This week I received my professional accreditation from the International Enneagram Association (IEA).
I’m not always very good at stopping to acknowledge milestones, but this one feels worth marking.
IEA accreditation isn’t something you get after completing a single course. It takes a minimum of three years and requires a certain number of accreditation points earned through ongoing study, client work, teaching, writing and contributing to the wider Enneagram community.
For me, most of that has come through coaching and teaching, but also through projects I’ve loved along the way.
Things like my Creativity and the Enneagram subtype series, presenting at the Enneagram Australia & Aotearoa New Zealand Festival this year, speaking at the Typish Personal Growth Summit, presenting at AusAPT in 2024, and joining people for conversations on podcasts about everything from creativity and burnout to Enneagram subtypes and personal growth.
And, of course, a fairly ridiculous amount of reading, studying and thinking about the Enneagram.
Somewhere in amongst all that, I’ve also written more than 100,000 words of a book about Enneagram mistyping, which continues to challenge and deepen my understanding of the Enneagram.
The people behind the milestone
And none of this has happened in isolation.
So thank you to those of you who have helped me test workshops, talked through ideas and challenges with me, replied to my emails, encouraged me when I wasn’t sure where any of this was going, or simply said, you’re doing great, keep going.
And especially to the clients who have trusted me with the complicated, messy parts of their lives, and whose lives have shifted because of the conversations we’ve had.
That feels like the most important part of all of this.
Where my work is going now
So this accreditation feels like a nice moment to look back at what has brought me here.
And also at what I want to do with all of it.
You may have noticed that my website has been changing recently too.
There’s still more I want to add, but the biggest shift is that I’m getting much clearer about the work I do.
And that’s helping people recognise and work with the patterns that keep them stuck, even after they’ve done considerable personal development work.
I’ve become particularly interested in what happens when we go through a big change or upheaval in our lives.
Those moments have a way of forcing us to reconsider what matters most, and how we want to spend the time we have from here.
We often come out the other side with a clearer sense of the values we want to live by, or the kind of person we want to be.
Unfortunately, even with our compass pointed in the right direction, we don’t automatically start living the way we imagine we will.
Because our old patterns and habits come with us.
We can still overwork, avoid the difficult conversation, put off what matters, make ourselves smaller, get snippy or frustrated with the people we love, or gradually fill up the space we worked so hard to create.
We might even discover that the work or relationships that once suited us no longer fit who we’ve become, while our familiar patterns make it difficult to figure out what needs to change.
And that’s where I keep coming back to something I wrote about recently: sometimes the work isn’t to get rid of the waves or wait for calmer seas.
It’s to build a bigger boat.
To expand our capacity to stay with discomfort, uncertainty, conflict, rest, visibility, or whatever our old patterns have taught us to avoid, so we have more room to live according to what matters now.
That gap between knowing what matters and being able to live it is the work I’m increasingly focused on.
I use the Enneagram to help identify the protective patterns underneath that resistance, while also paying attention to what those patterns are protecting and what we may need more capacity for.
If this is where you are too
If you’ve done considerable personal work but still find yourself repeating familiar patterns, particularly in your work or relationships, this is the territory I explore through my coaching.
You can explore ways to work with me here.
For now, though, I’m going to let myself enjoy the accreditation for a minute.
It represents a lot of years of work, curiosity, wrong turns, inner work, conversations, study and practice.
And I’m very glad I kept going.
Samantha