and accessible language that different people can understand, but also answering the question that I get a lot of like, “Okay, how do I understand myself better, but now how do I get along with my teammate? What do I need to know about that person?”
One of the things people often say when they learn the Enneagram and they really start to get what it is they say, “Wow! I thought everyone saw the world the way I do. But what I’m realizing is there are really different worldviews. There are different lenses on the world that people around me have. Not everyone sees the world the way I do, but the more I can understand and articulate and communicate how I see the world and how it’s different than how someone else sees it, the more we can sort of navigate through any difficulties we might experience, but also sort of celebrate our strengths and collaborate in ways that make us even more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well thank you. So then, I’m curious. What are some sort of key actions you’d recommend, as a result of this study and having brought together these perspectives?

Beatrice Chestnut
Well, I think always the first thing is to understand yourself so I provide three introductory chapters in the book. One is just kind of making an argument for the fact that good leadership and being effective in any job, it really depends on emotional intelligence. Research is bearing that out all the time that a lot of people are smart. A lot of people have good job experience, but what really sets people apart and makes them successful is emotional intelligence, because that’s more intangible and it’s sometimes harder to develop, so the first thing is understanding yourself.
The more you can understand what kinds of things make you mad, what kinds of things draw you to other people, what kinds of preferences do you have at work, things like that. The first chapter highlights the importance of emotional intelligence. The second chapter is sort of a quick introduction to the Enneagram, what it is, what the types are. The third one is an introduction to how do you use it, how do you apply it to leadership and to working relationships.
Then there is a chapter on each of the nine types of leadership. In there, there is information that helps you figure out, “Is this my type of leadership? Which is my type?” Then it also helps you understand people who have that type, if you’re not that type. So, it has typical pet-peeves of a person of this type, typical ways to along with a person of this type. If you’re this type, ways that you can be easier to work with, things to understand about what your special superpowers are, but how when you use your strengths and superpowers, when you overuse them and don’t develop a wider repertoire of strengths, sometimes they can become liabilities.
That’s I think one of the really nice things that Enneagram highlights, is we all tend to look at 360 degrees of reality through kind of a narrow slice based on what our early coping strategy was and what our main focus of attention is, and the patterns that grow up around that and our personality. By highlighting, “This is how I tend to view the world, this is my focus of attention. These are my strengths which I absolutely need to own and leverage and appreciate, but then how my strengths can be a bit narrow and I can avoid sort of working on certain challenges because it’s not my comfort zone.”
So it’s both about how do you develop yourself, how do you understand yourself, and the Enneagram is very, very much a growth model. It’s about evolution and change, and personal and professional transformation. How can I understand myself and how can I understand the person I’m working with? I’m hoping it’ll be kind of a reference guide for people. You don’t have to necessarily read it cover-to-cover, but like, okay I’m working with a Type-8 and I’m a Type-3. I’m having an issue with my colleague, so if I can look up and I can read a little bit about Type-8, I can understand, “Oh! That’s where that person’s coming from. That’s the way they see the world. That’s what’s important to them. That’s the kind of thing I’m going to need to remember when I’m working with them. Maybe I need to make some little adjustments on my end so that we understand each other better.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Thank you. I guess I’m wondering then, you said, “Hey, I’m a Type-8/Type-3 interactions happening…” What are some key steps you would take to just gain an understanding of where someone else is coming from, and thusly, how to interact with them optimally?

Beatrice Chestnut
Well, one thing. Again, the first thing is often understanding yourself. One thing might be to use the book to kind of figure out which of these types do you relate to most. Sometimes some people can just read about it and really recognize themselves and really recognize, “Okay, this is really describing me.” Sometimes when people take the IEQ assessment that I was talking about, and I get together with them to find out how did the report land with you, what they’ll say is, “This is freakishly accurate.”
The first thing is to understand yourself better and then, again, what I often find is really powerful about the Enneagram is when people on a team are using it or when you can read about yourself and understand yourself more, and your colleague reads it, you can then use the Enneagram language as kind of a neutral communication medium to talk about your differences without engaging defensiveness, without blaming anyone.
The fact that we’re having this difficulty with each other isn’t your fault or my fault. It’s a product of the intersection of our different ways of looking at the world. If I can just say, “I’m a 3, so I focus on goals and I want to get things done in the quickest way possible. You’re a 6 and you’re asking me a lot of questions. I’m getting nervous because that feels like it’s slowing me down.” The 6 can say, “I’m a 6 and I tend to doubt things. I’m actually just trying to help you by helping us slow down and thinking about all the things that could go wrong, so that we could prepare to meet those challenges and the process can go smoother and we can reach the goal in a way that really works for all of us.”
It can be kind of a language.  Once you start to read about this and understand where you’re coming from, you can both understand yourself but then have a conversation that’s more productive with the people that you work with.

Pete Mockaitis
Ok, thank you. You tell me Beatrice, is there anything else you want to really make sure that we cover off before we switch gears and hear about your favorite things?

Beatrice Chestnut
I guess one of the things that I like to talk about is, one of the things that makes me passionate about working the Enneagram is just how much it’s helped me. From the time that I learned it, it just really got to the core of some of my own challenges and it’s been able to help me grow so much. That’s part of why I feel motivated to bring it to other people, because I feel like it’s something that helped me develop myself, helped me get over some of the things that caused me problems in my life. I want to bring that same kind of solution-focused technique to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well thank you. So now, could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote?

Beatrice Chestnut
The quote here is from Todd Tapper who is Vice President for Culture and Learning and System Chief Learning Officer at Greenville Health System in South Carolina, which is a health system of 20,000 people. He and some internal faculty who have gotten educated in the Enneagram have now taught the Enneagram and helped 600 people in this health system learn their type.
Here’s a quote from him in terms of how they used the Enneagram. Todd says “We use the Enneagram in support of a bigger idea we promote in our organization: conscious leadership and conscious professionalism. Because this is a central focus of the organization, we invite people to build the muscle of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. We build an organizational culture around the idea of consciousness and we believe that because of this, we are more highly aligned, we get more done, and we figure out how to not get overly caught up, how to deal with issues when they show up.”
In terms of quotes that I’ve been inspired by, I like the two quotes that open the first chapter of my book, which is called ‘Leading in the 21st Century, The Power of Understanding Your Personality,’ and the two quotes are this. I like them because they kind of go well together. The first is by Warren Bennis who is an author, scholar, leadership expert and he says, “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.”
I also like Peter Hawkins. He’s a British author, leadership professor and management consultant. He has a great book I like called The Wise Fool’s Guide to Leadership, where he uses some Rumi Nazrub ideas about the wise fool and applies them to leadership lessons. The quote by him that I like that opens the book is, “To develop leadership is less about learning new skills and more about unlearning habits, and breaking free from limiting mindsets we have already acquired.” The idea that it’s kind of about becoming who you really are, but also at the same time letting go of mindsets that might be limiting that you don’t really know you have because it’s almost like the air you breathe. It can be kind of invisible.

Pete Mockaitis
That was good, thank you. How about a favorite book?

Beatrice Chestnut
The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success. It’s by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Warner-Klemp. They give this great idea at the beginning that there’s leadership that’s above the line or below the line. At any time, you can be operating from a conscious level or an unconscious level. They know the Enneagram and they’re great people and great colleagues, and I also the book Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney. It’s a really interesting book. This guy worked in investment banking but he had also been a Jesuit, so he kind of applies lessons from the Jesuits to leadership and business and even investment banking. It’s kind of an interesting thing that he puts these two things together. He talks a lot about how, again, emotional intelligence, making people feel good and having sort of that element of respect and affection is actually an important part of developing leadership ability.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. How about a favorite tool, whether that’s a favorite product or service or software app, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Beatrice Chestnut
Let’s see, again I might have to go to the IEQ. I’m using that a lot with leaders. I think it’s nice because it not only helps you find your Enneagram type, but it also provides you with a lot of information about how to develop yourself. I think it’s important that when people are using the Enneagram they don’t just use it as, “Okay, that’s what I’m like” and that’s the end of it, but that’s actually the beginning of a developmental journey that I think can be quite exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, and how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that has been handy?

Beatrice Chestnut
I guess I would just say having my morning meditation practice, and also I’m a runner. I sometimes feel like that’s almost like a moving meditation. On my best days, I get in a half hour of meditation in the morning and an hour run and I feel like that really keeps me balanced. I just think meditation is so important because it helps you create the mental space, which is a great facilitator of self-awareness because it’s important to know what your patterns are but it’s also important to have the internal space inside, to be able to catch yourself in the act and reflect on what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget or expression of your message that seems to really resonate with folks, in terms of they’re nodding their heads, they’re Kindle book highlighting in great quantities?

Beatrice Chestnut
I think it might be something about the Enneagram really helping see your blind spots. You don’t know what you don’t know, that’s the thing about blind spots. Maybe something you’re not seeing that other people are that’s sort of affecting your relationships, but the tricky part is how do you know what your blind spot is when it’s blind? The whole idea that you don’t really know what you don’t know, and that it’s important to have a tool that helps you shed light on that in a way that is something that you can learn about and becomes a developmental growth opportunity and not something that continues to represent a defensive way of keeping you stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and what would you say is the best place to find you if folks want to learn more, get in touch, see what you’re up to?

Beatrice Chestnut
I have actually a new website that’s launching next week and it’ll be BeatriceChestnut.com. I’m sort of scaling up a bit. I’m teaming up with a lot of different people under a new brand called the Chestnut Group. I’ll be offering on the one hand business trainings and coaching, but on the other hand Enneagram workshops and trainings for people who both are leaders and people at work that want to develop themselves, but also individuals who just want to use the Enneagram for personal development.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Do you have a favorite challenge or call to action you’d issue forth to those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Beatrice Chestnut
I think I would just say to sort of see, developing your emotional intelligence as self-awareness as kind of an exciting adventure to be more mindful. Understanding your habits and patterns can be both challenging at times but also incredibly, incredibly rewarding. I think it really is a way to enhance your relationships, both at work and at home. When I teach the Enneagram in business settings, oftentimes people say, “Oh, I can’t wait to share this with my partner” because they immediately start seeing how it helps them get a new window into themselves and their relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Well Beatrice, thanks so much for this. This has been fun and eye-opening. I wish you lots of luck with the book and your practice, and everything you got going there.

Beatrice Chestnut
Alright, thank you very much Pete. I really enjoyed talking with you.