The Influence of Enneagram Type on Communicative

Competence

Claudio GARIBALDI and Flora SISTI1

Introduction

The Enneagram of psychological types is a human trans-cultural model aimed at promoting

understanding of one’s self and others through the identification and accurate description of
emotional, cognitive and behavioural automatic and repetitive patterns that develop from
childhood in the process of adaptation to the environment. These automatisms act as a blueprint
throughout the successive evolutionary trajectories of the individual, influencing one’s personal
and professional decisions and leaving a lasting impression on relational and communicative
modalities.
For students, the Enneagram can act as a map which represents a coherent framework with
which to outline and define recurring patterns of interpersonal communication. As well, it is a
tool for deciphering the process of creating one's own identity so as to foster the possibility of
making authentic choices for their futures and to orient themselves among interpersonal
differences.
This initial phase of our study focused on students, but we believe that knowledge of the
Enneagram could be also useful for instructors in order to create a better learning environment.
For both students and instructors, the Enneagram facilitates the perception of their relational
styles and enhances the ability to understand others’ cultural and behavioural characteristics.
Consequently, it increases the ability to resolve potential conflicts by positioning them in a
meaningful context. As well, it allows improved management of group dynamics and refinement
of communication skills.
Each of us perceives the world from a unique perspective. While each perspective is valid, it
is limited. Our personality shapes the way we interact with the world: how we teach, learn, work,
and communicate. As instructors, our personality types make us more comfortable with certain
teaching styles over others and also create a positive or negative resonance with pupils. As
students, our personality types make us prefer certain ways of learning, affect our focus of
attention and how we react to different kinds of teachers. Teachers interact with many students,
most of whom probably see the world differently than they do. Different perspectives, values,

1
C. Garibaldi (Istituto Grafologico Internazionale G. Moretti, ITALY) wrote sections 1 and 4; F. Sisti
(Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, ITALY) wrote sections 2 and 3. Both the authors are
responsible for the introduction and the abstract.
and preferences sometimes lead to misunderstanding and frustration. When we study the
personality types of the Enneagram, we can better understand how and why others see the
world differently from us. This awareness leads to greater acceptance of others.
We can apply this knowledge to become aware of how our teaching styles will have an impact
on the different learning styles of our students. In general, the Enneagram can help teachers and
students connect to be effective partners in education and find a meeting point at a
metacognitive level.
Each of the Enneagram types has a different motivation. Our motivation is a powerful force
that drives most of our behaviour. When the world around us supports and reinforces our
motivation, our energy will be aligned with our aspirations and our learning performance will be
increased. At the same time, a student can be driven by the results of many environmental
constraints more than by genuine choices. Making students aware of their motivations activates
a virtuous mechanism of inner dialogue that will allow better management of their human,
learning and professional characteristics.
This preliminary mixed (qualitative-quantitative) study is part of a larger project called The
Enneagram as a tool to develop soft skills. The goal of the general project is to verify whether
student exposure to knowledge of the Enneagram types increases their metacognitive awareness
of their identities and motivations and then of their performance in university courses. There
are many definitions of ‘soft skills’, but we will refer mainly to the approach that partially
identifies them with the EQ - Emotional Intelligence Quotient, "which represents the set of
personal, interpersonal, communication and linguistic skills, as well as personal habits", taking
into account that "soft skills have more to do with 'who we are' than 'how much we know'”
(Ciappei and Cinque 2014: 137).
This paper investigates the relationship between the Enneagram of psychological types and
the study of foreign languages in terms of motivational aspects and objective data on the success
in university exams. In particular we attempt to answer three research questions:
1. Is there a link between performance in foreign language learning and belongingness to a
particular Enneagram type?
2. Is there a link between performance in intercultural communication exam and belongingness
to a particular Enneagram type?
3. Is there a link between students’ motivation to study foreign languages and belongingness to a
particular Enneagram type?

Enneagram Basics
Table 1

The Enneagram of psychological types is a dynamic model of human being that describes
automatic personality patterns that are universally recognized as valid. It is one of the few
theories of personality whose descriptive and operational principles are generally agreed upon
around the world. Nowadays we can benefit from a great deal of international publications
among which some texts are worth mentioning: Naranjo 1996, 2006; Palmer 1996; Levine,
1999; Riso and Hudson 1999. In our research, we made specific reference to the work of Mark
Bodnarckzuk because of “its focus on a naturalistic, scientific view of personality and
psychological processes that are linked to modern advances in the neurosciences” (2009:X) and
the connections he made between the Enneagram and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow
1973).
The purpose of the Enneagram is not to classify ourselves into categories, but to show us how
we become stuck in automatic patterns. From one point of view, the Enneagram can be seen as a
set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type.
It is common to find a little of ourselves in all nine of the types, although one of them should
stand out as being closest to ourselves. This is our basic personality type. Each of the nine types
lives by a core assumption, that is “unquestioned beliefs and autopilot responses to people and
life” (Bodnarczuk 2009:20), that shapes and defines how we see ourselves, others, and the world
around us.
A core Enneagram pattern is a deeply ingrained pattern that has been the basis for one's self-
identity. We begin to live this way of ‘seeing’ like an ‘inner ‘script’, an ‘embodied individual
paradigm’ (Bodnarczuk 2009), and we can become aware of the inner story that we tell
ourselves by paying attention to our repetitive modes of behaviour. At that point we can also
start acting in order to change it.

Table 2 (Bodnarczuk 2009:3)

The verb ‘must’ is used because one's enneatype significantly reduces our psychological freedom
and compels us to adopt relational patterns that have proved useful for adaptation in childhood,
but which are limiting in adulthood.
Our core assumption influences our thinking process and our self-perception which influence
our behaviour and our communication style. The Enneagram helps decipher and create a
‘coherent framework’ for outlining and defining recurring patterns in behaviour, thought
processes and emotional reactions. Our central belief is our main limitation but also our deepest
resource. When unaware of students’ automatic patterns, teachers can inadvertently reinforce
patterns that helped the student to become stuck in the first place. A more effective learning
must intersect with the core assumption of our Enneagram type so we can transform our
automatic patterns from a negative problem paradigm to a positive resource paradigm because,
as previously stated, our central belief is our main limit but also our deepest resource.
The dynamic nature of this system provides precise information on how individuals evolve
and devolve. This is a great advantage of the Enneagram personality system because it allows to
carry out evaluations and implement training courses that are tailored to the individual
characteristics of each student.
In our case, as explained below, we also used the analysis of the students' handwriting, which
allows further exploration in the process of knowing one's own potentialities. The connection
between the Enneagram and Graphology has been the object of a previous research, carried out
on 1,000 handwriting samples and published in the Journal Enneagram Monthly (Garibaldi
2005-2007) and in a book (Garibaldi 2016).

The case study: methodology, participants and data collection

instruments

The methodology chosen for this research follows both a qualitative and a quantitative
approach. A mixed method (Dörnyei 2011) allows the integration of words and numbers to
describe both the context of the study and the quantitative data collected from the sample group
through the questionnaires.
In our study, a qualitative method was used for analysing the content of students’ samples of
handwriting. These samples described their self-images and reasons that determined their
choice of studying foreign languages at the University.
On the other hand, a quantitative method was applied in the analysis of the data collected
through the questionnaires given to the students. This allowed us to quantify students’ success
in their exams in order to search for a relationship between personal enneatypes and individual
performance. Numerical data were collected from the University database related to students’
exam marks in two subject matters: foreign languages and intercultural communication. Worth
noting is that the intercultural communication final test is an oral exam while foreign language
exams consist of three parts: a written test, and two oral sessions (each part counting for 33% of
the final grade). This could be considered when analysing students’ communicative skill.
Moreover the present study is a case of educational action research (Kemmis 2010) since it
was conducted by teachers within their courses with the goal of improving students’ self-
perception and consequently their capacity to develop an effective intercultural dialogue and, in
the long term, to orient them to make more effective choices for their future.
The group of respondents is constituted by 144 second-year students enrolled in the Business
Language curriculum of the three-year degree programme in Foreign Languages and Cultures
of the University of Urbino. The sample consists of 131 females and 13 males, aged from 20 to
22, coming from all over Italy. Participating students represent a convenience sample (Dörney
2010:28) since they were selected for the purpose of the study among the students attending the
course of Intercultural Communication held by one of the researchers. Within that course
programme the themes connected with the target of the project were introduced and a seminar
on Narrative identity and Enneagram types was scheduled.
Students were asked to undergo, on a voluntary basis, an individual test regarding self-
definition of their profiles in terms of the enneatype (Daniels and Prince 2000). The
Enneagram Essential Test was available online on the Moodle page of the course.
After this first choice students participated in the above mentioned seminar on Narrative
identity and Enneagram types and deepened their understanding of this descriptive model of
personality. Then they were asked to repeat the test more carefully and with greater self-
awareness in order to confirm or alter their initial choice. Lastly, they were asked to release two
samples of their handwriting. In the first sample they described their self-image and in the
second sample they explained the motivations that determined their choice of an academic path
in foreign languages. Therefore, we gathered two freely worded graphological samples for each
student: one giving a self-description of one’s temper, attitudes, and, in some cases, of
communicative style and social habits and a second one mentioning the personal reasons for
choosing the Foreign Languages and Cultures programme.
The second set of data analysed in the study was collected through the University ESSE3
system. ESSE3 is a virtual secretary system which provides data related to students’
performance and academic record. For each participating student we collected the results of
both his/her intercultural communication exam and foreign languages exams (English, French
etc.) and calculated the means.
The Enneagram survey was processed and the data were analysed and compared with those
related to students’ grades. The results are reported in the graphs below.

Results
Table 3

In table 3 the whole sample (144) is reported divided into the nine enneatypes with the inner
columns indicating the number of students who released the graphological samples (77= 53,4%
of the total). The percentages under the different types refer to the incidence of enneatypes on
the whole sample.
Table 4

Table 4 reports an example of a spreadsheet which summarizes all the information gathered
from the sample: name of participating student, enneagram type, final mark in the intercultural
communication oral exam and marks in the foreign language exams classified according to the
different languages (E-English; F- French; S –Spanish , R- Russian ) and the academic year
(first – 1 or second –2). Moreover, we calculated the mean of the grades they received on their
language exams. The last column reports the different kinds of motivation described in the
handwritten texts. The data were classified according to the Self-Determination Theory by Ryan
and Deci (2000) illustrated by a continuum running from absence of motivation (amotivation),
to extrinsic motivation (due to external causes such as external pressure, tangible rewards etc.)
to intrinsic motivation fostered by the need to feel autonomous, competent or in relation with
the other members of the group. More than one type of motivation was listed in the students’
handwritten samples, including 2 cases of absence of motivation (amotivation) (table 5).
Table 5

At the end of the study the total mean of the grades obtained in the exams was also determined
for each enneagram type as reported in table 6 below.

Table 6
The first column refers to the total means related to foreign language grades, while the second to
the means calculated for the intercultural communication grades for each enneatype. Since the
research took into consideration only the 77 students who released their handwritten samples,
the data referred to enneagram types Three, Five and Six are poorer and not really statistically
significant.

Discussion and further research

An Enneagram type of personality is a complex structure based on neurobiological and

adaptive processes influencing our cognitive, emotional and behavioural style. Exploring how
this model of personality impacts on the foreign language learning experience is an innovative
field of research which can benefit from the fact that the Enneagram is spreading worldwide.
Ideally, our study paves the way for multiple further investigations.
As stated above, our general goal was to expose students to their Enneagram type for the
purpose of verifying whether this learning might contribute to increase two main soft skills, that
is self-awareness and communication. Many other abilities revolve around these two crucial
skills, because they imply the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of human beings.
Many different learning activities should be organized on a theoretical and experiential level:
explaining the main concepts of the Enneagram personality system, making an individual
assessment through interviews and with the support of the handwriting analysis, and arranging
group meetings where students can discover how the Enneagram types function in their own
and others’ personalities. This overall process is made possible because the Enneagram will be
perceived as a common language by which one may name one's own experiences. Since it is a
work in progress, it is not currently possible to demonstrate if this approach proves to be useful
to students and to their course of study.
Outlining this general frame is necessary in order to define the precise meaning of the work
presented here. Through our knowledge of the Enneagram system, we hypothesized that the
enneatypes could have an influence on foreign language and intercultural communication
learning experience and exams, and that the specific motivation which drives each of them could
have played a role in choosing to study foreign languages.
The interpretation of the results is necessarily partial, as we are currently in the first phase of
our study and further research are necessary to produce meaningful conclusions. However, it is
a fact that we can benefit from the availability of the respondents, who expressed a keen interest
in the Enneagram.
Remaining strictly adherent to the numbers that emerged from the test, students who
identified themselves as types Three and One got the highest scores on the two exams
considered. We must be very cautious in the interpretation of this result, since many students
may have answered the Enneagram Essential Test questions quickly, or misinterpreted the
meaning of them. This is the reason why individual interviews and a comparison with the results
of the handwriting analyses are necessary.
However, we must also admit that the same results did not surprise us because, in general,
students belonging to the type One have a strong sense of duty and are extremely rigorous in the
things to which they apply themselves and type Three students are gifted with a natural
propensity to shine in their field of activity.
Based on these assumptions, it is legitimate to argue that these qualities would emerge even
if such students had chosen other fields of study, since these qualities could be defined as
natural soft skills for these enneatypes. For now, let us just give a brief description of the
characteristics of these two types of students. In future development of our research we will try
to investigate whether there is a specific link between the belonging to these two or other
enneatypes and a predisposition to the study of foreign languages.
Short profile type One
The type One student is defined ‘The Serious Hard Worker’. Students belonging to this group
are driven by a basic motivation that ‘I must be perfect’. They look for constant improvement
and try to avoid mistakes and negligence. They follow rules and standards so closely that they
will meet all expectations. Their main quality is self-discipline, but they are uncomfortable to be
spontaneous, playful and emotional. Being very attentive at lessons, taking thorough notes,
wanting to know the rules, proceeding step by step in a logical manner and meticulous attention
to details characterize their learning style. They need to plan their studies and they have very
high standards in maintaining the dead-lines. Their Inner Critic points out every mistake, and
they become irritated when they don't get things right. They tend to notice when the teacher is
off track.
Their speaking style is precise, direct, exacting, concise, and detailed. They use words such as
should, ought, must, correct, excellent, good, wrong, and right. They react quickly to ideas. They
are defensive if criticized. The blind spots of their communications style concern the fact that
they do not realize that they appear critical, impatient, preachy, and opinionated. The ideal
educational environment values hard work, fairness, where rules are constantly enforced, the
work is well planned and organized, and the teachers are responsible, self-disciplined and
conscientious. The type One students flourish in such an educational context (Fitzel 2011).
Short profile type Three
The type Three student is defined ‘The Brilliant Achiever’. Students belonging to this group are
driven by a basic motivation that ‘I must be excellent’. They focus on visible results and
accomplishments in order to win the admiration and esteem of others. They are driven to excel
and may become role models. Their learning style is characterized by the desire to improve skills
and abilities in order to obtain success. They reduce lessons to key concepts and like an
experiential approach. They challenge themselves, work quickly and need to produce all the
time. They enjoy competition but carefully avoid areas in which they know they won't excel.
Their speaking style is clear, efficient, logical, and well-conceived. It avoids topics that reflect
negatively on them. They are impatient with lengthy conversations. The blind spots of their
communication style concern the fact that they do not realize to appear dismissive if the
information interferes with their goals and that their focus is to look good and not the
authenticity of their feelings. The ideal educational environment should be dynamic, pragmatic,
characterized by a visible reward system of achievements, where the expectations are clearly
defined and the whole system is permeated by competency (Fitzel 2011).
We then took a further step, to connect the results of the students’ Enneagram Essential Test
with the classifications of the Self-Determination Theory by Ryan and Deci (2000). This theory
explains how important it may be for personal growth and self-esteem not only to carry out
activities in which we feel good and competent, but also and above all to choose to do something
we like, based on personal values and goals to be achieved. Connecting the two theories is totally
innovative, and our premise is that motivations linked to the Enneagram type have a stronger
and deeper influence on personal values. We can say that the motivations expressed by the
enneatypes are even more ‘intrinsic’ and that becoming aware of the inner dynamic of our type
can, as stated above, allow us to be active agents of our choices.
We have included a chart (Table 5) that shows the quality of the motivations expressed by the
77 students who provided their handwriting and related to the choice of studying foreign
languages. At present, no interpretation would be significant, because we need to deepen the
investigation through individual interviews with students in order to encourage them to make
some reflections on the automatic patterns of their enneatype. To build a bridge toward further
investigations and the field of educational affective neuroscience (Immordino 2017) it would be
interesting to relate the message each enneatype’s heart longs to hear (because it wasn’t
sufficiently perceived in childhood) to the motivations outlined in the Self-Determination
Theory (Table 7). In perspective, trying to integrate the two models can give interesting results.
Table 7 (Noordzij 2013 - Your Enneagram Coach, https://www.yourenneagramcoach.com/)

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