Enneagram Narrative Tradition: A Value Central to All Our Work
Sep 14, 2026
We've learned from many people across the Enneagram world, and we're grateful for them. We've also stayed close to some of the core values of the Narrative Tradition.
The Narrative Tradition is one of the main streams of Enneagram teaching, developed by Helen Palmer and David Daniels. Its distinctive method is the panel: rather than an expert lecturing on a type, people who identify with that type speak about their own experience while others listen. Much of what we do grows out of that one practice.
The reason we've stayed close to it is simple. The Enneagram is a practice, and a practice requires ongoing learning. And the best learning is communal. It comes from the people who live the types, not from a single authority handing the model down. That communal process is the value we keep at the center of everything we do.
How We Teach It
Panels are how we got started, and they are still part of how we learn, grow, and teach others. They have shaped the way we teach in our certification programs and with our corporate clients.
We still do typing interviews. So by the time we teach an organization, people have already taken one of our assessments or sat for a live interview, and they come in with a type they've identified for themselves.
That matters. It matters more than having an expert tell them what they are. An experienced Enneagram professional is a helpful guide, but people identify themselves.
When we first teach the types inside an organization, we do it briefly. Then the people who self-identified as a type essentially function as a panel. We invite them to describe it in their own words. What is it like to be this type? What did they hear that resonated? This is also a point where some people reconsider and begin moving toward a different type.
Go to the Source
People don't learn a type as well from a teacher describing it as they do from the people who actually live it.
That is the heart of what a panel does. We teach on the type briefly, and then the people who are that type describe what it's like to be them. Two things happen at once.
The speakers are teaching their own type. And people learn more quickly, and remember better, when they teach something themselves. They become teachers of their own type, and they get better at it as they go. Once someone can express their own type well, they slowly begin to understand how to teach the others.
The listeners are not hearing a secondhand description from an expert. They are hearing it from the source. They are seeing the type embodied in the people who live it. They notice how those people speak, the presence they hold, their body language, their intonation, their intensity, and what lights them up when they start talking about it. All of it contributes to the learning.
So both the speaker and the listener come out ahead. That is why we keep using this method.
A Model That Corrects Itself
The Enneagram is an evolving model, not a fixed or finished one. It is at its best when it stays inside a process like this.
There isn't any one person standing over the Enneagram, deciding what each type is supposed to look like. The communal aspect is self-correcting and self-refining. The teaching and the learning about the types is improved by that communal refining process.
We've seen it happen live. Someone new to the Enneagram self-selects a type, sits on a panel, and while listening to the others realizes that isn't really them. The participation itself leads to better self-identification. No expert corrected them. The community did, along with their own recognition.
No True Experts
This is why we say there are no true experts of the Enneagram as a whole. We may be experienced student-teachers, but each person is the true expert-in-the-making on themselves.
It is also why it bothers us so much when a supposed "expert" derails someone who has held a type for years. The person is told they couldn't be that type because of some behavior the "expert" noticed, and that they must be something else. And because this person is the "expert," they are treated as the one who really knows.
I'll say it directly. This is emphatically wrong.
At its heart, the Enneagram is meant to be self-identification through self-reporting. The guide's job is to listen, notice patterns, ask good questions, and offer language drawn from the many people who have identified with that type.
That last part is what gives the language its weight. When a teacher who has listened to thousands of people speak on a type shares the language back with someone newer, that person should feel a deep resonance. The articulation was formed by the people who are that type. It came from them, not from us.
We've done thousands of typing interviews over the last few years. And still, at the end of every single one, I tell the person the same thing:
"It's not my job to tell you what you are. My job is to show you where the data is currently lining up and what I'm seeing, so you can decide whether it resonates with you."
And this is how the practice continues.