Enneagram Growth Practice Type 3

Growth for Type 3: The Performer

Basic Essential Practice: From a grounded, receptive, openhearted, and non-judgmental stance, notice your zeal for efficiently accomplishing tasks and goals, and to give and receive approval and recognition for doing rather than for being. This stems from your core belief that to be loved, valued, and secure you must perform, accomplish, and succeed. Recognize how your go-ahead driving energy can take you away from your own true feelings. Notice and pull your driving energy to accomplish back inside yourself by breathing down and in with slow breaths. You can then do the work of inquiry and realize that love comes from being as well as from doing. From this place of self-observation, you can notice your pace and pressure to accomplish. Then with each breath focus on slowing and easing the tightness and constriction accompanying the impatience to move forward into doing. In slowing your pace, you actually expand your pace. Then your heart can be receptive to your own and others true feelings. Remind yourself to notice that everything is not dependent on your effort. And remind yourself to notice how others respond when you allow yourself to slow your pace and open your heart.

 

David Daniels Free Enneagram Guided Audio Meditation Practice for Type Three (3) Achiever, Performer Personality Growth and Reflection

 

 

Additional Key Themes for Reflection: Simply stop for a minute or so 3-4 times a day to center and reflect on one of the following:

Image. Simply stop to sense in your body and notice how looking good and behaving in ways that gain approval and recognition can run your life. Then do your best to allow in your own true feelings.

Focus on tasks. Simply stop to notice how you focus attention and energy on doing and performance and do your best to expand your pace by slowing it.

Feelings. Simply stop to ask yourself, “Have I been paying any attention to my feeling?” And when not, pause further to encourage your feelings to manifest themselves.

Short Reflections for Reclaiming the Essential Quality

With openhearted kindness toward yourself simply practice several times a day for a minute or so saying and living one of the following each for a few days at a time. Do these all with the receptive energy encompassed in the “may I.” Recall that the higher quality or virtue for type Three is veracity, meaning being present to self and others and allowing your own true feelings to manifest in the present moment.

  • May I cultivate stillness, letting things and feelings be as they are.
  • May I expand my range of pace to include a slower pace, allowing for my true feelings to manifest.
  • May I allow greater patience, just letting things be.
  • May I cultivate my own feelings and allow my heart to open to self and others.
  • May I have compassion in the face of suffering for myself and others.