Have you ever read something with a sinking heart as it completely describes you? All your habits and patterns, great and awful and you know you’ve been busted. That’d be your Enneagram moment then. In your moment of crisis, it finds you when you need it. If you meet it before a crisis, even better!

My inner geek loves a good classification and this is a sophisticated spiritual and psychological tool; profiling Nine Types of personality or ‘fixation.’ The Nine Types are The Perfectionist, The Helper, The Achiever, The Individualist, The Observer, The Loyalist, The Enthusiast, The Challenger, The Peace-Maker. Each personality at its best has so much to offer. We all need each other. The Enneagram is clear on that.

Understanding your type won’t put you in a box, but gently let you know the box you’re already in and help you clamber up and out. Knowing this we can work out our blocks and gifts, understand ourselves and how we can live, offering our natural talents more effortlessly. It also helps us understand others and be a little more compassionate; the Enneagram invites us not to take things personally.

We all develop a personality style depending on our particular form of childhood situation and throughout our lives, we’ll unconsciously see the world through this somewhat distorted lens. It usually means we respond and compensate to experiences in later life with behaviours, both healthy and unhealthy, from that place. If we’re lucky (or unlucky) we eventually hit a point of defeat with ourselves, where we grasp, on some level, that our reactive behaviour is an act of desperation and a wake-up call.

For this book group, I suggest you buy a hard copy of Riso and Hudson, take this test work out the personality type you most likely sense you are, and please read about YOU before joining the book group. In the gathering, you'll likely chat with others of your type in break-out rooms.