This blog was inspired by Ruth Landis’s insight activity about Empowerment, below. You can also read about how each of us, based on our Enneagram styles, can experience Empowerment in our daily lives. Ruth Landis is a Senior Member of the Enneagram in Business Network. To read more about Senior Members of our network, click here.

Empowerment is a dance between inspiration and resourcefulness. Today, make a list of your resources – inner and outer – and the many ways that you use these resources. Then, think about something you’ve wanted to do but resisted doing because you thought it might not work out. Pull from your list of resources and take bold action now without worrying about the outcome.

Empowerment and Enneagram Styles
I’ve added the following to help us understand how we can access our deepest state of empowerment through understanding our Enneagram style-based obstacles and the ways in which we can expand our potential.

Enneagram Style One
Obstacle to Empowerment: Confusing getting things under control and an action orientation for true empowerment
Path to Empowerment: Becoming more and more free and less and less constrained

Enneagram Style Two
Obstacle to Empowerment: Focusing so much on empowering others and so little on empowering yourself
Path to Empowerment: Using your internal and external resources for yourself as much as for others

Enneagram Style Three
Obstacle to Empowerment: Confusing goals, plans, and action focus with pursuing what you truly want to be and do
Path to Empowerment: Use your own real desires as a guide to your empowerment instead of pursuing what you believe you “audience” thinks is empowered action

Enneagram Style Four
Obstacle to Empowerment: Not fully believing in yourself and your ability to manifest what you truly want
Path to Empowerment: Turning the volume down on negative information about yourself that you take in from others or create through your internal monologues; amplifying the positive information you take in from external sources and saying to yourself multiples times each day: I can and I will!

Enneagram Style Five
Obstacle to Empowerment: Believing that resources – internal and external – are both scarce and limited
Path to Empowerment: Taking in the real resources available in your external environment – including those offered by others – as letting other know all the talents you have to offer. Don’t keep them to yourself!

Enneagram Style Six
Obstacle to Empowerment: Believing that you are already empowered in the purest sense and that your concern about your potency is the biggest obstacle
Path to Empowerment: Self-Preservation Subtype Sixes: put away your self doubt; Social Sixes: put away your adherence to rules; and One-to-One Sixes (counterphobic); put down your “guns” – that is, your need to protect yourself by taking the offense

Note: the above information on the subtypes is taken from the work of Claudio Naranjo.

Enneagram Style Seven
Obstacle to Empowerment: Confusing trying to keep all your options open with empowerment
Path to Empowerment: Find the completeness inside you, which comes from fully integrating pain and discomfort with pleasure and possibility. Real empowerment comes from inside

Enneagram Style Eight
Obstacle to Empowerment: Confusing power for empowerment
Path to Empowerment: Remembering that real empowerment comes from being real; part of being real is being open and vulnerable at times; and that you can’t really empower someone else – real empowerment comes from inside each person.

Enneagram Style Nine
Obstacle to Empowerment: Not having enough access to the fire in your belly
Path to Empowerment: Get fired up, enjoy your energy in full throttle, and move forward on what matter most to you