The Enneagram is one of my favorite tools to gain insight into what motivates and influences us! I love learning how to apply it so we can strengthen our connections with each other, and learn how to support others in the way that’s most helpful for them.
In this episode of The Dreamer’s Manual podcast, I dig into all of this with my guest, Karissa Harrison, an Enneagram expert, who shares her wisdom about how anyone can use The Enneagram as a resource in our personal + professional lives.
Whether you’re an Enneagram enthusiast like me, or you’re just learning about it and want to know more, this episode will help add some great tricks to your toolkit to help build emotional intelligence and recognize how to keep evolving and strengthening your connections with others.
Karissa is a Certified Enneagram Coach and Consultant who’s passionate about helping leaders use the Enneagram to execute a plan for personal and professional growth that works so well that everyone around them notices the results. With more than 15 years of leadership experience, including at the executive level, she is passionate about helping individuals and teams use the Enneagram to perform at their highest and best. Karissa has worked with executive leaders, entrepreneurs, and leaders from organizations all across the globe and teams from small businesses, schools, and Fortune 500 companies.
She shares tons of unique insights during this episode, so check out the links below for all the resources we discussed during our conversation.
Highlights from this Episode
We talk about:
- How Karissa helps individuals and teams use the enneagram as a tool to increase their emotional intelligence, understand our motivations and behaviors, and how they affect our personal and professional lives.
- Using the Enneagram as a tool to strengthen professional teams and impact the organization’s culture and foundation.
- Using the Enneagram to diagnose the root motivations behind our behaviors and how it can help us address and overcome our own limits. We also chat about how the Enneagram helps us learn how to support our strengths and take informed action to mitigate misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
- Karissa’s recommended books and resources to get started or continue your journey with the Enneagram.
- What her framework looks like in group and 1-on-1 sessions, when she supports individuals and teams as they build their Enneagram awareness
Captivating Quotes from this Episode:
5:16 How the Enneagram helped her develop as a leader and shift her focus to helping others use it as a powerful tool.
And it really has just been such a gift and a privilege to work with individuals, you know, really in a coaching relationship, mostly with leaders, helping them to understand what are the things that are holding them back, or sabotaging them, where they’re experiencing resistance. The Enneagram helps us to uncover what’s causing the resistance so that they can operate with more self-awareness and more freedom. And so that is a great honor. And then on the consulting side of things, getting to really work with team dynamics, and how do we increase emotional intelligence across an organization, which is, you know, self-awareness and social awareness? And how do we increase collaboration and communication and conflict management so that we have synergy, and we’re building trust as a team…”
8:31- The wonderful experience of facilitating awareness and watching humans are operating together to achieve awareness
“What’s fun about what I get to do now is I get to see all different kinds of teams and all different kinds of organizations in the online space and in the corporate space in the nonprofit space. And every team is different. And what you begin to notice is that there’s also just such a beautiful part of when humans are working together, and everybody is wanting to operate with self-awareness and care for one another well, and that was definitely present with the team that you are on and that you’re a part of leading, which is a direct reflection of who you are in the way that you desire to lead.”
11:22- Emotional intelligence is the key leader of success.
“ So, I would say for me, [theEnneagram] is the favorite tool for measuring and increasing emotional intelligence. I really think that’s what sets it apart. And regardless of who we are following right now, we are learning together collectively, in the last decade, that emotional intelligence is what sets great leaders apart from the rest. It’s the key indicator of success, regardless of what industry, we’re leading in, even if that’s we’re leading ourselves as a solo entrepreneur, we’re all leading, and we need emotional intelligence work in order to do that well.”
17:51- Consulting leaders to hire for the healthy version of the Enneagram
“So this is a common question that comes up, especially when I’ve worked with a client for a little while. And most of them at some point are hiring along the way, whether it’s during our work together or after our work together, and then they’re gonna come back and they’re gonna say, Okay, Karissa, how do I use what we learned to hire the right fit person for my team? And you’re very right, I’m not looking to hire an Enneagram, one for this role, or an Enneagram, eight for that role. Because a one or an eight or any of the other types can be fantastic in any role. But what I’m looking for is an emotionally intelligent, healthy version of whatever their Enneagram type is. And that’s how we can use this tool to help us make wiser hiring decisions
25:37- The best teams have diversity throughout the Enneagram, and are operating at healthy levels
“We all have a strength and a superpower that’s connected to our type. And with that strength, and superpower also comes potential weakness or liability, sometimes they can look very similar. But every Enneagram type is beautiful and necessary and needed not only in the world, but on our teams. And so I think some of the teams that are doing incredible work are teams that have diversity of different personality types, who are operating at healthy levels.”
Connect
Website: https://www.karissaharrison.com/
Email: karissa.harrison@gmail.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karissaharrison/
Links
Work With Karissa: Ennea-Growth Accelerator, Coaching Waitlist, and Consulting Opportunities: https://www.karissaharrison.com/Workwithme
Free Enneagram Assessment:
https://coach.yourenneagramcoach.com/karissa-harrison
Enneagram Book and Podcast Recommendations:
The Road Back To You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabille
Beatrice Chestnutt: Enneagram 2.0 Podcast
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