Having explained the benefits and importance of the narrative tradition of the Enneagram, it may seem paradoxical to use a personality questionnaire. Isn’t there a great risk of imposing an identity on people, thus abandoning an ethical approach, rather than enabling them to discover their identity for themselves?
Yes, this risk exists and we want to avoid it at all costs. Although we have put together a questionnaire, this is precisely to help trainers do their job in a skilled and ethical way.
It took us years of practical application of the Enneagram to start to get to know it well, even though we are professional psychologists and trainers. The Enneagram is complex, is based on largely unconscious drives, and observation of behaviours is not the right starting point for discovering one’s Type. All trainers must constantly work to maintain their neutrality if they are not to decide on someone's Type based on their own projections.
In training, it often happens that some people have problems recognising their Type or veer towards another Type that appears more acceptable or attractive to them. In an ideal world we would have weeks, or months, so that everyone could discover their Type at their own pace, but we do have to take time into account, and most people coming to training want to discover their Type. It is preferable for the trainer to have the support of a reliable questionnaire for discovering your Type rather than risk losing his or her neutrality.
The results of the questionnaire are not sent to the person who answers it, but to the trainer. Most of them, as we recommend, choose not to consult it at the start of training, but only when a person is having problems locating his or her Type. Looking at the results helps the trainer either to confirm the person's hypothesis or his or her own, or to question this by leaving the door open to a Type that the person and/or trainer had not seen as relevant. The trainer does not say ‘you are this’, but ‘in your thinking, consider such and such a Type'. At the end of training, the person receives the results in order to continue with this process.
In any event, the goal of a training session is not to determine one's own Type, but to start on the path to self observation. The questionnaire is a highly valued accelerator in this process and a safeguard for the trainer.