Two paths into the Enneagram, one shared way of teaching it
Ian found the Enneagram almost thirty years ago, when he was invited to a meeting and got hooked. He kept going back, eventually sitting in on panel after panel — small groups of people who shared the same type, being questioned in front of a room.
The panels that taught him the most were the ones where someone turned out to be mistyped: watching that person visibly not fit, while everyone else in the group nodded along, showed him more about what a type actually is than almost anything else could. Nearly three decades on, that's still how he works — getting into the guts of a type until he understands it from that person's own point of view.
I started learning the Enneagram from Ian when we met, five years ago. He has a way of taking a type apart and understanding it from the inside that I hadn't seen anywhere else, and I was hooked too. I started typing people myself — friends, family, colleagues — explaining what I was seeing and watching it land for them.
For a while, Ian was my only source, so I went looking at what everyone else in the Enneagram world was teaching. What I found was a lot of complexity — layers on layers, wings, subtypes, tritypes — more than most people could ever really use in their own life. I kept learning from it, but somewhere in there I realised what I'd actually found was a gap: for something clear, accurate, and simple enough to actually use. That gap became ENRG.
These days we live what we teach — off-grid, in the forest, in Tasmania's Central Highlands. We're there because we love the land, and because we're happier away from the pace of city life. It suits the framework: Energise, Nourish, Restore, Grow isn't just something we teach, it's how we try to live.