Hidden Benefits

Do you ever think about the hidden benefits that your personality type brings to the world? It’s okay if not; I know I think about a lot of things that the rest of humanity seems to find either inconsequential or just straight-up weird. 

But I think about it. 

Before I explain what I mean, a little context is necessary. (Just a tiny bit, I promise. With some supplemental reading.)

There are zillions of different personality tests and types and books and categories out there. We sort the world’s population many different ways – introvert/extrovert, Myers-Briggs, Type A and Type B, loud and quiet (just to name a few.) Each personality has many positives and negatives. And my line of thinking can be applied to any of those different ways of sorting. 

But for today’s post, I will be talking about the Enneagram (which you can learn more about here) and more specifically, my type – Type 9, also known as the Peacemaker. 

Okay, now to the point. 

A lot of the benefits of being and being around Type 9s are loudly proclaimed and widely known. If I explain to someone who understands the Enneagram that I am a 9, they could easily recite three positive things about 9s (i.e. our ability to mediate conflict or our enjoyment of the little things in life.) But I think that there are also unspoken, and therefore undervalued or even unnoticed, benefits of Type 9s that people don’t even see. 

For instance:

• We can set our pace to match yours. This means that if we are somewhere together and you decide it’s time to leave, we will have already noticed the warning signs and will pack up just slightly faster than you in order to be ready to leave just at the moment that you are ready. To you, it seems like we are simply in sync. To us, it’s a delicate dance that we can execute flawlessly.
• When we say “I understand where you’re coming from,” we actually mean it. Because of our ability to see both (or all, in the case of polygonal arguments) sides of every situation, we can actually understand where you’re coming from even if we disagree with you. This is frequently to our detriment, but it benefits others so we keep doing it. 
• We won’t wake you up when you’re sleeping. I honestly can’t explain this one, but it’s true. Obviously, there are exceptions. The two that come to mind are 1) imminent physical danger, and 2) we know you’ll be sad that you missed out on something if we don’t wake you up. (I once awoke my roommate at midnight to come with me to the 24-hour hardware store to buy a toilet plunger, because I accurately guessed that she’d rather be awoken than hear about it in the morning.) 

All that to say, I know my own personality type’s hidden gems, (and now so do you, or at least some of them) but it’s causing me to realize that I don’t know what I don’t know about other personality types. 

So. What are the hidden benefits of your personality? I really want to know.