Weightless
Spending 5 nights with 30 strangers from 11 countries.
For 5 days this week, I logged on to Zoom each night from 11 PM to 6 AM for a series of live webinars that are part of the Enneagram professional certification programme I’m pursuing.
I initially had this grand plan to acclimatise to Pacific Time, which is where the instructors are based. I told myself I would start a day early, going to bed in the afternoon, waking up at 10 PM, and establishing that as the 'start' of my day. My body clock would then adjust accordingly—or so I assumed.
Unsurprisingly, I wasn't sleepy at all when that first afternoon came around. I ended up squeezing in a nap from around 7 to 10 PM, and then suffered through day 1 of the course before crawling into bed at 6 AM. After waking up a few hours later, I groggily muddled through the day, and found myself crashing in the early afternoon.
I realised very quickly that I thought all this out quite poorly. By day 2, I was floating outside of my body, experiencing a strangely comforting weightlessness.
As I've written about before, I am typically hopeless at listening to what my body needs. But this time, I figured I would just go with the flow. I would sleep when I needed to, work where I could, and prioritise being fully present for those 7 hours each day.
I ended up getting a nice routine going: from days 3-5, I slept from 6 AM-12 PM, took a nap in the late afternoon, went for a run at 9 PM, then logged into Zoom at 11 PM.
Before I knew it, I was transitioning back into GMT +8, which also explains why this week's newsletter is in point form—I am still very sleepy and it was much easier to write this way.
So some quick thoughts from 5 days of learning to work with the Enneagram:
Spending this much time with 30 people from 11 countries reminded me that we are all more alike than we realise. I think that we are the most human when we are telling our stories, and it is such a surreal experience listening to people who look nothing like you describing experiences that make you feel like surely they must have lived a version of your existence. When I was younger, this would have made me feel less special. These days, it gives me hope that I might yet live a decent life.
Many of us find ourselves attracted to personality typing systems because it is a way to know who we are. But this shouldn't become a quest to justify oneself—the goal is not to say, "This is who I am, therefore I am like this." Instead, the goal is to use these systems first as a way to see the box that we're in, then as a map to find the way out. It's about bringing awareness to all our automatic/mechanical reactions, and seeking to identifying less with them in order to live more freely.
Through this, we can begin to see how our personalities developed to help us stay safe from experiences that confused us, left us feeling helpless, or that deprived us of love and connection. It's almost as though we are all walking around in adult body mecha suits that serve as armour to defend against never having to ever feel these things again; our weapons are the things we avoid, the habits we lean on, or the false selves that we temporarily inhabit to get our needs met.
We are also different in ways that never cease to surprise me. Take the example of people who exhibit perfectionist tendencies. While all of them might look like a perfectionist, Person A may actually be striving to do things perfectly, while Person B wants to be perfect, and Person C wants to look perfect to others, and Person D fears that doing anything less than perfectly will make them feel incompetent. Actions that look indistinguishable from the outside can be motivated by entirely different things.
Which made me realise that while it is fun and intellectually invigorating to understand human nature through so many new dimensions, this has also been about cultivating compassion and appreciation for the human experience. My new mantra when it comes to people who annoy me is, "I don't like what this person is doing, but they probably have a really good reason for it. I wonder how they were hurt when they were growing up."
For me this is powerful because I am also learning that we don't see people as they are. We see them as we are. We are always telling stories about what is going on with others or why something happened because we believe, perhaps unconsciously, that these stories are preferable to reality. In this sense, the 9 types of the Enneagram really describe the 9 universal ways in which we have all learnt to stay safe in the world.
I used to think that growth, accomplishment, and meaning could be found in seeing what others had, and then doing what I had to do to gain those same things. But the more I do this work, the more I realise that it's about coming back to yourself. I find myself asking questions like, "Who was I before I was afraid? Who was I when I never used to second guess anything I wanted to do?"
If you are interested in learning more about your Enneagram type, there are free tests you can take, but I highly recommend this paid one from the academy I'm studying with. I think it's more accurate, and it also comes with a report that describes possible growth paths.
Drop me an email if you're keen to give this a shot, and I will send you a code for 20% off. (This is not a sales pitch btw! I have genuinely found this extremely useful)
Some other things
A few of my friends are doing very cool things, so I wanted to just give them a quick shout out here.
A workshop on 'Navigating Your 30s', run by Nat and Chris at Our Curiosity Collective. I attended and really enjoyed their previous one, which focused on identifying your personal values. Sign up here.
A community for LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs called Huddle, started recently by my friend Glenn. While it's intended to help people network with one another, he's also focusing on delivering very actionable takeaways that will help participants to build more successful businesses. It's free to attend, and you can register here; you can also join their Telegram group, and feel free to share this with anyone you know who might be interested!
"Finding your own unconditioned path and figuring out what matters to you"—if these are words that resonate with you, Lin is putting together a self-paced workshop and a 9-week coaching programme specifically dedicated to this. Just drop her an email if you want to find out more and/or get early access.
As always, I’m continuing to share interesting things that I’m reading in the subscriber chat, so do check that out.
Otherwise, I’ll see you at the next one 👋🏻