Enneagram Personality System Cheat Sheet

The Enneagram is a nine-type personality model that identifies the core motivations, fears, and compulsions driving human behavior — not just behavioral traits on the surface. It emerged from the teachings of Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo in the 1960s–1970s, later systematized by Don Riso and Russ Hudson at the Enneagram Institute. Unlike most type indicators, the Enneagram insists that personality type is fixed from early childhood and represents a strategy for coping with a specific core fear; this means growth comes not from changing your type but from moving up the Levels of Development within it. The single most important insight for practitioners: your type is identified by its core motivation, not by its behaviors — many types can behave similarly for entirely different internal reasons.