Balans

Personality as developed character based on inborn temperament and the accompanying values, vulnerabilities and personality styles or paradigms.

At present I am reading on the enneagram by Jerome Wagner.

Such interesting topics as A 3-V view of the enneagram: values,

visions, and vulnerabilities; how we stay stuck in our styles:

Schema Maintenance, Avoidance, and Compensation;

The three triads, namely the feeling triad, the thinking triad and

the instinctive triad (each containing three types of personality).

A must read for everyone who wish to understand their personal motivations and limitations, from which I extracted the following teasers:

 “Vulnerabilities are the tender underbelly of our values. We are

most sensitive around those areas where we are naturally gifted

and which we most prize. Where our strengths are, there lie our

weaknesses. When our values are assailed, discounted, derided,

or in any way violated, we feel threatened and frightened. When

our strengths are challenged, impugned, distrusted, or dismissed,

we feel anxious, guilty, ashamed, and angry.

Every person shares common human needs such as those for

security, consistency, esteem, acceptance, etc. When these basic

needs are satisfied, then higher needs for self actualization and

self transcendence come to the fore and attract our energy.

If certain basic needs are not attended to and fulfilled, then we

experience vulnerability around them, accompanied by loss, hurt,

fear, and anger. Our energy gathers around these needs to

proactively get them met or to reactively shield them, making sure

we don’t get re-traumatized or neglected again. …”

AND

 ”Once we establish our personality styles or paradigms to help us

apprehend and navigate around the world, we can either keep

them pliant, flexible, accommodating, and up to date; or we can

rigidly maintain them, assimilating everything into them, and suffer

what Joel Barker (1992) calls paradigm paralysis and George

Kelly (1963) labeled hardening of the categories.

There are many reasons why we might not want to change our

personality paradigms once we have formed them. They’ve

worked for us and we’ve become successful experts within their

existing range. Outside the range of our paradigm, we’re back to

average. The more adept we become within our style and the

more we become invested in it, the more we have to lose by

changing it.

Another reason for resisting change is that our identity has

become intimately associated with our paradigm.”

These extractions were not meant to replace an introductory reading on the enneagram and the taking of a personal test, for which there are various possibilities on the internet (even free ones).

I wish everyone would take such a test, which results have the possibilities of working on both our personal strengths and our weak points.