Speaking by the Numbers

Enneagram Wisdom for Teachers, Pastors, and Communicators

Sean Palmer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780830841660, 9780830841660
• eBook ISBN: 9780830841677
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Communication Studies

It's not just what you say, but how you say it.

Good communicators know this, but it's often easier said than done. Teachers, leaders, and speakers are often left bewildered, wondering why the content that was so carefully planned and delivered seems to fall flat with the audience. The art of communication requires more than the transfer of information; it both connects with and engages the hearer. To communicate well, speakers must understand both their audience and themselves.

Speaking by the Numbers offers a strategy that combines communication principles with Enneagram wisdom to help leaders, pastors, and teachers understand how to convey content in ways that both inspire and connect with their audiences. Using the Enneagram wisdom of triads and stances, communicators can learn insight into the ways that various Enneagram numbers receive and process information. Sean Palmer draws from his extensive experience as a public speaker to develop communication strategies that lead to connection, transformation, and mobilization of audiences. Providing real examples of speeches and messages he has given, Palmer shows how he uses the Enneagram to craft a message that connects with his audience.

A healthy marriage of Enneagram wisdom and communication skill can help us speak with clarity into the heart of where people live, love, and experience life.

1

The Enneagram Knowledge You Need

Once you get over yourself, you can get anywhere.

UNKNOWN

“THAT’S THE MOST Enneagram Three sermon I’ve ever heard.”

Autumn gently confronted me after worship one Sunday morning with those words—“the most ‘Three’ sermon I’ve ever heard.” She knew what most of my friends know: I am a Three on the Enneagram, and there’s just no hiding that fact. Threes are called The Achiever, The Performer, or The Motivator. When we are in a healthy space we are energetic, charming, attractive (I like that one), ambitious, goal-oriented, and all sorts of other things that excite me.

Right now, for instance, it’s nearly midnight. The house is quiet—even though my wife, two daughters, and my wife’s cousin all live here—and I am in my happy place, pecking away at my keyboard, working toward goals I set six months ago. In four hours, I will be here again. Today I set new goals for house renovations and physical fitness—I have two races coming up, chipped away at two work projects, and moved to a new level on my favorite video game. I love accomplishing things. They don’t even have to be important things. I’m a Three on the Enneagram and accomplishing things is the fuel that ignites my inner engine. And that fact is not lost on anyone I’ve ever known, especially those who hear me preach.

Autumn was right. The introduction to my sermon that weekend was soaked through with Enneagram Three perspiration. Want to know what I said? This is how it began:

I want to tell you three indisputable facts about your life. And guess what, there’s nothing I’m going to tell you that you don’t know already.

You’re the expert. You know these already, but once you hear them out loud, it’ll give you clarity.

The first indisputable fact about your life is this: You were consulted before you committed your biggest regrets. So was I.

I had a say in doing whatever I did, saying whatever I said, going wherever I went, when I did or said the thing I regret.

I wasn’t just consulted. I was the brains behind the whole operation. I was the fool who proofed it.

And so were you.

Now there are certainly times when we are the victims, but those aren’t regrets. Regret is upset over our own past actions.

And you know who cast the deciding vote in your biggest regrets? You did. I did in mine.

I chose to eat that. I decided not to work out.

I decided that zero percent APR for one year was a good idea.

I charged that to the card. I swiped left (or right. I’m really too old to know how that all works).

I was consulted on all my biggest regrets.

And the reason you need to know that is because I’m about to tell you the most provocative and controversial thing I’ve ever said.

Like you, I have views on politics and race and the Bible and everything else, but this is the one thing that I get the most pushback on even though it’s an indisputable fact.

You know what it is? It’s this: You have a choice.

You have a choice of where you live, who you work for, who you marry. You have a choice about how you respond when provoked.

You have a choice which college to go to. You have a choice. And you know what Americans hate more than almost anything? The fact that their lives, our lives, are largely—not totally, but largely—the result of our choices.

You may not like your choices. You may think you have bad choices, but you always have choices.

That was my sermon introduction. Later on, I planned to talk about the choice we make to become and be people of love and that doing so involves the decision to love. Like most things I say, the sermon introduction made complete sense to me. It was clear, somewhat concise, and was the shortest point from the beginning of my message to the heart of my content—it made sense.

To me.

As a Three I intuitively believe certain things about the nature of my life and the world. I believe that my life matters. I can make a difference, an impact on the world. I’m an aggressive person, and I wake up every morning with an instinctual belief that what I do matters. It sounds weird to some folks, but I wake up with a list of accomplishments that need to be complete before sundown. Some people like to make lists. I don’t make lists; I am a list. Working out, writing one thousand words per day, and structuring my world are as natural to me as breathing. When I think about life, I naturally connect life to deliberate choices.

Not everyone does.

What Autumn revealed to me is while I was speaking what I believed to be true, I was filtering that truth through my lens of a Three, the Achiever. The Threes in the room were sold; I suspect the Fours weren’t. Activities like scheduling every hour of the upcoming week on Sunday night, doing the dishes, or accomplishing routine daily and common tasks have little-to-no appeal for them. It’s all too mundane, too simple. The Nines in the room were contemplating whether or not their decisions really could add up to consequential change and concluded they could not. The Fives were hoping that I’d back up my assertion with five or more peer-reviewed studies.

While I was thundering away at a reality that was as true to me as the fact that humans breath oxygen, I missed a significant number of people in the room. It can’t all be helped; miscommunicating can never be completely avoided. When communicators speak, we are always people—we don’t always quite “get” what other people “get”—we cannot possibly see the world in the same way all our hearers do. We misunderstand one another’s experiences, we don’t always know where other people are coming from, and that’s okay. But we can reach more people in the room than only those who see from our point of view.

THE STANCES: FEELING, THINKING, AND DOING

One of my favorite commercials claims to solve a problem that customers can’t know they have: nose blindness. It’s a series of commercials, each one promising to rid our homes of smells we either don’t know or can’t prove we have. Our homes have smells that are hidden to us. Certainly, we’ve all had that friend or family member whose house always has a particular smell....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Suzanne Stabile
• Introduction
• 1 The Enneagram Knowledge You Need
• 2 Speaking to the Dependent Stance
• 3 A Model for Speaking to the Dependent Stance
• 4 Speaking to the Aggressive Stance
• 5 A Model for Speaking to the Aggressive Stance
• 6 Speaking to the Withdrawing Stance
• 7 A Model for Speaking to the Withdrawing Stance
• Conclusion: Speaking to the Centers
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Praise for Speaking by the Numbers
• About the Author
• Also by Sean Palmer
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright