Temet Nosce

There are personality tests, and then there's the Enneagram.

Myers-Briggs, 16PF, Belbin and even the humble horoscope are amongst the things people reach for to better understand themselves and their possible futures.  And it's true that these offer varying degrees of insight.

But the Enneagram stands apart.

Myers-Briggs is just a little too fussy, and inconsistent.  It's not unusual for someone to be ENFJ in the morning and ENTJ in the afternoon, or for different people to overlap as many as three or four different classifications during different scenarios.  If you don't land in one specific 'type' for most of the time then trying to use the information for benefit quickly becomes unmanageable.  Belbin meanwhile is less detailed and less likely to end up in overlapping personality types, but it's essentially work-related. It won't help you for self-development, only to decide how best you can contribute to a team at the workplace.  Few employers use it anyway.

The Enneagram is not only better, but older.  The version of the Enneagram Test available now is only half a century old but the philosophy behind it envelops learnings from mystical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancient Greek philosophy (particularly Socrates, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists).  Even Pythagoras had his fingers in the Enneagram pie at some point in the ancient past.

So it shouldn't be surprising that finding out your Enneagram 'type' can be like having a massive dose of insight, self-awareness, and understanding wrapped around a house-brick that gets thrown through your front window unexpectedly while you're trying to eat breakfast.  It may even land in your cereal, but you won't notice the milk dripping off your chin, your nose, your household pets and the light fixture above the table because you'll be too busy wondering how the people who wrote the test managed to get into your private diary and inside your own head.

The results are so accurate, so deeply intimate, that the first read will have you feeling the way you do when you're dreaming you've been caught out in public without any clothes.  Amongst other things, the test results will explain the reasons why you've behaved the way you have in the past, especially in unusually bountiful or difficult circumstances.  Perhaps for the first time you will understand why you did what you did, said what you said, and suffered the way you did.  You will also receive exclusive insight into all your personal relationships whether at home, at work, or anywhere else.  You'll then also get, indirectly, insight into how well you suit the profession you've chosen.  Even if it isn't good news, it will likely explain why not.

For the purposes of human evolution though, the Enneagram will tell you what you're good at, what you can offer, and provide an easy-to-understand barometer that can tell you at any moment in time how well (or badly) you're dealing with any given situation.  And that situation can be anything from a death or break-up, to the neighbour's dog poo-ing on your garden, to - hypothetically of course - living under medical martial law as elected public officials betray their constituents to abet a eugenics plan of arbitrarily killing several billion humans deemed 'unworthy'.  Like what's happening on Earth right now.  And if you're one of those talented people sandbagged with as much self-awareness as a bag of sand then it'll be a godsend.