Can the Enneagram Be Used to Build Better Relationships at Work? - Jesse Eubanks

The Enneagram, a personality typing system, has exploded in popularity in recent years. Guest Jesse Eubanks shares about his experience using the Enneagram to build healthier relationships with God, himself, and others. Jesse is a certified Enneagram coach and host of The EnneaCast, a podcast exploring personality and relationships through the lens of the Enneagram. Jesse is also the founder and executive director of Love Thy Neighborhood, a nonprofit mobilizing people to follow Jesus and serve the poor in modern culture. Relevant named him one of the top 50 Christian artists and activists who are making an impact on culture in the United States.

Scripture Reference

John 8:32

Additional Resources

• How We Relate by Jesse Eubanks
• Relate Better
• The EnneaCast podcast

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Transcript

Leah Archibald: Making It Work is brought to you by The Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary and the Theology of Work Project.

Mark Roberts: Welcome to Making it Work.

LA: Through conversation, scripture and stories, we invite God into work’s biggest challenges... so that you can live out your purpose in the workplace.

MR: I’m Mark Roberts.

LA: And I’m Leah Archibald. And this is Making It Work.

The Enneagram, a personality typing system, has exploded in popularity in recent years. For followers of Jesus, the Enneagram can be a useful tool on the road to healthier relationships with God, yourself and others. Our guest today, Jesse Eubanks, is a certified Enneagram coach and host of The EnneaCast, a podcast exploring personality and relationships through the lens of the Enneagram. Jessie is also the founder and executive director of Love Thy Neighborhood, a non-profit mobilizing people to serve the poor in modern culture. Relevant named him one of the top 50 Christian artists and activists who are making an impact on culture in the United States. Jesse Eubanks, welcome to the Making It Work podcast.

Jesse Eubanks: I'm so glad to be here, thank you so much for having me, Mark and Leah.

MR: You are welcome.

LA: I'm excited, I'm excited for this conversation 'cause I have some questions about my own Enneagram type. Or maybe I just wanna be typed a little bit more accurately to help me in my work. [laughter] Let's go from the beginning. So for Christians, you might have questions about the Enneagram. Where did it come from? Can you say a little bit about its origins and how is it used by Christians today?

JE: Yeah, the origins are a funny story because if you go and pick up a lot of Enneagram books, you'll probably see the same, a version of the same story over and over again, and the truth is that almost all those stories are actually wrong. And so there's actually a whole lot of false history out there regarding the origins of the Enneagram. A lot of people will tell stories about that it's this ancient thing that existed from millennia ago and that it was rediscovered sometime in the 20th century. But that's all made up. None of that's true.

And so it is a system of personality, in other words, it's a system, it's a theory of personality that looks for patterns in the ways that people perceive, process and present. That we as people have certain aspects of our personality that we are prone to really wanna go after certain things and we ignore other things, and that it's some of these desires, they drive us so deeply as people, that we literally forge our personality around the pursuit of those desires.

It was... The Enneagram was really created by three guys throughout the 20th century, that's a longer story than we probably have time for, but none of these guys would have been Orthodox Christians on any level. That the majority of these guys would have come out of a sort of a new age sort of mystical worldview, but they were pulling a lot of ideas and concepts from ancient Christianity, so seven deadly sins, intelligent design, this notion that we need to live as virtuous people to overcome some of these things.

So they're pulling all these ideas and essentially yeah, Christians got their hands on it in the late '70s, and over the last 40 years, Christians have taken the best parts of this theory that are gonna be helpful to us as people, and we've jettisoned all the stuff that we do not believe and don't agree with us Christians, so that all that stuff goes out. And yeah, so it's a theory of personality about how each of us literally moves, sees and operates in this world.

MR: So just to be clear, Indiana Jones didn't find this thing? Oh I'm so bummed. [chuckle]

JE: I know. I know, I know, I know. There's...

LA: There's a tablet somewhere. [chuckle]

JE: Yeah. I know.

MR: Actually Jesse, when I read in your book how you dealt with this, I actually felt... I felt like, "Okay, here's somebody who's not... " Well, I don't wanna be unfair to others, but I just felt like, "Here's a guy who really is just gonna say what it is." And I really appreciate the way you framed it up for us and also in your book. So it's still... There are many tools created in the last century, they're great tools, they don't have to necessarily be centuries or millennia old to have value, so. Anyway, thank you.

JE: Yeah, and what I say is this is a tool that those of us that the way that we approach life is that we believe all truth is God's truth. And those of us that are Christians that believe that our God is a redemptive God, that He can take things even from very broken origins and redeem them, these are the kind of folks like they're gonna look at the Enneagram and they can go, "Hey, this is interesting, this is cool."

If you're wired in such a way that you tend to be more of a separatist where you're like, "I'm not into anything that's not 100% Christian in origin, I'm not gonna engage it," you know, the Enneagram may not be your jam. But for the rest of us that believe that God's truth is inescapable and it can be found in the most unusual places, yeah, I think that the Enneagram has a lot to offer us.

LA: Now, I wanna hear more Jesse, about your personal discovery of the Enneagram. When did this become... Because you have a podcast about it, you have a book about it. Obviously, you've been very impacted yourself by the Enneagram. How did you find it and how did it change your own understanding of yourself and your work?

JE: Yeah, so around a decade ago, I was on staff with a homeless non-profit in our city and we would spend all of our days taking care of folks that were coming in off the streets, people living really, really hard lives. And we would, every day we're telling these folks about the love of Jesus and, "Hey, come be a part of God's family," and we're also, we're meeting a lot of their physical needs as well. But we're preaching this message, this gospel message of, "Come be a part of God's family," when behind the scenes our staff, we actually had no idea how to be a family to each other, we were really dysfunctional in our dynamics. We undermined each other, we fought a lot, we bickered a lot. And so some guys were brought in to help us try to navigate some of that stuff and they brought this bizarre sounding thing called the Enneagram.

But man, when I began to read through information about, especially about my top two types, it really hit. And it really... I went home, I remember going home and going, "I just had the most unsettling experience. It was like somebody was crawling around in my psyche." And it gave me language to be able to talk about things I didn't know how to talk about.

Not long after that, my wife and I went through a really difficult season in our marriage and the Enneagram resurfaced again and it really rapidly gave us an understanding of why we were hitting some of these very significant roadblocks with each other. That we just fundamentally, we were driven by different things, and yeah, we do not perceive the world in the same way.

LA: Can you give us a little taste about what you learned in that first session about your own self and how it impacted your work?

JE: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I remember that I had a co-worker, he was really... He'd be very affirming when I was talking to him, but I could never get him to go confront somebody else on the team. And I had another co-worker that was always very concerned about the protocol and the rules of things. And then there was like.. There was me, where I tended to be very like, how can we be at efficient in how we get this done, but also I wanna make sure that it's sort of fresh and it's original, it's kind of creative.

And all of that ended up making sense in the end because my one co-worker turned out to be a Type 9, so very affirming, but struggle with conflict. My other co-worker turned out to be a Type 6, who are very concerned with what's the protocol for a place. And then I turned out to be a four with a very high three wing, which is, we love original creative, authentic work, but also I wanna get stuff done. And so you bring those personalities together and there was conflict when we couldn't understand my way is one way of doing things, but there are other options out there as well. And gave me a lot more empathy as well for the worlds that these guys came from and why they approach life the way that they did.

LA: I had a similar experience in my work when I first found the Enneagram. We were doing... I actually had a friend tell me about this and she goes, "It's gonna change your life, and you're gonna," maybe she oversold it, "but you're gonna understand why you don't get along with these people that you work with." [chuckle] And what I did through... I didn't have even have to do a test. I just read a book on it. And I said... I'll rephrase it. I was like, I didn't even need to do read a test, I just read your book. And this is what I found out about myself, so I'm a Type 7. I never wanna not be having fun. I always... I'll do a lot of work, but it's gotta be fun, and if things aren't fun, I get really, really irritated.

And I have a co-worker who, like you said, similar to someone who you're working with, always wants to make sure everything follows the rules. Always wants to make sure everything is done correctly. So he sends me a message, "Can you check up on this expense that came to your credit card? It's $3.45. I think the company is over-charging you." And I'm like, "This is not worth my time or money, and it's so not fun that I am so irritated. Why are you ruining my life?"

Now, he really valued having that be correct, and I thought he was trying to stick it to me for some reason, he didn't trust me, we just have very different values. And once I saw that, oh, that's actually how we're made up, that's ingrained in us, it gave me a whole different amount of space to be able to deal with that situation.

JE: Yes. Absolutely, yeah. Because one of the things that we... We just finished up a series on the EnneaCast about desire and about how each of the nine types have a different core desire. So if the core desire of the seven is to be happy, and let's say... And I don't know your co-worker's type, but let's just say that if they are a six. Well, their core desire is to be secure. Those are not exactly the same desire. And whatever our chief desire is, we say that the other eight desires either tend to serve it or are slain by it.

So we either say, "Listen, you're gonna get in line and you're... I'm the lead dog in the pack and you're gonna follow me or you're out of here." And whatever our core desire is that drives us, if we don't acknowledge it and name it and pay attention to it, it will drive us in ways that are subconscious, and it ends up doing a lot of destructive work. If we want to actually put it before the Lord, put it before other people that we trust and make good life-giving decisions with it, we have to name what that desire is that is driving us as people. So even what you're describing, it's like, yeah, you got two different people that are two different core desires in life, and then it trickles down in all these often not so fun ways, which are, the seven is like, "On to the next job now." [laughter]

LA: Mark, did you have a similar experience of learning about yourself?

MR: Actually, at first, I had a hard time figuring out what I was. And it was before some of the responsible tests were available. And I felt, "Oh I'm part of this, I am part of this," and I was actually kind of bummed because [chuckle] I had friends who are like, "Wow, I'm an eight, this is me." I'm like, "I'm a nothing." And it took a while. Part of what I have later learned and got some help from some of the diagnostic tools, is that okay, okay, so I am a three. I am an achiever. But I got some other stuff going on, Jessie, like you said. And one of the things I really appreciate about the Enneagram is, yeah, you've got these basic types, but then you have so much way of personalizing it, so it's not putting you into some really constrictive box. And so anyway. But when I finally got clear on this, I'm an achiever.

Also in days gone by, and Jesse, you would know this, there were other titles for these things that were not as affirming. I can't remember what it was. [chuckle] Like perfectionist or... I can't remember what it was, performer, I think. And that didn't get it at me, but achiever. And so it's actually been really helpful because it does explain a lot of who I am at work that is different from others, and actually it explains a lot of who I am in other relationships too. So for me, it was clarifying to say, "Okay, this is who I am, this makes sense. It's good to see this." But then again, Jesse as you pointed out, it's not just self-understanding, it's so that when I come into a conversation with my colleagues about things, I'm coming at this from my unique perspective, which I might have thought for a lot of my life is the only and best way.

And now I realize, "No, I need Leah in my life. I need somebody who wants to have fun. I just wanna get it done and make it great. And Leah wants to have a good process along the way." And actually that, if you can work in that, then what ends up is really better than if you just turn me the achiever loose and don't have any fun.

JE: Yes, yes. Yeah. And the Enneagram gives language to those things, it allows us to name it. Because whatever we don't name, it's gonna go septic on us, it's gonna go sideways. If you think about a lot of the major failures that happen in the business world and in the church world, so much of it is about a lack of self-awareness. And the Enneagram allows us to move past self-deception and began to actually see ourselves with a little more accuracy, so that we can have better relationships and enjoy a more flourishing life.

MR: Yes.

LA: Tell us how the Enneagram has integrated with your own spirituality? You mentioned some of the redemptive characteristics of the Enneagram, you mentioned that it can bring you closer connection to God and see what it is that God is calling you to change. How would you explain the relationship between your faith and this tool that you work with?

JE: Yeah, a lot of people when they come to this conversation, and understandably, they've got questions about like, "What in the world does this either secular or even non-Christians sort of tool, how in the world does this have anything to do with my relationship with God, with Christ, with the Bible? What is it?"

And here's what I would say. We have a responsibility to self-awareness, so whether somebody utilizes the Enneagram to that end or not, all of us bear that burden, we need to have self-awareness. And as part of self-awareness, it's my conviction that the way that we relate is the way that we relate. Throughout the Bible, you see a one-to-one connection over and over again that the way that we treat other people reveals the true nature of our relationship with God, and that our relationship with God shows the true nature of our relationship with other people. We don't exist in a vacuum.

So let me give an example. If I am somebody that tends to be a bit melancholic or a bit pessimistic, if I tend to be a little emotionally over-reactive, but I also tend to really respond strong to beautiful things, well guess how that's gonna show up? It's gonna show up in my prayer life, it's gonna show up in the worship songs that I gravitate towards and the ones that I reject. It's gonna show up in the way that I respond to my neighbors, it's gonna show up in the way that I react or don't react to the Holy Spirit.

In other words, we have one way of being and we apply it universally. And so I am not an introvert with everyone else, and suddenly an extrovert with the Lord. I'm not somebody that tends to be really, really about goals and tasks in all of my work relationships, but all of a sudden with God, I'm just sort of this Zen master, slow down and really sit on things. We have our way of relating. And the way we relate to God is the way that we relate to others, is the way that we relate to ourselves. We have one relational style, we apply it universally. And so the more that we as people can understand our relational style, also becomes a means by which we can say... We can see, "How is Jesus customizing His love for me?" No parent parents all their kids the same. Our Father doesn't parent us the same. And then as part of that, what does it mean for me to take ownership of the way that I'm relating to God and other people in ways that hopefully ultimately lead to healthier relationships?

MR: Leah, you were asking about how faith touches here, and I'd just give a real personal example. So as a three, which was at least where I was taught was called performer, there was a lot of emphasis, and deserved an emphasis, of that people like me wanna put on a good show because we need to be affirmed and adored, and we value ourselves in terms of our performance. And I own that. That's substantial. But there was a time, it seemed to me anyway, in my awareness of Enneagram, that there was a lot of that negativity, and it really was kind of seven deadly sins almost. And I get that and that's important. But one of the things you've done and I'll just say is you're reframing it in light of the gospel. One of the things I love about your book, honestly, when I got to my chapter on the achiever, you have like a little subtitle there and your subtitle is "God loves your unedited self, not your performance." And I just need to tell you, I mean, that is the gospel, but that's not just the gospel in general, that's the gospel for me. That's the good news I need to hear. So one of the things I really appreciate about what you're doing is you're taking that perspective, the Enneagram, but then you're just flooding it with the gospel. And personally, that means a lot, but I also really believe that's really important and makes this a very redemptive kind of tool.

JE: Well, I'm really, really encouraged to hear that, Mark. So often when the Enneagram is taught, the arc is essentially, "Here's the attributes. So you're like this when you're healthy, you're like this when you're not very healthy. Here's the vice that your type struggles with. Now here's the virtue that you can do to counteract that."

Well, as Christians, we don't actually believe that it is virtues that truly transform us and save us as people. We believe that it's an encounter with Jesus. And so there was this big question of, okay, well, what does it mean within my personality to encounter Christ? And what does it really mean...'Cause here's the thing, if you're going to do work around the Enneagram, part of the hard part of it all is that we're encountering our dark stuff. There's no way to really legitimately do work with the Enneagram and not go, "I am engaging with things that are very shameful for me, that are very scary for me, that make me feel really guilty or angry." And so there's this question of, "How in the world does Jesus meet me in that space?"

And so one of the things that I explore in the book is this idea of, well, what if Jesus actually empathizes with my wounds? These things that I'm actually deeply ashamed about, these things that are really scary for me, what if actually Jesus is meeting me in those most hidden, tender places that I barely can admit to myself? And what if He meets me in that place and that invites me actually to begin to trust Him because He's the God who empathizes?

LA: I'm really struck. I'm recalling this verse, which you mentioned in your book actually as well. It's John 8, Verse 32, where Jesus says, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free."

I really hear what you're saying about two parts of being set free by Jesus through this work. One is knowing the truth about how we are made each individually, and the other is knowing the truth about Jesus and how He can redeem that, not just redeeming the world, globally speaking, but redeeming each of us and the unique challenges that we come forward with.

JE: Yeah, yes. Yeah. And I think, I mean, there's just a reality... Let me say that different. Jesus invites us to live in reality, and in reality, all of us live at some level and sort of like, you can use whatever word you want to use, like a trance, a delusion. I don't know what words we should use, but there's some level where...

LA: Fantasy land.

JE: A fantasy land. Like we tell stories to ourselves to help us cope with living. And part of what Jesus is inviting us towards is, "Hey, come live in reality with Me because I'm enough in reality. I will be enough for you. I will give you everything. You don't need to lie to yourself. You don't need to dress yourself up and make yourself seem better than you are. You don't need all of these tactics."

And again, one of the things I love about the Enneagram is it shows us all of the deeply clever ways that we try to make it in this world so that we won't have to trust God or trust other people. And the Enneagram names it. And even though the guys that created it, they're not talking about Jesus, but they inadvertently began to name these things that are very much about Jesus, which is, I don't want to have to trust you. I don't want to have to rely on you. And so let's name the things that we're doing to try to make our way in the world without Him, so that we can trust Him, so that we can enjoy true life and be set free.

LA: I also think there's an aspect of this when I reflect on my work. There's an aspect of my Enneagram type that's not only keeping me from trusting Jesus, but keeping me from doing hard work, leaning into my work in a way that might be helpful and be effective. You know, so for me, I care about being happy all the time. That's my type. So I'll like lean into this, "Hey, look at me, here's a song and dance. We're doing something fun," in order to get out of the things that I find really challenging, like doing a, what was I talking before? Like doing an expense report or figuring out why the number of things I scheduled wasn't correct.

Like doing all these hard, hard thinking. I'm trying to get out of it 'cause I'm afraid it's not going to be fun. I'm afraid it's going to waste my time. I'm afraid I'm going to have FOMO, missing out on something. And that's not necessarily helpful for my work. That's an impediment to my work. So kind of embracing the truth and just seeing it for what it is, not only helps me trust God more, but it helps me trust God in my work. Like if I'm going to lean into something hard in my work, Jesus, you're going to be there with me. That's my way of kind of knowing the truth about myself and letting it set me free.

JE: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at some level, right, in the first century, so if Jesus was the rabbi of the disciples, the disciples were, the goal of a good disciple in the first century is be like your rabbi. Think like them, see like them, move in the world like them. And at some level, I think that the Enneagram can help us see the ways in which there are aspects of fullness that we have let go of because we're overly relying on one thing too much. We're expecting this one thing to do something it can't do.

So for me as a four, it's like I'm all about originality and authenticity and let's be creative and let's do all these good new things. And I rely on that at the exclusion of these other really, really important things in life.And so when Jesus talks about that He wants us to have life and have it to the fullest, at least part of what He is getting at is this idea that we would become more like Him and that we would stop living as diminished people, diminished creatures, diminished ways of doing relationships. And then instead we would begin to have a broader experience.

And so yeah, so it includes the ability not only to pursue happiness and have fun, but it does also include the ability to be faithful and reliable and to have forethought and to be diligent, and all these other good and beautiful things, instead of our natural tendency is to pit one against the other and to say, "Well, I'm choosing this and I can't choose that." But the way of Jesus is it's a both/and.

LA: Now you mentioned the group of disciples following Jesus. They were kind of an early work group, you could call them, and there was some dysfunction there.

JE: Yes, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that there's so much subtext when we read the Bible that is easily lost. Why did this person ask the question they did? Why did they react the way that they did? Why is it that in one context, the disciple does this, and in another, they do this?

And again, it's true to life. That's us, right? Is that a diverse group of personalities attempting to come together around this common vision. And I do think that at least part of what Paul is getting at later when he talks about all the gifts among the churches, collectively, when we come together, at our best, we do reflect the wholeness, the fullness of Christ.

But in our, when we break off into our factions, when we begin to isolate unto ourselves, we become these truncated versions of the bigger picture. But the picture that we have that's given to us is a diverse people, that we are unified, but we're also distinct. And we're not asked to turn into clones. If you're looking for a religion in which everybody merges into one consciousness, that is not Christianity. You have to look elsewhere. We're allowed to continue to be distinct people, and people that need each other.

LA: I want to go back to the first workplace scenario that you were talking about when you were in this dysfunctional team. You brought in some consultants who led you through this exercise of the Enneagram. What happened? What was the fruit of that exercise?

JE: Yeah, yeah. Well, no one ended up on the 5 o'clock news, and so that's the good part. [laughter] That's the good part. Yeah, you know, it was a really intense situation. Ultimately, how do I want to say this? Things had unfortunately, in some aspects, they had escalated enough that some of those relationships were really deeply strained and some of those folks are, we cannot say that we are friends at this point in life. What I would say is that it gave us a lot more empathy for each other, even if we knew we had arrived at the place in life where our journey together needed to come to an end. But we did not part with the level of bitterness, the level of anger, the level of resentment that we would have had without this tool.

Now, on the other end, there were some of us that were really frustrated with each other, and the Enneagram gave us language that actually drew us closer to each other. And to this day, I would very much say we are friends. These are people that I still call. These are people that I still get lunch with. These are people that I still check in with. And the Enneagram played a very significant role of going, "Oh gosh, this thing you were doing that was driving me nuts, that I thought was this deeply vindictive, you're doing it against me on purpose, or you're doing this thing intentionally to be neglectful," or whatever it is. I suddenly could depersonalize it, meaning that it actually wasn't even about me. It was their stuff they were working through, and that they had good intentions, but the tools they had were the tools they had, and the tools I had were the tools I had. And so it allowed I think all of us to move to a place where we had more curiosity about each other, more empathy for each other's stories, and less resentment for the ways in which certain people, myself included, we couldn't fulfill all the things that oftentimes we put pressure on each other to do. And so it definitely moved us to a place of a lot of healing. I mean, that's a lot of the work... I mean, now I do work. I do work with...

So obviously, I run this organization, this nonprofit called Love Thy Neighborhood. But we just spun off all of our Enneagram work into a brand new company called Relate Better. And as part of the work that we do with Relate Better, we go in and we work with everything from, next week we've got a little thing with just sort of a three-person business, mom, mom, and pop. But then this Friday, we will actually be with all of the Goodwill managers for this region, all of their store managers. But we also do work with Fortune 500 companies.

And we really want to help business leaders begin to find language to talk with their employees and their staff, their coworkers, and begin to build better relationships with each other. What am I like as a boss? What am I like when somebody else is telling me what to do? How is it that this person communicates versus this person? There's so many problems that can be avoided if we just had better understanding of each other.

LA: I love that. Mark and I are both nodding to the sentence, "There are so many problems that could be avoided if we just had better understanding of each other." [chuckle]

MR: I've honestly wondered, as I've learned about the Enneagram, whether had this tool been available back in the past when I had some pretty significant conflicts with work relationships, whether it could have been helpful? And I appreciate the way you said that, Jesse. So you didn't just tell, "Oh yeah, we've heard about the Enneagram and now we're all a big family and we do Christmas together." Because sometimes it just isn't going to work. But I do think it would have been helpful to know what's going on inside of each other, even if you come to the place of saying, "You know, that's who you are and this is who I am, and I don't think this is going to work." But then of course at other times you discover that kind of the opportunity to have synergy. I mean, what I find with many of my colleagues is we refer to our Enneagram often in humor when it's sort of our dark side, it's a little bit intrusive. [chuckle] It's some of the, "Oh, that's my seven coming out."

And it's a great way actually to confess without actually having to say really hard and awful things, but you're kind of getting, they're saying, "Look, this is my irresponsible side of my enthusiasm." And it gives some freedom and then we can not get upset. Or at least some of the time.

JE: Yes, yes. I mean, we talk all the time like here at our offices, all of us have just grown in our capacity to be able to laugh at ourselves. And not in a horrible self-deprecating way, although I guess that also can happen at moments as well, but more of the ability just to own it, man. Just, we're just trying to own, "This is who I am and I'm so sorry I'm like that. And I'm working on it and gosh, I know that must be frustrating for you." But even, Mark, like I... Okay, so I'm, I'm a four, I got a ton of three, but I also have a ton of seven.

Okay. You put that stuff together and you've got a guy that is an idea generator, a guy that loves to dream, a guy that loves to go chase things, but I don't like a lot of details and I don't want a thousand questions to slow me down. I want to keep going. But the downside is you cannot be a responsible leader and just choose to let all those details go or just choose to keep running onto the next shiny thing. And so I've come to recognize that I need certain employees and certain people on my team that will ask me the questions that annoy me, because they're the responsible and helpful and longterm things that are actually going to help all of us grow and flourish. And simultaneously when they're frustrated with me, I don't have to make it as personal. I can go, "You know what? It makes total sense that you would be frustrated with the way that I'm leading right now, in light of what your gifts are and the fact that I'm really not serving your gifts in the way that I need to."

So then again, it just, it helps us go, "Hey, can we make this a little less personal and just look at this in terms of, I don't need to be offended by your way of seeing and being. Let's figure out a way that we can work together. And let's just name it when it happens."

LA: I think that's a great place to land, both in terms of our personal growth as humans and as workers in the workplace, and in our organizational thinking about how to be better leaders. So my last question is, if people want to find out more about this, where should they go?

JE: Yeah, the best place to go is go to relatebetter.com. And if you go there, we'll have a free gift for you called Your Relationship Cheat Sheet. And it's a simple Enneagram activity to help you build better relationships. You can literally download it and you sit down with your inner circle and you can ask for the things you need in life, and they can tell you what they need in return. So the next time you're going into a time with your spouse, a friend, a coworker, whatever, you don't have to guess. Take the sheet with you and they've literally already told you what they need. And so, head over to relatebetter.com. And you can also learn about our workshops that we offer, and of course we offer those to businesses as well as to ministries. We have public and private workshops. There's books and workbooks and articles and there's a podcast and all sorts of resources, but we exist exclusively for the purpose of helping you build better relationships with God, other people, and yourself.

MR: You're a humble man, Jesse. You didn't really mention your book, so I will. Jesse Eubanks, How We Relate. Even notice that, it's about relationships. It's not who you are deep in your soul, though that involved. But you can... I'd recommend that. Especially, it's gonna be good for folk who know the Enneagram, but it would be a great introduction if you're thinking, "Man, I don't really know what in the world they've been talking about." It'd be a great starting place. Because you're super clear and helpful in talking about the Enneagram, but as I've said before, it's infused with the gospel. And that it takes that sort of neutral tool and it makes it a redemptive and a creative one.

JE: Well, thank you. I tried to write the Enneagram book I wish I had found when I first stumbled into the Enneagram. And so I hope that if that describes you, I hope it's a book that can be helpful to you.

LA: That's great. Jesse Eubanks, thank you so much for talking to us today. It's just been such a pleasure.

MR: Yes.

JE: Yeah. Thank you, Leah. Thank you, Mark.

MR: Thanks.

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