Working With Emotional Health And The Enneagram

Building emotional health levels has always been at the heart of our work together. It was our intent for the Global Leadership Foundation when we established it in 2003: ‘raising emotional health levels across the globe’.

We have been working with emotional health levels in business environments for nearly twenty years – across the private, public, not-for-profit and community sectors. Throughout, our main focus has been the development of leaders alongside transformational change in organisations. The application of emotional health to leadership was the topic of our first book, The Emotionally Healthy Leader, published in 2013.

Both of us also have long experience with the Enneagram as a model that can help individuals to understand their psychological patterns, including the triggers they react to and the underlying drivers of their actions.

Our motivation for writing this book is three-fold.

First, we wanted to introduce the Enneagram and the role it can play in the context of moving the emotional health levels. While there are have been many books about the Enneagram published globally, we wanted to share what we have learnt about the application of the Enneagram in moving up the emotional health levels. In sharing what we have learnt we combine an understanding of various Enneagram elements through the lens of emotional health levels and thus bring some clarity to areas of practice of the Enneagram not previously published.

Second – and in response to the urging of many of our peers of the years – we wanted to share this knowledge with a broader audience. While most of our work has been with leaders, we are often asked to share our knowledge and practical experience of how to move up the emotional health levels with a broader audience.

Finally, we wanted to provide a practical set of self-development tools to our audience. Our hope is that any reader of this book, regardless of their prior exposure to this material, will be able to take the information, and in particular the development guides in Part 3, and start down the path of self-improvement.

Part 1 of the book introduces the key concepts we use in our work, including our model of the emotional health levels. This provides a platform for what follows. Part 2 is focused on the Enneagram and its relationship to our emotional health levels model, helping you to gain some insight into your primary Enneagram type and your current emotional health level. And Part 3 provides a substantial development guide, in which you can take what you’ve learnt about yourself from the first two parts and commence your journey towards moving up the emotional health levels.