Are You My Type, Am I Yours? : Relationships Made Easy Through The Enneagram

The Enneagram, a renowned personality typing system that is enjoying enormous popularity, explains why we behave the way we do, providing an important tool for self-discovery and insight. Are You My Type, Am I Yours? explores each of the nine types and how they interact in love, work, family, and friendships. Each chapter is filled with intriguing details, witty cartoons, simple personality tests, and examples of "famous couples" of each type to help discovery and appreciate your own type and those of the people you've involved with--or could be.

The 9 types of people

• The Perfectionist Motivated by the need to live life the right way, improve yourself and others, and avoid anger.

• The Helper Motivated by the need to be loved and appreciated and to express your positive feelings towards others.

• The Achiever Motivated by the need to be productive, to achieve success, and to avoid failure.

• The Romantic Motivated by the need to understand your feelings and to be understood to search for the meaning of life, and to avoid being ordinary.

• The Observer Motivated by the need to know everything and understand the universe, to be self-sufficient and left alone, and to avoid not having the answer or looking foolish.

• The Questioner Motivated by the need for security, to feel taken care of, or to confront your fears.

• The Adventurer Motivated by the need to be happy and plan fun things, to contribute to the world, and to avoid suffering and pain.

• The Asserter Motivated by the need to be self-reliant and strong, to make an impact on the world, and to avoid being weak.

• The Peacemaker Motivated by the need to keep the peace, merge with others, and avoid conflict.

So, partly out of my own selfishness to keep some friends into the theory, I checked out "Are You My Type....?" and I am so excited. The authors have done a fantastic job of providing a good, solid introduction to the theory and gently describing some of the, um, less appealing qualities that each of the types has. The cartoon illustrations throughout seem a bit too silly at first, but once you see them in context to the text, you can see that they really enhance the text. A sense of humor with the Enneagrams is nice, too, as it does get taken a bit too seriously sometimes.

I've loaned this book out as an introduction to the theory and have gotten a lot more people interested in the Enneagrams and in learning about themselves. A very good thing!