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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
It's not just what you say, but how you say it. Good communicators know this, but it's often easier said than done. Teachers, leaders, and speakers are often left bewildered, wondering why the content that was so carefully planned and delivered seems to fall flat with the audience. The art of communication requires more than the transfer of information; it both connects with and engages the hearer. To communicate well, speakers must understand both their audience and themselves.Speaking by the Numbers offers a strategy that combines communication principles with Enneagram wisdom to help leaders, pastors, and teachers understand how to convey content in ways that both inspire and connect with their audiences. Using the Enneagram wisdom of triads and stances, communicators can learn insight into the ways that various Enneagram numbers receive and process information. Sean Palmer draws from his extensive experience as a public speaker to develop communication strategies that lead to connection, transformation, and mobilization of audiences. Providing real examples of speeches and messages he has given, Palmer shows how he uses the Enneagram to craft a message that connects with his audience. A healthy marriage of Enneagram wisdom and communication skill can help us speak with clarity into the heart of where people live, love, and experience life.
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Foreword by SUZANNE STABILE
SPEAKINGBY THENUMBERS
Enneagram Wisdom for Teachers,Pastors, and Communicators
To Vann Conwell
for being the first to ask me to speak
To Dr. Jack Reese
for teaching me to speak
To Suzanne Stabile
for teaching me the Enneagram
To Dr. Richard Palmer Sr.
for filling my childhood with stories
To Rochelle Palmer
for simply being my everything
Contents
Foreword
Suzanne Stabile
I FIRST MET SEAN IN 2015, in the back of a party bus in New York City. My husband, Joe, and I were speaking at a conference in Greenwich, Connecticut. Sean was one of about thirty pastors who made the pilgrimage to join others from around the country for the purpose of exploring the topic of sacramental imagination. Our last day together included a field trip to the city where we had the opportunity to explore the architecture of several churches, and the added gift of closing with vespers in the nave of St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. After several full days of teaching and learning, we all welcomed the freedom to explore the city and enjoy dinner on our own before returning to Greenwich.
I’m a little bit feisty by nature so it suits me to balance a few days of teaching, and a full day of being quiet and prayerful while touring churches, with some storytelling in the back of a party bus. It’s the perfect environment for me, as an Enneagram Two, to set the table for acquaintances to become friends, and Sean and I have been committed to our growing friendship since. He has been studying the Enneagram under my tutelage, and that of others, over these years, and he is now sharing some of his acquired wisdom with the rest of us in the writing of Speaking by the Numbers.
I have been waiting for someone to write this book about the art of communication and the ways the Enneagram might be helpful. I’ve taught the Enneagram to literally thousands of people. And some of my students have become teachers themselves. They have chosen from many possibilities. One might choose The Enneagram and Education, another The Enneagram in Corporate America, or The Enneagram for Spiritual Directors, or The Enneagram and Parenting. The list is seemingly endless. Sean Palmer, knowing he was called to be a professional communicator, is well equipped with extensive experience as an author, teacher, preacher, public speaker, and professional coach. So, when he began to see all that the Enneagram had to offer to those of us who communicate for a living, he began the work that culminated in the writing of this book.
The trendy and oversimplified Enneagram that is presented on many social media platforms is hardly recognizable to those who have studied and explored the depth of Enneagram wisdom. As Sean explains in detail, there is a lot to the Enneagram. For example, in the mid-twentieth century, a scholar named Maurice Nicoll professed that there are three Centers of Intelligence: thinking, feeling, and doing. When Nicoll’s work is studied through the lens of the Enneagram, we learn that for each of the nine personality types one of these centers is dominant, one supports the dominant, and one is repressed. It is from that wisdom that Sean explores the three Enneagram stances and the value they offer to those of us who long to communicate successfully.
It is my belief that good communication includes at least these three elements: a relatable story, vulnerability, and hope. I’ve known since our meeting on the party bus that Sean is a good storyteller, and he used that gift in the writing of this book as a way of letting you know that he sees you. He knows how you engage with the world. And he offers a more complete way forward, should you choose to receive it. He is vulnerable as he shares both the struggles and the successes that are the story of his journey—a commendable choice for an Enneagram Three. And he offers hope by including a chapter that models speaking to all of the nine numbers in each of the three stances.
It has been twenty-five years since I first learned that, along with Enneagram Ones and Sixes, I am in the Dependent Stance and therefore, thinking repressed. I must admit I was shocked by that news, but I have adjusted to its accuracy over the years. When I read Sean’s story about his first year of preaching, I found comfort in discovering that he truly does understand my way of seeing the world.
He writes,
I failed to realize I was layering on too much information, either by the words I used or the actions I championed for them to accomplish. I was making a twofold mistake. First, they couldn’t do what they didn’t understand, and second, I made them feel stupid.
What they needed to hear was how much they mattered. They needed me to appreciate the work they were already doing—some were doing so much there wasn’t much else they could possibly add. The church needed me to help them think strategically, not merely high-mindedly. I could help their thinking by only communicating the most crucial information and not every bit of information I had.
Sean continued by adding, “Many of us will need to embrace the fact that our job is not to look and sound smart, but to help our hearers think well.”
He does a really good job of offering the same teaching pattern throughout the book. He shares a story for each personality type and then teaches a model for how to speak to each number in the way they can both hear and receive the message. We are bombarded every day with talkers and teachers, sound bites and advertisements competing for our attention, leaving us little room for receiving and processing all the noise. But when someone speaks to us in ways that are respectful of our struggle to somehow learn to balance the three Centers of Intelligence, while using each for its intended purpose, everything changes.
Speaking by the Numbers is the book you need to learn to make the most of any opportunity you are given to share your thoughts, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, desires, hopes, and dreams. I hope you will read it from cover to cover, and then return to it time and again, knowing that you will learn something new every time. Because the truth is, it doesn’t really matter what any of us have to say if other people can’t hear us and then apply it to their own lives in some meaningful way.
Introduction
Raise your words, not your voice.
It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
RUMI
“YOU OUGHT TO BE A SPEAKER.” These words from a youth leader changed the shape of my world.
When was your life changed by something someone said to you?
Spoken words are music, and I love all of it: speeches, poems, monologues, standup comedy. Give me a wordsmith at their best and I’ll buy a ticket. Long before TED Talks took off, I was in love with speaking. At its best, public speaking is a lure, an enticement; it gives voice to our hopes and dreams. I fell in love with speaking, as many people have throughout history, in my childhood church. And once it got its hooks in me, speaking and preaching never let go. Maybe that’s why I became a public speaker and preacher.
I’m a preacher; more than that, I’m a homiletician, which is the fancy word for someone who studies preaching and public speaking. I also coach preachers and public speakers. A “speaking nerd” is what my friends call me.
While I love public speaking, most people do not. Listen to the way we talk about public speaking: when someone goes on a long rant about a topic, we say, “She got on her soapbox”; when someone insists on a moral imperative, they are “preaching at us”; a friend of mine was shouted at during a television interview that “we don’t need a history lesson.” Even in churches, where the faithful have long trusted that “faith comes by hearing,” we are seeing an increased resistance to the spoken word.
I refuse to believe, though, that the medium is the problem. There are countless spoken-word videos on YouTube. People still spend hours seeking out TED Talks, and Dave Chappelle and other comedians earn millions for one-hour specials of them talking. Poets like Amanda Gorman have reminded us how powerful and beautiful words are when they are well-crafted and invite hearers to be their whole and best selves.
However, I fear many speakers don’t realize that most people would sooner do anything else than listen to us talk. The same is true for most teachers, professors, lecturers, and communicators. Anything is better than listening to bad speakers when you could be doing something else. We forget that public proclamation is a relational act designed to call us into relationship and wholeness. That means speaking is about the hearer, not the speaker. I like to use the term hearer rather than audience. I believe it closes the distance between what has traditionally been called the “audience” and the speaker. Audiences witness performances; hearing is a mechanism engaged to help people enlist in a project or goal.
We forget that public proclamation is a relational act designed to call us into relationship and wholeness. That means speaking is about the hearer, not the speaker.
The greatest speeches in history focus on relational connection and wholeness. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.” “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” “The only thing we have to fear is . . . fear itself.” “There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.” Relationship and community are at the heart of these familiar words, and our deep desire to live in community moves us into our deeper, better selves.
SPEAKING AND THE WISDOM OF THE ENNEAGRAM
If speaking is more than the right words or simply the transfer of information, then it makes sense to not only equip ourselves with tools to improve our rhetoric, but also with tools that help us better relationally connect. One of the best tools I’ve found for this is the Enneagram. My public speaking began as preaching, but it has now taken me to the world outside the church. In spaces where it would be inappropriate to use the Christian Bible as a tool of organizational knowledge and transformation, the Enneagram has been useful as a framework to teach, as well as to understand. The Enneagram as a tool for speaking, teaching, and leading is without borders. What I initially used as a wisdom tool for my work with churches turned out to be useful for people who might never darken her doors.
I’ve used the wisdom of the Enneagram in trainings with schools, organizations in the public and private sectors, and boards of directors and nonprofit executives. The more I deepened my knowledge of the Enneagram and used its wisdom to help other agencies and businesses, those businesses experienced a new, fresh perspective on their employees and end users, which aided them in seeing and appreciating one another’s humanity.
If you’re looking for a deep dive into the Enneagram, there are plenty of teachers and authors offering far more than I ever could. I would suggest The Road Back to You, by Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile; The Sacred Enneagram, by Christopher L. Heuertz; Ennea-Type Structures, by Claudio Naranjo; and a deeper dive, The Complete Enneagram, by Beatrice Chestnut as helpful guides on the journey. These were my first teachers. I encourage you to do more than dip your toe in the water because the Enneagram can become something like a party game—many people are satisfied with repeating superficial and shallow notions about the Enneagram. However, the goal of it is to create self-awareness and then allow that awareness to move us into growth, relational connection, and wellness for individuals, organizations, and businesses.
A WAY OF SEEING
The first advice many teachers and students of the Enneagram offer is that the Enneagram teaches us how we see the world, but more than that, it reveals that there are at least nine ways of seeing the world—your way of seeing is just one way of seeing. Knowing this offers us an opportunity to create space for others. The Enneagram reveals to us the faulty ways we’ve sought to protect ourselves and the flawed ways we’ve attempted to be loved. Knowing this should create humility—learning that everyone has tried to cover themselves and find love in their own deficient ways should generate compassion. This is how the Enneagram cultivates relational connection. It has changed the way my friends, family, and hearers face one another and connect. In knowing ourselves, we discover the depths of other people by coming to appreciate the differences between people, differences that are crucial for a communicator to explore and know.
A communicator best serves hearers by knowing the nine compulsive personality patterns that hearers adopt in order to feel seen, known, and loved. The Enneagram is often reduced to only a personality mapping system, but it is much more than that. In the most basic sense, the Enneagram describes how hearers reach out to the world, in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Knowing one’s motivations, fears, compulsive responses, and paths toward growth are crucial for any individual that wants to be whole. It is also critical for any organization or speaker that wants to aid wholeness and fulfill a mission.
No single way of understanding and seeing the world is preferred, right, or paramount to the others. We are multitudes within ourselves, and we live among multitudes who are also complex, which means we must be more intentional about how we communicate, knowing that our way is not the only way even as we hold the microphone. Sometimes our hearers don’t connect with what we’re saying because it is based on how we see the world rather than how they see the world. And we mistakenly think we see the world as it is. As has been quoted by many, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” For years, I’ve signaled to thousands of people—in churches, at conferences, conventions, retreats, and other gatherings—that my reflexive and compulsive ways of seeing and being in the world are the ways to see and be in the world. I did not know I had a myopic perspective—and most other speakers don’t realize it either—yet we do.
This raises a question. What about people who don’t interpret the world the way I do, who don’t hear what I hear, who don’t see with my lens? Or yours? I’m not merely talking about differing worldviews or competing philosophies; all of which are choppy enough seas to navigate. But what should we do when what foundationally motivates us and the way we process reality are genuinely good yet wildly dissimilar.
It’s entirely possible that communicators inadvertently disengage a good portion of their hearers by overlooking the reality that their thought patterns and words are rooted in a particular way of seeing and being in the world. Preparing public proclamations under the assumption that people hear, interpret, and understand the same way we as speakers do, might be the reason some folks drift into sleepiness during our talks and presentations.
What if the reason that you didn’t close that last deal, convince that executive board, or get a yes to your invitation was an understandable naiveté about the difference between the way you see the world and the way your hearer sees the world? What if you were talking only to yourself?
What if the reason that you didn’t close that last deal, convince that executive board, or get a yes to your invitation was an understandable naiveté about the difference between the way you see the world and the way your hearer sees the world? What if you were talking only to yourself?
A greater understanding of the gifts of the Enneagram will help you shift boring discourses into life-giving messages that hearers can receive with eagerness, gratitude, and greater self-understanding, which becomes a glide path for transformation.
THE DUTY, THE DANGER
The Enneagram, however, can be dangerous.
At first blush the typology seems simple. An introductory knowledge of the Enneagram teaches us that there are nine basic personality types. Experts Riso and Hudson describe the framework as “nine personality types result[ing] from three personality types in each of three groups, or Triads.” Those nine personality types are designated by numbers One through Nine.
Deploying the language of Helen Palmer, Ones are named The Perfectionist, Twos The Giver, Threes The Performer, Fours The Tragic Romantic, Fives The Observer, Sixes The Devil’s Advocate, Sevens The Epicure, Eights The Boss, and Nines The Mediator. Different teachers use diverse language to describe the nine personalities, but each of these basic personality types experiences differences in motivations and passions, which are used to navigate the world.
While each of us has a distinct personality, there are some broad ways of seeing the world that are endemic to each Enneagram number. As presenters, Enneagram Ones will tend to wrap their teaching around what’s wrong with the world; Twos around how to be helpful; Threes around goals and accomplishments; Fours around deeper and darker emotive expressions; Fives around data; Sixes around myriad paths to security; Sevens around optimism; Eights around action; and Nines around peacemaking and peacekeeping. Each of these instances are good and necessary in their own time. But a steady diet or an over-emphasis placed on how the speaker sees the world is limited and disenfranchises a great deal of our hearers.
Since people aren’t robots, the more we know about how we individually function opens up the possibility that that knowledge can be used to both bless and curse. No one has the ability to honor you like those who know you best, yet the same is true of shame and reproach—no one can hurt you like those who know you best. Knowledge of one another is a power that should only be wielded with grace.
The first, and perhaps most critical, danger in using the Enneagram is that it appears to codify or reduce people. Perhaps you can’t possibly accept that there are “only” nine types of people in the world. I’m with you. I’ve been alive and in pastoral ministry too long to fall for that kind of reductionism. Yet each type bursts into color like a kaleidoscope when we look closer. As we examine the types, we notice not simply nine types but at least ten, given that there are two types of Enneagram Six—phobic and counterphobic. And still, there are miles left to travel. Each type then disperses into three potential subtypes (using the language of Beatrice Chestnut). Those subtypes are Self-Preservation, Social, and Sexual (sometimes called One-to-One). These subtypes might be best understood as layers or components.
Discussing subtypes, I’m reminded of a house my family lived in near downtown Houston. It was three stories high. The entire house was ours, but at different times or seasons we spent more or less time on some floors. On the bottom floor was a garage and a guest bedroom with an attached bathroom that doubled as my home office. The second floor contained our living room, dining room, kitchen, and half bath, and two large bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. The laundry was on the third floor. When I was working on writing projects, I spent a great deal of time on the bottom floor, but no time there when my wife’s second cousin moved in with us and we gave her that room. One summer when I could hardly sleep, I spent long hours in the living room on the couch. And when my wife or daughters had friends visit, I hid out in my bedroom. As an example, an Enneagram Three at the height of her earning power providing for her family might be Self-Preserving, while a stay-at-home father or mother with young children might be Social, only to have those subtypes change as life changes. Subtypes are not locked. Humans shift floors depending on what they need to do to survive.
Not only do subtypes play an integral role in self-awareness, but each Enneagram type has another type to its left and right referred to as “wings.” Wings, too, shape our motivations and resulting behaviors. For instance, I identify as a Self-Preservation Three with a very strong Four wing—or, as I tell my wife, “I’m moody.” All this means that I draw from the gifts and passions of Fours as my natural and compulsive way of being in the world. Many of my friends are expressions of different subtypes and wings. Our motivations and behaviors can often be identical and just as often present themselves very differently.
Another variation within the Enneagram is our behavior in times of stress and security or what other Enneagram teachers might call “disintegration and integration” or “stretch point and release point.” As a Three on the Enneagram, in times of stress I will take on the behaviors, but not the motivations, of a Nine. In times of release, my behavior looks more like a healthy Six.
The Enneagram is ever expansive. The typology is multilayered, as we have seen with types, wings, and subtypes, and all this is without glancing at the dynamics of race, introversion and extroversion, nationality, birth order, or the various ways we are shaped by our family of origin. What the Enneagram does better than any system I have encountered is name the various ways we have endeavored to be loved and how that task has shaped how we see the world. The Enneagram doesn’t so much tell us who we are as it reveals to us strategies we’ve used. So to review, we must resist the danger of using the Enneagram to codify or reduce people.
The second great danger of Enneagram wisdom is weaponization. Once we have accepted that people are diverse, we can be tempted to use the wisdom of the Enneagram against others. When I know someone is motivated by a desire to be needed or to perfect a broken system, it becomes easy—dare I say, lazy—to leverage that against them in order to get them to do what I want. As I mentioned, I’m a Self-Preservation Three on the Enneagram. An unscrupulous manager could make unreasonable job demands, and I would go along with them—even work that I might be philosophically against—if they promised me enough attention, praise, or money. I’m not proud of that fact, but it’s true. We need to be cautious. It is tempting to use Enneagram wisdom and self-knowledge as an instrument of reduction or manipulation.
The third great misuse of the Enneagram for speakers—as well as all Enneagram amateurs—is “typing.” Typing is deciding that a person identifies on the Enneagram in a particular way or that in a group of people the majority inhabit a certain Enneagram number. It is like believing all medical salespeople, because they are driven and well-dressed, are Threes, or thinking all poets must identify as Fours. This is surely one of the ways we dismiss one another and diminish the values of coming to know people as humans while robbing them of their own journey of self-discovery. Unlike many developmental tools, the Enneagram doesn’t so much describe what we do, but reveal why we do what we do. That is why typing others is so costly. Few of us can ever truly know why we do much of anything, even then only through a glass dimly. Attempting to type another person nearly always fails.
When my wife first told me she identified as a One on the Enneagram, I did not believe her. I wish I could say we were newlyweds, and it was the kind of mistake a rookie husband would make. We weren’t newlyweds—we were seventeen years in at the time. I was so dense that it still took me a couple of years to come around to her perspective on herself. Our house wasn’t dirty and never has been, but it was far from the crystalline perfection often associated with Enneagram Ones. What convinced me was not her need for perfection, but her rigorous righteousness and rigid commitment to reforming injustices, key characteristics that had always been a part of her personality. What would happen if I’d spent the balance of our marriage disbelieving who she claimed to be because I “typed” her? What might happen if I were to do the same with my children? My friends? My church? Conjecture about the passions and motivations of an audience is also a surefire path to misunderstanding. Any communicator who types a person or their hearers risks spending their time behind the microphone identifying problems and offering solutions that few care about. Riskier still might be revealing to your hearer that you don’t truly care about knowing them.
The fourth and perhaps most insidious of the pitfalls associated with the Enneagram is simple prejudice. For years I traveled the country speaking about racial justice and reconciliation. As part of that work, I routinely introduced hearers to Project Implicit at Harvard University. I encouraged my listeners to go online and take Project Implicit’s Skin-Tone Implicit Bias Test.
