Personality Maxing: Using the Enneagram to Max Out Your Personality
5/22/2025
Personality Maxing: Using the Enneagram to Max Out Your Personality
You've heard of "looks maxing" - there is such a thing as that. However, what people should be doing is attempting to max out their personality.
The Mental Health Paradigm We're Missing
Maybe this idea is too soon and people aren't ready for it. Because therapy and mental health is kinda still taboo.
But that's just old thinking. People only check in with their mental health when things are going wrong. But they should be proactively working on their mental health. Similar to how someone should go to the gym to be physically healthy, people in the future will be going to therapy to mentally freshen up, lose weight and shed mental baggage.
What Personality Maxing Actually Looks Like
Personality maxing is about taking a proactive approach to mental health and becoming mentally strong. We don't really have imagery around this idea right now but in the future we will. For now picture ancient Greek philosophers who are mentally fit addressing everyday life.
The Stoicism Trap
And the trap is to fall into stoicism.
I don't want to push people to stoicism because being mentally fit is about dealing with your emotions in a healthy way and not suppressing them.
You need to demonstrate that you can control and in a healthy way express your emotions. In doing so that signals confidence and is attractive.
That is what you get when you start using the Enneagram to max out your personality.
TLDR on the Enneagram
There are 3 core emotions that shape a personality.
There are 3 different ways/strategies of handling those emotions.
That is how you get 9 personality types or worldviews, or life strategies.
The Three Core Emotions
The three core emotions that shape your personality are anger, fear and shame.
Though these emotions are negative they correspond to a certain intelligence.
Intellectual/Thinking/Head Intelligence
Ability to think clearly and reason
Emotional/Feeling/Heart Intelligence
Ability to empathize and sense feelings
Instinctual/Body Intelligence
Being in tune with your body and desires and instincts
Your Childhood Wound Is Still Running the Show
This makes sense because every therapist wants to talk about your childhood and try to get at pivotal moments in your childhood. In the enneagram world your childhood is important because somewhere in there you got a childhood wound that didn't quite heal. Could have happened in a number of ways:
- Something that you were repeatedly told
- An incident that forever changed you
- Neglect in a certain way from your parents
Somehow we are still recovering from our childhoods and as we grew we developed coping skills to deal with these core emotions.
In childhood we learned how to deal with anger, fear and shame. But the enneagram teaches that we have an underdeveloped relationship to one of those emotions. We didn't quite fully develop coping mechanisms in response to that emotion.
Finding Your Core Emotion
There is a lot to process there. But the first step to personality maxing is figuring out which emotion do you have an unhealthy relationship with.
Sometimes you can tell if you ask yourself, who do you empathize with.
Do you empathize with people who are angry, or people who are fearful, or people who feel shame? Shame is kinda tricky - it's kinda like being insecure.
You likely will have more patience for someone who is expressing one of those emotions over the other. You can empathize with someone experiencing one of those emotions more than the others. That should give you a clue into the emotion that relates to your personality.
Connecting the Dots
At this point you should be ready for me to connect these dots.
- Intellectual/thinking/head intelligence → fear
- Emotional/feeling/heart intelligence → shame
- Instinctual/body intelligence → anger
Think about it.
If you didn't think about it go to this link to get a deeper breakdown. TLDR: Plato talked about the human soul consisting of three parts and Freud talked about the human psyche consisting of three parts but they were both circling around the ideas of the Enneagram. (In that article it goes more in-depth about how the 3 core emotions are connected to specific intelligences.)
| Freud | Plato | Enneagram Center of Intelligence | Enneagram Core Emotion |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | appetite | instinctual/ body | anger |
| ego | reason | intellectual/ head | fear |
| super ego | spirit | emotional/ heart | shame |
Back to Personality Maxing!
Each enneagram type interacts with their core emotion in a different way. You can either:
- Suppress that emotion
- Actively use that emotion
- Have that emotion in the back of mind subconsciously influencing you
The 9 Types Breakdown
This is the breakdown of how that works:
- Uses it → enneagram type 8
- In subconscious → enneagram type 9
- Suppresses it → enneagram type 1
- Uses it → enneagram type 2
- In subconscious → enneagram type 3
- Suppresses it → enneagram type 4
- Uses it → enneagram type 5
- In subconscious → enneagram type 6
- Suppresses it → enneagram type 7
Now this is just the surface level.
Think about the coping skills of someone who actively uses anger. And think about the personality type that develops from that. Now think about the person who suppresses their own shame and insecurity. Now think about the person who is subconsciously driven by fear.
Your Personality Maxing Strategy
There is a lot going on but each negative emotion is correlated to a particular intelligence -- remember that. This is where you can start to look at personality maxing.
All this is just scratching the surface of what you can do to max out your personality by using the enneagram.
This is what the gurus and Enneagram coaches are busy doing. And I am going to start distilling this information into short guides for each type.