FOR THE most part, our personalities are positive and, by expressing them, we can offer our gifts to the world. The problem is that those same personalities include what we call a defence mechanism: the things we’ve learned to avoid at all costs.

Some people avoid breaking the rules at all costs, while others avoid seeing them at all – they pretend the rules don’t exist; some avoid risk at all costs, while others avoid failure at all costs; some avoid conflict at all costs, while others avoid people at all costs. We each have one or two key areas of avoidance which are constantly being triggered and send us spiralling into habitual patterns.

Joining the dots

The enneagram is a tool that identifies your core gifts and avoidances, and links these to your habitual behavioural patterns. It joins the dots for you and for me as coach in a way that vastly accelerates the discovery phase of the coaching process, and deepens the conversation throughout.

Get your Enneagram Report and One-on-One Debrief today. 

MINDFULNESS HAS become a buzzword. Yet it’s about so much more than just being present while you eat and walk. Applied properly, mindfulness is at the heart of all personal development.

The first step towards improving or transforming oneself is awareness, or being able to observe oneself objectively. This is easier said than done. When a person is angry, or scared, they are not likely to become aware. They tend to “lose themselves”.

Training the mind

Mindfulness trains the mind to recognise when it’s in a reactive state, to become present, and then to make a better choice about how to act in the situation. Clearly there are many ways to achieve this. However, mindfulness is like the “salt in the mix” that brings up the flavours of the dish – it enhances the gains you make through any other kind of practice or process.