Your enneagram journey starts here

Based on your responses to this test, your likely Enneagram type is...

Type

Four

As a Type Four, you have many tendencies that help you and others in life. Like all the other types, you also have specific blind spots and challenges. There are habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are actually self-limiting, but that represent valuable growth opportunities when you become more aware of them.

Here’s an overview of type Four

key aspects of your type Four style.

You tend to be more connected to and aware of your emotions than most people. Your capacity to experience a wide range of feelings is significantly above average and you usually seek ways that you can express your emotions in different ways.

You have a rich experience of your inner world. You tend to spend a lot of time focusing inward on your own feelings and thoughts. You also focus your attention on relationships with others and how connected or not you feel to specific individuals. You assess your connections from the inside—based on how you feel and perceive your authentic feelings and how you think others view you.

You maintain high standards of quality in what you do, usually because you have high ideals based on a vision of how you would like things to be. And because you compare what’s happening now to how you imagine things could ideally be, it may be hard for you to value the current state of things. For you, there may be a focus on how things can be—or how they were in the past – instead of valuing what is positive in the present.

You are creative – even if you think you are not. This is because you constantly try to be unique and do things differently than others. You can easily feel bored with routines and with more of the same. You have a desire to stand out as special and value authentic self-expression, so these traits can fuel a drive to communicate creatively.

You tend to be either nostalgic about the past, idealistic about the future, or both. This may be why it is harder for you to feel content with the present moment and what’s absent can catch your attention more easily than the here and now.

Type Four Key Motivation

Type Four Key Motivation: Type Fours are motivated to find meaning and purpose in life and express themselves in ways that create understanding and connection. This may lead you to:

  • Stay in touch with your emotions as a way of experiencing life– “I feel, therefore I am.”
  • Be “different” and intense, even if sometimes this leads you to feel unworthy or “less than” others
  • Keep searching for ultimate experiences that might fulfill your heart’s longing for authentic connection and understanding
  • Express your uniqueness (and avoid being “ordinary”) in a world that can otherwise feel dry, boring, and tedious
  • Stimulate intense emotional experiences that make you feel alive

Does this initial explanation of Type Four describe you? Or maybe who you have been in the past or for much of your life?

And There's More

Our test also captured your likely subtype. So, what is a subtype?

Each of the 9 Enneagram personality types comes in three versions – or “subtypes.” Your subtype tells you which of one of three central “instinctual drives” motivates you the most—either a survival instinct that focuses on “self-preservation,” your relationship to the “social” group (or tribe), or the expression of “sexual” energy and one-to-one bonding.
When you blend your “dominant instinctual drive” with your main type, you get your subtype – which gives you more precise information about your type that will help you confirm whether this is the right type – and help you understand your specific personality patterns and your particular path of self-development.

Based on your responses to this test, your likely Enneagram subtype is:

The Self-preservation Four

Hard-working humanitarians who want to prove what they can do.

As a Self-Preservation (SP) Four, you express Type Four patterns blended with a strong instinctual drive that focuses on Self-Preservation. You are different than the other two type Four subtypes by displaying these five unique tendencies:

1. Avoiding complaints. As a Self-Preservation Four, you complain less and express less suffering (outwardly and explicitly) than other Fours. Instead of being a person who needs to suffer, you are “long-suffering.” You are someone who has learned to tolerate pain and even endure too much suffering without wincing or complaining.

2. Comparison leads to self-challenge. All Fours compare themselves to others quite often. However, as a Self-Preservation Four, you might not be as aware of this tendency. When you admire someone, you may immediately take on the challenge of proving yourself just as competent or worthy –working hard to get something like what that other person has or does. This is why you tend to be very goal and action oriented. While the other two Type Four subtypes can be dramatic, as a Self-Preservation Four, you can be more stoic.

3. You don’t appear as sensitive or melancholic as some other Fours. You have probably learned to swallow a lot—to hold your feelings in and not share them as much with others. While you may feel a lot of emotion inside and may feel very sensitive yourself, you don’t talk about your emotions as much and you don’t share your pain as much with others. You play strong in the face of your pain, and you develop a high capacity to bear frustration. In fact, you may be more of a “sunny Four”—appearing happy on the outside, even when you feel sad on the inside.

4. Enduring. You test, challenge, and demand a lot of yourself. You also usually face tough situations. You may even take on the pain of others whom you view as less strong than you are. You likely have a high pain threshold, and you may not always register your painful feelings.

5. Unlike the other Fours, you have to push yourself to share your feelings. A good self-development challenge for you is to communicate your feelings to others more, as you tend to keep them to yourself, cry alone, or only share with one or two people who are especially close to you. It’s also good for you to learn to allow for more lightness and fun, live more from your fragility, and go easy on yourself.

Subtypes are important because they are more precise descriptions of your specific mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns, and they clarify what your core motivations and growth opportunities are in an even more nuanced way. Knowing your subtype gives you insight into your most automatic instinctual and emotional energies that constitute central parts of your personality related to survival in the world.

What Now?

The key next steps you can take to start putting the insights of this report into action are to start engaging in very intentional efforts at self-observation.
Your Enneagram type provides you with an excellent guide, or map, for self-observation, so you can start getting a much more conscious sense of what you actually do and why you do it.
The first and main thing you need to do now is to notice the operation of these patterns more often in your life. There are different levels and ways you can do this. You can develop a capacity to self-observe at the “now” moment.
Then you can use the information the Enneagram provides to deepen your self-reflection about how and why these patterns have operated in the past. How might you understand them to gain more insight into yourself? Why do you do the things you do?And how can you begin to envision your growth path to break out of the unconscious patterns and be liberated to reach your full potential?
It’s very important that you try not to judge yourself as you begin to observe yourself. Your personality patterns developed as a way of protecting yourself from early on in life, so have compassion for yourself as you learn more about who you are. To deploy the Enneagram to grow, it’s just a matter of seeing your type’s patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving with a more conscious awareness, and then learning to relax these habitual tendencies in the present moment.
The more you can understand your personality type’s tendencies, the more you can make conscious choices about whether you want to act from old habits or go beyond who you’ve been to be all of who you can be!

Not sure this is your type?

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