Throughout the years, I’ve found personality assessments to be extremely helpful. I have utilized the DISC, Meyers-Briggs, Love Languages and Maximizing Your Strengths assessments in hiring new teammates and building team camaraderie.

But for some reason there was a hesitancy on my part to take the Enneagram assessment. The graphic seemed hokey, the verbiage inaccessible, and it all sounded too religious and new age.

This past weekend while vacationing with friends Michael and Gail Hyatt, I noticed Richard Rohr’s book The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective and began to casually read. My intuitive self immediately realized there was more here than I cared to admit.

When Gail told me there is an app (of course there is) for the assessment, I promptly purchased it (.99 cents) and began answering the questions. My results are in the graphic accompanying this post.

I am a seven. A seven on the Enneagram is described as a Busy, Variety-seeking type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Acquisitive, and Scattered. Sevens are enthusiastic and almost everything captures their attention. They approach life with curiosity, optimism and a sense of adventure, like “kids in a candy store” who look at the world in wide-eyed, rapt anticipation of all the good things they are about to experience.

Of course, there is the flip side to all this enthusiam, which I will save for another day—being the enthusiast I am!

I will say that I’m very impressed with the candid evaluation and discussion of the dark side of personalities the Enneagram provides in order to improve our relationships and understanding of others. To me, this was the most powerful portion of the assessment.

No one is a pure personality type: everyone is a unique mixture of his or her basic type and usually one of the two types adjacent to it on the circumference of the Enneagram. One of the two types adjacent to your basic type is called your wing.

Your basic type dominates your overall personality, while the wing complements it and adds important, sometimes contradictory, elements to your total personality. I found that I have an eight wing as you can easily see on the photo of my results. The eight wing adds a Powerful, Dominating, Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational aspect to my personality.

Examples of sevens include: John F. Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein, Amadeus Mozart, Kate Winslet, Elizabeth Taylor, Steven Spielberg, Bette Midler, Elton John and Joan Collins.

As my wife Chris (a two), Gail (a nine), and Mike (a three), discussed our Enneagram numbers, it was easy to see how helpful—and accurate—this assessment can be in improving our understanding and relationships with ourselves and those around us with whom we work, play and live.

You can go HERE to buy the app at the iTunes store.

After you take the assessment, please return here and tell us the results.

What is your Enneagram number?

What do you think about personality assessments such as the Enneagram?