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The Enneagram Global Summit™ The Five Elements of Change

Tom Condon Jessica: Welcome, everyone. This session is entitled "The Five Elements of Change," and

our faculty is Tom Condon. Tom has taught over 800 workshops in the United States, Europe and Asia. The Director of the Changeworks in Bend, Oregon, he has been an adjunct faculty member of Antioch University and the University of California at Berkeley. He's the author of over 50 audio and video programs and several books combining the Enneagram with NLP and other methods of change. Welcome, Tom.

Tom: Hi. Thanks for having me. Jessica: It's so good to have you. This topic about change, teaching from Confucius is that

if a person would be constantly happy they must become a friend of change because change is the only constant there is. And I do think that one of the things we're most challenged by is the ways that we want to have a sense of things staying the same and yet change is what really brings new birth and vitality and experiences to our life. So I'm eager to get into this with you and particularly not only how coaches, counselors and therapists can use this work that you're doing, this model that you're framing for us to work with Enneagram patterns and problems but how ultimately we can sort of become our own coachb best coach, counselor and therapist. So why don't we start by you named it the five elements of change. So there are five elements of change. Can you start taking us through those?

Tom: So this model is in relation to the Enneagram and in relation to how people get

stuck and caught in the low side and then how to grow and change towards the high side and beyond. The five elements, as I've defined them are, number one is defining the change, the thing that you want to have more choices about, what you want to be able to do instead of say reacting out of the low side of your Enneagram style. The second element is motivation, determining your own motivation to do that, assessing how motivated you are to change. Motivation is really important. The third is well-formed goals, what you would like instead, how you would like to function differently. The fourth is evoking inner resources meaning that you have a number of strengths and capacities and qualities and talents and abilities even those defined by the Enneagram related to the high side of your style and some of the other connections like stress and security points and wings and even subtypes. And then the fifth is using good methods, and I want to kind of talk about what different methods do, sort of present you with a little model of how various methods that people already use or can use,

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how they do different things and what's advised with certain dilemmas that you're trying to go past.

Jessica: Okay, great. Tom: So we can start with number one, defining the change. One of the ways that I

approach working with the Enneagram when somebody is caught in the low side of their style and having reactivity or having reactions without choice is to understand it in terms of an adaptive strategy. Something that has benefits and has had a use at least in the past but now is starting to backfire, let's say. So you could have a Five, for example, who grew up in a family where there was a lot of emotional distance. And then he goes forward in time and has his own family and introduces a lot of emotional distance because that sort of the way to be in a family but it doesn't work in the present, in the way that it worked in the past. And a lot of times there are elements of reactivity within each Enneagram style especially when people are reacting out of the low side. That has this sort of quality of it's like something that used to work really well and now it has an opposite effect or it doesn't bring you the same benefits that it once did. It's like the thing that saved you as now the thing that gets in your way. So that becomes an important thing to begin to define sort of like contemplating. Why am I doing this or how does this reaction that I typically have that I want to go past, what kind of resonance does it have in my history? Is it part of a role that I used to play that I'd like to have more choices about now. Or is it a defense against something that used to happen that I protected myself from but now it doesn't really happen? I just sort of imagine that it's going to happen.

I have a background in NLP. One of the things that they really emphasize in NLP

is sensory-based descriptions. When you're trying to define a change like this it helps to really get specific about what the sensory qualities are. In other words when you're reacting out of the low side of your Enneagram style what do you see, what do you hear, what do you feel, what do you taste, what do you smell, what kind of inner state to you go into because usually when somebody is reacting out of Enneagram style the inner state is familiar, it's something that they return to, it's like a default inner state. There's a kind of sequence to it as well that's worth exploring like something will, a person will see something and then they'll say something to themselves. Then they'll get a feeling in a particular part of their body. All of that is kind of helpful in terms of beginning to specify what's it like when I'm having the problem. Another element in that is taking responsibility, how well can I recognize that this is something I'm doing to myself. If I'm a Six I scare myself. If I'm a Nine I delete myself. If I'm a Three I reject myself. And recognizing that it's something that's happening internally even if it seems like it involves other people or they could be easily blamed for it or something like that.

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And sometimes specifying the context, when does this happen, with whom does it happen, what kinds of situations typically in your life do you have reactivity in this way. That's kind of helpful also. And another one is finding our point of power. People will sometimes define the low side of their Enneagram style in a passive way like a Nine will say, "The fog just rolls in and suddenly I'm foggy and I forgot what I was talking about" or a Four will say, "Well, I'm a victim of the mood or a victim of my critical voice, it attacked me again," something like that. What's often helpful anyway is to find a point of power within that, in other words if I'm a Four is there some part of me that is stubborn, let's say, or if I'm a Six and I feel like I'm being assailed from the outside is there some part of me that feels like it's a kind of form of control, something where there is more choice, something where there's more power in it. Are you with me so far?

Jessica: Absolutely. I really get this place about finding the point of power. So it isn't even

like the power might not even being used in a constructive way, but you're finding that place where you're making a decision. I love that.

Tom: Where there's a choice being exercised already. It's just a historical choice or an

uninformed choice or a blind choice or an unconscious choice that used to work. And then jumping over to motivation, motivation to change is important as well. People will be attached to their way of functioning, and this is especially relevant and salient with the behavior of egos and the way everyone talks in Enneagram circles about the ego trying to sort of maintain control and kind of trying to hand on and co-opt anything new and make it familiar and translate, sort of like you're looking for Main Street in every new town. You're kind of taking what happens to you and integrating it, but also maybe turning it into and then enfolding it into a story that you've got going.

[0:10:26] Within that, within the behavior of egos, there's a kind of control, there's a kind

of predictability then that ensues. Maybe you're playing a role that used to get you love or was necessary protection from things that used to happen with some frequencies. Or in a more spiritual sense your ego kind of provides you with a bubble self and a bubble of perception and it protects you from the void, and the void is something that people are trying to avoid. It's sort of like people's relationships to the unknown. It's something that we're drawn to but something that we're also kind of pulled back from at the same time. We both yearn for it and fear it. So egos will do that, and all of those will constitute attachments to a way of functioning that might no longer serve you. There's what they call secondary gains in NLP, and it means a kind of unconscious attachment to an old way of functioning that you maintain even as you aspire to something new. You see this, for example, in what they call spiritual bypass where somebody is trying to be spiritual on the one hand but on the other hand they're prone to road rage in traffic or something like that. And there's a contradiction and the contradiction is sort between their conscious ideal of themselves or their belief

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about what they're doing or their aspirations. And then another kind of level self where you're kind of hanging on to what used to work. Generally, motivation comes in two forms. One is called towards and the other one is called away from. Towards means you're going towards something, you have a goal, you have an aspiration, you have a desire to be something more or to have more choices or to have more freedom, and then away from motivations are you're trying to cease being in pain, you're trying to get away from something that is vexing or problematic or creating chaos in your life. You could contrast Sixes versus Sevens with this. When you ask Sevens are you motivated towards new things or away from old, painful things, if the Seven is not very self-studied they'll almost always say, "Oh, I'm just totally towards." And then the Six will say, "Yes, I'm totally away from." They'll say, "I've got to get over my anxiety and my panic attacks because otherwise my wife will leave me. So I'm trying to avoid a worse alternative."

But it's usually a little more complicated than that. It's usually Sevens are both

motivated towards consciously and away from unconsciously. In other words, they're going towards something new, but they may feel like they're being chased by something painful, like there's something behind them. It's like don't look back, something might be gaining on you. And getting in touch with that and realizing that the motivation is dual aspect in this way, is often helpful. Same with Sixes, a Six might be trying to get away from a difficulty or a painful situation, but they might also have a toward motivation that's born out of idealism or a sense of mission or even just curiosity about what else their life could be. And then motivation is kind of affected by the type of defense you have as well in Enneagram terms. I call them feel good, feel bad and feel nothing defenses. And feel good defenses, you might think of Sevens, for example, somebody who hits a wall of pain or a difficulty or frustration and then cheers themselves up. Talks themselves into a good mood, focuses on the future and steps into the picture of the future and feels better. And then there's feel bad defenses like Fours might attack themselves or Sixes might assail themselves or Ones might judge themselves. And then there's feel nothing defenses like Nines, for example, going into a kind of inner fugue state where they're numb or they're oblivious or they're just kind of floating, something like that. Or Threes who get into very busy, active, robotic-like courses of action, and they get out of their feelings that way.

[0:15:41] So these are to be considered because if you have a feel good defense, you

might really have to cast around a little longer to find the low side of it and to motivate yourself. If you have a feel bad defense, you might have more motivation in one sense because you're suffering, but in another sense you might be attached to the suffering somehow like Fours can get. If you have a feel nothing defense it's like you can postpone doing something about a problem that you have for a long, long time and it's something to be aware of. And then

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past examples of motivation can matter, kind of thinking about times in the past where you really made a change versus times when you were just contemplating a change. It's almost like you already have a skill somewhere to make changes but you may not realize it. So that's motivation. Does that make sense?

Jessica: It does make sense. I love this feel good, feel bad, feel nothing as the defenses.

It's sort of like even the triadic thing of flight, fight and freeze that I think this really helps people get more specific about the particular ways that they are losing contact with the present moment and doing something that is a compensation rather than their authentic self. I'm wondering, Tom, if we also just went back for a minute to the first point which you really brought out so much, defining the problem to be changed, because you brought in this fascinating element of NLP and talking about the sensory-based phenomenon, and you said there are particular ways that type, the way things feel, taste, smell even, and people could become aware of that. I'm wondering if you could just give an example because I think that's a very unique part of your work of how a particular type, what's the kind of sensory expressions that you might notice.

Tom: Well, allowing for the fact that we talk about type and yet people are individuals.

There are some generalities you could make. The one I often mention comes from my own style which is Six, how do you scare yourself. Why you scare yourself might have some relevance also as connecting the dots to an early strategy that you developed to protect yourself. But NLP would then ask how, and in the how what they're after is what do you do to yourself in the theater of your own mind to produce this consistent response. So somebody like a Six might have a big picture in their mind's eye. If they're going to scare themselves, they're not going to do it with a little snapshot. They'll have a picture of some negative event or the boss is angry at me or something like that but it has to be large, it has to be large in order to be intimidating. Maybe there's a soundtrack that goes with it, and the soundtrack is loud, sort of like going into these multiplex theaters these days sitting in the front row. You've got a big picture, you've got a loud something. It could be a noise, it could be a voice, it could be probably someone else's voice if you're scaring yourself. Then there will be a typical kind of experience of anxiety in the upper chest, although it's not always there in the chest but it's somewhere. Usually there's anxiety in the chest and a kind of tension in the belly. The Six doesn't feel this in their feet, for example, or in their little toes. It's got a specific location. And then maybe there's a taste and a smell that goes with it as well, a taste in the mouth, that acrid taste in the mouth or a bad smell or something like that. That will be fairly consistent. Whenever the Six scares themselves it will have some of those elements.

[0:20:15] Jessica: Fascinating. Okay, so we've done step one, which is to define the problem and

step two which is motivation. So what happens with step three?

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Tom: Step three is well-formed outcomes. That is to say goals, that is to say what you'd like to have instead. Generally speaking, they need to be stated in positive terms. If a One says, "I want to stop being so critical" or an Eight says, "I want to stop alienating people." You have to kind of turn that around to "Well, what would you like instead? How would that be different?" So it's sort of like don't think white monkeys. What you want to focus on is what you want rather than what you don't want. And then, again, referring to NLP, getting a sensory-based description of that is often helpful, kind of detailed information about well, how would you see things differently. Would you see any pictures in your mind's eye differently? How would you talk to yourself or talk to others or would you have more silence, for example? And then how would you feel in your body? Instead of tense would you feel calm? Instead of out of alignment would you be in alignment and so on? And getting into real detailed sensory stuff about what it's like to make this change and to have made this change. And sometimes that alone, focusing on what you want and getting a description of it that's quite detailed facilitates and kind of speeds up the process of change. A person will suddenly start to realize, "Oh, yes, I have that within me." Also, usually when a person is trying to define what they would like in terms of a well-formed outcome, it's usually sort of the opposite of the problem in some way. So in other words, a One who is critical or a Two who is giving themselves over to too many people, what they'll want instead is to be, the One will want to become more accepting or more supportive of themselves or quiet down their critical voice. The two will want to be able to have the choice to return to their own emotional location and maintain their boundaries when appropriate. And if somebody says, "Oh, I'm in need of help," they don't automatically jump out of themselves and go over and try and help the other person. Maybe the other person could help themselves or be taught to help themselves. Teach them how to fish rather than giving him a fish, that kind of thing. That often will come into it, the experiential opposite of problem.

And then there's what NLP calls chunking, and chunking means essentially the

size of your goal. There's kind of two kinds or there's sort of a range, and the range goes from global to specific. Global means I want to be inspired in my work but the description is vague, or I want to have a better quality of life but it's not very specific. And yet, it's good sometimes to have global chunks or global goals in the sense that they're inspiring. I want to sort of go forward and I want to have a more complete life somehow. But then it comes down to the specific steps you'll take that need to be defined in order to have that better quality of life. And so it's sort of like think globally, act locally or the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step. You sort of need both. If you emphasize the global part you can get yourself high but maybe you don't really change. If you get too specific and too detailed and too exacting, then it's sort of like you have a houseplant and you want to check on the progress of its growth and how healthy it is and so you dig it up each day to examine the roots. Or you're trying to lose

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weight so you weigh yourself every hour and a half. That's sort of too much in the other direction. But getting specific about the things that you want to do on a daily basis and integrating them becomes sort of important and getting, like a said, a sensory-based description.

[0:25:00] There's also what they call an ecological check in NLP which means you're

predicting the future, you're kind of anticipating okay, once I make this change, what will be the ramifications and are there any unintended consequences? So you're anticipating those in advance and kind of adjusting your goal in relation to that. If I'm a Nine and I become more assertive, will I alienate the people in my life? If I'm a Five and I become more outgoing or become more public in some way, will that affect some of my relationships? Sometimes when people have spiritual goals, when they want to really evolve spiritually, it becomes important not to define them in sensory-based terms necessarily. So ignore everything I just said. But rather to focus on how to prepare the ground for that, how to do things that will allow you to open up on a spiritual level rather than trying to get a vision of yourself being spiritual and then step into that picture. That's usually a production of the ego. You have a spiritual practice, things that you practice in your life that allow you to open up more and more to what's beyond your personal self.

Jessica: That makes a lot of sense, and that avoids the spiritual bypassing that you were

talking about before. Tom: Yes, it does. So number four is evoking inner resources. What this means is that

when were in trance of our Enneagram style, when we're caught in the low side of it. When we're in the pattern of it and reacting out of it without choice we're ignoring a lot of other capacities that we have. They're just sort of not enfolded in and included into the state of mind or the state of body or the state of heart that we're reacting out of, and these are worth fleshing out and kind of evoking and bringing forth. The first one that's most obvious is what would be a counterexample to the problem. We've already talked about that in a way with well-formed outcomes. A Two has a greater sense of boundary and choice and can stay inside themselves even when somebody is delivering the siren song outside of them of "Help me, help me." But the point is that usually most people have counterexamples to their own problem somewhere in their background. In other words, there have been times when that Two maintain the good boundary or there have been times when that One was self-accepting and kind of relaxed. Or there are times when that Three sort of let down their guard and kind of took a day off and connected well with the other people in their life. So what you're casting around for are are there any times when this has already happened, this change or the outcome that I want? Have I already kind of exhibited it somewhere? Also, people have existing strategies for change if you've ever grown up, moved away from home, gotten married, got divorced, changed jobs,

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changed locations, given up a bad habit, there have been ways in which you already had an ability to change and an ability to adapt to the new and to new circumstances. Sometimes that's helpful to consider and to, if you're a coach or a counselor or a therapist, kind of call into the process. And then there is also what I call dark and light shadows. Dark shadows we talk about lot. There will be some person or some behavior or some aspect of it or people that you react to, that push your buttons, that you're in tension to. But actually, the fact that you're in tension to it means that somewhere it's within you and it's only being perceived in a dark way, as a negative capacity, sort of like you're only noticing the low side of that other person's Enneagram style. You're a Six and you look at an Eight and all you can see in the Eight is them being a bully, let's say. But actually Eights have a high side. Eights can be honest and powerful and proactive and prosocial, and you can get through to that part of it, that resource as well, and find it within yourself.

[0:30:35] And then there are light shadows, and light shadows are like Enneagram styles

that you admire, that have capacities that you wish you had. The fact that you notice that in them indicates that somewhere those capacities are within you, however latent. So those can be brought out just like the high side of your Enneagram style, you can remind yourself or if you're working with other people, sort of evoke that. What's it like when you're at your best? What do you like the most about being a Four? What's the best thing about being a Nine? And what are you like when you're really functioning well? So those are resources that can be brought out and called in to the process and kind of apply to the goal. There's a high side to subtypes. There's a high side to each one of the subtypes and there's a high side to wings stress and so-called stress and security points, those kind of built-in connections. Also you have a connection to the Enneagram style of your parents. So all of those potentially represent a map of resources.

And then there are general resources like humor and adaptability, flexibility,

resilience, agility, ways in which you've coped using your mind, using your body and adapted to new circumstances. Those are, as well, somewhere within you. Sometimes it comes down to learning something new. You might have a client who is a Five who has no social skills. You can't really say, "Well, somewhere within you, you have social skills." That's not really true. But the Five is good at learning and so they could learn something new. They could take a class. They could learn about social skills. It's the same with other styles. There might be gaps in your education that you could fill in by simply learning. Another thing that's helpful there is role models as well. Somebody who embodies and enacts capacities and strengths and talents that you wish you had, kind of using them as a model and trying to imagine what it's like to be them and sort of step inside of them and step inside of the idea of them anyway, the fantasy of them, the perception of them, and try to feel what it's like to be them from the inside out. So that's evoking inner resources.

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Jessica: When you describe it, Tom, I know there are so many people that often feel like

they don't really have that many inner resources, but you've just described such a variety. It's almost like anybody can imagine now from their life, whatever their life has been, there are a lot of resources that they could utilize.

Tom: Well, a couple others are humor and courage. If you've ever had times when

you're able to laugh with yourself, not necessarily at yourself. And also times when you came to a choice point in your life, and you calculated the pros and cons of it, and in the end there was no complete certainty and you felt a little bit afraid and you did it anyway. That's courage. Courage is only courage when you know you're afraid, when you feel the fear and then do it anyway. But everybody has moments like that as well.

Jessica: So that takes us to step five. Tom: Which is using good methods. I kind of break this down into different, I don't

know, what different methods do. Some of these are already existing in the Enneagram world in different ways. This is a sort of a model of what psychotherapeutic methods and spiritual methods do in a bullet point sort of way. But one method would be standing back. This is what people do when they first learn about their Enneagram style, and they start to separate from their behavior and recognize they're caught in a pattern. And recognize that they are not their pattern perhaps or there's a way in which it's a template, it's a way in which they're reacting, a way in which they were overidentified with something. But they realize there's me and then there's my pattern, and that's when you start to catch yourself in the act, you start to witness the kind of peccadilloes of your Enneagram style rather than reacting out of them.

[0:35:50] Meditation is helpful for this, a kind of witness meditation where you're

watching your thoughts rather than identifying with them. Learning more about your Enneagram style, continuing to learn, continuing to catch yourself in the act, these things are all good. This is an important first step. If it's the only thing you do, if you only do witness meditation or you keep learning about your Enneagram style and keep catching yourself in the act you might find change really slow and really hard because it's usually not enough. It's usually a good approach to employ but not necessarily to only do that. And then there are other methods and other techniques that involve going against where you go against the proclivities of your Enneagram style, you go against the expression of the pattern. You interrupt the pattern is one possibility. There was a therapist that I knew who had a client who was probably a Four, and she got arrested for shoplifting. One of the conditions of her not going to jail was she had to go see this therapist, and the therapist was kind of blunt and direct and plain-speaking. He did an initial interview with her, and he asked her, "Okay, now tell me exactly

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what the pattern is when you go out in public and you shoplift." So she started to talk about her inner feeling and she said, "I have this large bag that I take, and then I do this and then I do that and I watch for people around the store" and so on and so on. The therapist at the end of this description he says, "Okay, now I've got something that I'm going to require you to do. Are you ready to do it? Do you agree? You know what the stakes are. You could go to jail." She says, "Yes, yes." The therapist says, "Leave the bag at home."

What he was saying was interrupt the pattern. Whatever it is that you're doing

that is a habitual sequence of responses or a habitual behavior, find ways to kind of do something different. So pattern interruption could involve and going against could involve applying your strengths to your weaknesses in some ways. The inner resources I was talking about, you're kind of bring those in and kind of surround the low side of your Enneagram pattern with all those capacities. If you're a Four and you're starting to lapse into a mood, you take a walk. If you're a Five, you learn social skills. If you're an Eight, you might learn anger management. You're sort of filling in the gaps of your education. An assignment for Twos or Nines, for example, might be go shopping for something you don't want like an automobile. It has to be a high-end item, a high-end appliance, something where there will be a salesperson who will come and try and sell you this product, and your job is to keep going around and pretending to be interested in buying the product and then saying no. The whole thing is an exercise in saying no. So that would be going against.

[0:39:40] And then going with would be kind of digging in to the pattern. We were talking

about it in the first element, defining the change where you get really kind of detailed and focused on what's it like when I'm having this reaction, what happens when I'm being a Seven, what happens when I'm being a Five, what happens when I'm being a Three. In doing that sometimes what you start to get in touch with is what the benefits are, what the secondary gains are, what the perceived advantages are. This is where you kind of defeat things like spiritual bypass also because you start to acknowledge that on this other level I have kind of good reasons for doing what I'm doing, even though they don't make sense now and they're not working very well in 2017, but they used to work. It's sort of like you identify with your Enneagram part. And you maybe are aware of what you resent about the difficulty it produces when you're having this sort of consistent reaction, but then you also start to pay attention to what you appreciate or discover what your appreciate.

In doing that then you could exaggerate or intensify a body feeling, for example.

If you're a Six you could schedule times to sit down and worry and have a little timer and write things down while you do it. There used to be a thing called the Sikh Center. I don't know if there still is. But when they were trying to help somebody quit smoking, they would lock him in a room and make him smoke a

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pack and a half of cigarettes before they could come out. And the idea was to produce a threshold experience and intensify the problem so much that they would then be over it. I don't know how well that worked with cigarettes but everything it can be quite helpful. If you're a One, you can get a big tablet and write down a huge list of shoulds, things like that. And then getting in touch with what you're trying to do when you scare yourself or delete yourself or reject yourself.

Jessica: Very cool. Tom, it's interesting as I was listening to you, I felt like the way that

you're working with people in this, and I know you also train coaches and therapists. But the way that you're working with this really brings in a three-centered approach because there's such clarity to these steps and there's a lot of differentiation in each of the steps and a lot of different pieces of information that are coming in that people could be using to help make contact with and identify the various things that they need to be able to become aware of. So there's that head center clarity. I've always felt about you and we've done sessions here on this summit in the past and I remember being very struck the first time you ever took us around the Enneagram with something that we were talking about. That you seem to me to have one of the most objective and, therefore, compassionate orientations. I remember going around and thinking wow, he hit every type without the slightest sense of judgment about that type. It was really very touching to me. So that's like a heart-centered quality of real, I think objectivity actually is extremely compassionate. And so I feel that in your work.

And then there's this embodied piece where you're really bringing in this NLP

stuff and the sensory aspect of these patterns. So I was just noting that as we were going through. It really came full front and center for me that maybe this is why you're getting such good results with people is you're really helping them have all three centers sort of transform as they are moving from their dark shadows to their light shadows of their type. I just want people to know that if they want to know any more about your work, they can go to website of www.thechangeworks.com. As we're coming to the last few minutes here, Tom, so obviously this work is amazing for people and coaches for sure and counselors and therapists would have tremendous insight learning this stuff to be able to work with other people. Can you say something more about how each one of us in our own individual work can use this to become our own, as you say, best coach, our own best counselor?

[0:45:00] Tom: Well, this would be a sort of template for that, a set of steps and a set of things

to consider. And in doing that, of course, the motivation is important. There are no real rules or laws about this. People will grow and change according to their need and what's going on in their life, what's up for them. Working with the Enneagram I like very much because at least when I first got involved with it, it

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seem to me like a sort of lifetime assignment. It was pretty gruesome and direct about my fallen state and then it kind of showed an arc, an arc of change and an arc of growth. It seemed to me the point was over time to go from the low side to high side, and that was my motivation. I was actually acutely suffering at the time so that made even more sense to me. But by and large, people can approach it as a sort of framework. I would say that I don't think it's very good to treat the Enneagram as an end in itself, but rather as a means to an end. A framework in which you can certainly better understand yourself and others and have compassion for others. And thank you for what you were saying. I would actually say that if I or another Enneagram teacher were treating certain styles unfairly and coming down on certain ones and maybe talking in a happy way about other styles, that would be a confession of character. That would be a statement of what dark shadows and light shadows were only integrated within me.

But in working with it, there is one more category to the kinds of methods that

are applied very often to the Enneagram, and it's what I call going beyond. It's where you really kind of muster and collect and gather and focus on and keep your attention on the high side of your style. There's a method in NLP called anchoring where you do a gesture or you do something that reminds you of that and you kind of add to the gesture. It's sort of straight behavior modification, but it keeps your eye on where you're going rather than where you've been. When people meditate they also open to what's beyond their personal self. Also there's modeling, modeling somebody whom you admire or modeling the high side of yourself, modeling the high side of your own style. You go to places within you that are latent or new. This also kind of bypasses spiritual bypass. And it seems to me like the going beyond part takes you to high side of your style and then beyond, and it's all good.

Jessica: It's all good. This is the first day of the summit, and this particular day is meant to

be an introduction to the foundations and key dynamics of working with the Enneagram. I just love that you are telling people and showing them in very concrete ways how the Enneagram is actually a way not of feeling your deficiencies but of feeling your possibilities. And how this movement, as you say, the arc, from the unhealthier part to the light shadows, to the evolved part is really doable, and you're giving us some real instructions. So that's been a real service, Tom, and I'm very happy to have had you on the summit.

Tom: Thanks for thinking of me. Jessica: Absolutely. And thank you for all the wonderful work that you do with people in

the world, helping their lives and helping them help other people with their lives. © 2017 The Shift Network. All rights reserved.