My own journey with
the Enneagram
For most of my working life, I was immersed in entrepreneurial ventures. For the last twenty years of my career, I built and ran a software business which eventually grew to the point where it was sold, allowing me to retire.
It was a rewarding and exciting journey, but also a very busy one. Work occupied much of my life and, although I rarely stopped to question it, there was always a quiet sense in the background that perhaps there was more to life than the constant striving, achieving and doing.
In 2008, I began exploring some of the questions that had been quietly developing in my mind. I looked at different approaches to understanding ourselves and our place in the world, but it was not until I encountered the Enneagram in 2012 that something really shifted for me.
The Enneagram gave me a new way of seeing myself. It revealed patterns in my thinking, emotions and behaviour that I had previously regarded simply as who I was. I began to recognise how much of my experience was shaped by my personality and how the “auto-pilot” of my ego conditioned how I showed up in the world.
That realisation was, for me, life changing. Rather than simply telling me more about my personality, the Enneagram began to show me how my personality could actually obscure a deeper sense of who I am. The more I understood the patterns of my ego, the more I became aware that perhaps I was not simply the person I had spent a lifetime believing myself to be.
Since discovering the Enneagram, it has remained an important part of my life, both personally and professionally. My understanding of it has continued to evolve. I now see it not just as a system for describing personality, but as a tool for developing greater awareness and potentially as a doorway to exploring what lies beyond our habitual sense of self.
For me, that is where the Enneagram becomes really interesting. It does not necessarily give us answers to the question “Who am I?” Instead, it can help us become curious about the question — and perhaps begin to discover that there is more to us, and more to life, than we ordinarily see.
My Enneagram Training
My Enneagram journey began in 2012 with Eli Jaxon-Bear, founder of the Leela Foundation. This introduced me to the Enneagram not simply as a personality system, but as a tool for self-awareness, personal transformation and freedom from habitual patterns.
Since then, I have undertaken extensive training in different approaches to the Enneagram. This has included courses with Robert Holden, exploring the Enneagram in relation to spiritual growth, love and purpose, and the Mastering Enneagram Coaching certification course with Tom LaHue, developing my understanding of how the Enneagram can be applied within a coaching relationship to support meaningful personal change.
I also completed Nine Prisons, One Key and Path to Freedom with The Human Potentialists / The Enneagram Prison Project. These programmes explored the Enneagram as a means of understanding and moving beyond the limiting patterns and “prisons” created by our personality structures.
I then undertook the two-year Professional Accreditation programme with Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy, supplemented by additional specialist modules and in-person retreats. This provided a comprehensive professional grounding in the Enneagram, including the deeper psychological and transformational dimensions of the nine types.
I am currently continuing my professional development towards accreditation with the International Enneagram Association (IEA), while continuing to deepen my knowledge and practice of the Enneagram.
Together, these different approaches have given me a broad perspective on the Enneagram — from understanding personality patterns and relationships to exploring the deeper possibilities of self-awareness, personal growth and freedom from the limitations of our habitual patterns.
