Download Episode Here – right click link and select “Save Link As…”
In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about the ways we over-identify with our personalities and strategies for the next phase of personal growth.
——————
In this podcast you’ll find:
- “Personality is who you are not” – Joel and Antonia unpack the meaning behind this statement, used by Dr. Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes in their Enneagram work.
-
How Joel and Antonia embodied this message during a recent enneagram retreat.
- Joel shares his experience with “personality is who you are not” through the lens of his Enneagram type (6).
- Antonia explains how this shows up differently for her as a type 3.
-
Antonia explains the importance and role of the “identity” phase as an entry point to type – and the trap of staying in this place for too long.
- How staying in “identity” affects our long term relationship with typology systems.
-
How Myers-Briggs® appears different from the Enneagram in relation to this topic.
- Viewing your Myers-Briggs® growth path through your cognitive functions as a way to avoid one-sidedness.
- Check out our article on The Car Model to understand your growth path through your type’s functions.
-
What’s the role of personality if it isn’t who we truly are? Joel shares his experience as a type 6 and how this has served him throughout life.
- Joel’s excitement at discovering his true essence as a type 6.
- Antonia talks about her inner work as a type 3 – and why the world in general rewards type 3s when they don’t do this work.
- What awaits you on the other side of overidentification and doing the work? Joel talks about how your motivations can change when you get to this place.
- Joel and Antonia share more thoughts and experiences on undertaking personal growth work.
-
Examining the layers of personal growth work through the HAT model.
- Check out this episode where we unpack the HAT model to learn more.
-
Viewing personal growth as a timeline – and why it doesn’t matter if you’re in the identity phase right now.
- A message for content creators on this topic.
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Subscribe with iTunes
Non-iTunes Link
Soundcloud
Stitcher
Google Play
Spotify
Radio Public
PlayerFM
Listen Notes
If you like the podcast and want to help us out in return, please leave an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking in iTunes immensely! We would be eternally grateful!
Want to learn more?
Discover Your Personal Genius
We want to hear from you. Leave your comments below…
Share:
Podcast - Episode 0405 - Personality Type And Our Persona Masks
Podcast - Episode 0407 - Dealing With Discouragement When Finding Your Best Fit Type
14 comments
I clicked because of the title, and it was exactly what I expected it to be and even better. I would love to hear a better suggestion by @Your#1Fan for the topic that would be clickbait without being so off that you attract the wrong audience, which will drop you the very second they find out.
Dear Antonia and Joel, I have just discovered this episode more than a year later and it resonate with me very much. You are formulating exactly the thoughts that I have also arrived at over time. I know my type for a very long time. In those days I did not have any access to the internet to exchange my thoughts on the subject nor were there any people in my country that could discuss type with me. So, my own type journey felt pretty lonely at the start as I could only read book content in English. I very much enjoyed the book by Lenore Thomson “Personality type – An Owner’s Manual”.
I very much enjoyed the book by Lenore Thomson “Personality type – An Owner’s Manual”. It is basically the book that I read repeatedly most often in my life and where I got most of my initial understanding from. You could call it my bible.
Because of my knowledge of type, it was easier for me to accept many of my idiosyncrasies and at the same time I had an easier time to communicate with the people around me. However, I also realized like 15 years into the journey that my understanding of type started to limit myself. It was very exciting to see all the new websites and channels on the internet, popping up. There was a lot of knowledge gained in that communal process. The sources on type that I began to follow on the internet matured in their understanding of their own type just like the general understanding of the typology itself, in the same way as I can see it happening with the two of you and myself included.
These days there is more content produced in Germany (due to the popularity of the 16 personalities) online, however it is of a very mixed quality to say the least and unfortunately the better quality does not really stick out. I hope it will at one time and I would love to guide this process. (And yes, if you are interested to publish your content in German, you can contact me at any time. I wrote with Jess about it.)
As you have mentioned, you really get to a point where your self-identification with your types starts to fade off and if you make type your business unfortunately you will lose some of your audience who is just at the identification stage in their life’s unless you continue catering to their needs even so you yourself have outgrown them.
By the way, I have found this to be a problem for me. There are more people interested in type in Germany these days, however most of them are just identifying with it and are not prepared to look at the bigger picture. I have recently set up a channel on YouTube to aid the spreading of better content in German language. I promise you I am not a big YouTuber, and it does not come naturally to me regarding my age. It is a daily struggle for me to determine, how I want to get my content across. How shall I deliver my knowledge so that my audience understands what I am talking about. I need to address the stuff that I have outgrown a long time earlier in my life even if it makes me feel inauthentic regarding my own understanding of the types. If I don’t adjust to my audience, my listeners will not understand me. So, I can see the struggle you are undergoing with your own podcast.
By the way I have found the ego development model by Susanne Cook-Greuter (and similar researchers in the field) very useful to explain the problem to myself. Like from this model you can see that most people are not really interested to reflect themselves so deeply. For most people, it is usually sufficient to know themselves enough to figure out their best place in the group they are in and then strive in that place.
The higher the perspective is you are able to take on life, the more of an audience you will naturally loose at least about the topics that are now more important to you personally in your journey of discovering yourself. Like at the higher stages people are able to disidentify with their ego and the more the advanced in their ego development a person is, the more they start to look at their ego as something separate of them. They basically look at their ego as an object and begin to transcend it this way, which tends to set them up for a spiritual journey. Unfortunately, the higher the perspective is you can take in the ego development process the lonelier you will feel if it comes to sharing your own understanding of the world initially. I am not sure if Ti-Fe-users are more likely to suffer from this problem then an Fi-User will.
However, you are able to see the perspective of everyone below your own level and this will make you an outstanding teacher as you really know where your pupils stand on their journey of life.
As a spiritual director, I am working with people in the transcendent phase of their exploration of their life journey. As Richard Rohr says, you don’t leave anything behind that was from a previous phase of development, but you learn to integrate it and learn from it. It’s all grist for the mill. In spiritual direction I use both MBTI and the Enneagram as tools to reveal personal truth — both persona and essence.
Thank you!
I’m so happy to hear the deeper conversations.
Heh! I’m just finishing the podcast and Antonia is asking for encouragement and that’s what I want to do.
I’m grateful for these delay conversations and that is because I started listening to the podcast a couple years ago and stopped because it seemed to be repeating the same things over and over again. At first that was great and exactly what I needed. Then I started desiring more meaty content, it wasn’t there.
Now coming back to this deeper stuff it’s exactly what I didn’t even know I was looking for.
I want to encourage you specifically in what you said about going deeper resulting in smaller audiences. While this is true that you’re immediate audience, those who listen to this podcast, is smaller, the indirect audience, those who are reached by the people who listen to the deep conversations is a multiplication of your regular audience.
You are reaching and impacting more people because you will be training and engaging those of us who want to reach others. I think that this is a key component in the intuitive revolution that you’ve begun.
You’re doing great work.
Keep going!
If I had to boil down the whole thing I said into one thing, I’d say that Thich Nhat Hanh is a great teacher for finding a sense of comfort and joy in the wake of letting go of achievement (or having never possessed it in the first place).
Another thought, and a question: I have the good fortune of being naturally good at meditation, so I think it’s easy for me to feel the value of non attachment experientially but I wonder how other ‘types’ might access the peace that meditation can bring without actually doing it. For example my mom is an ENTP, and I think she’d hate meditation.