Elevating Individuals Through Mentorship
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The Enneagram is a powerful model for growth and transformation that categorizes human behavior into nine distinct yet interconnected types. Going deep within a person’s underlying motivators can provide a map that will guide you in making the most of your life. Tina Fox dives deeper into this dynamic personality mapping system with Katherine Touhey, a CP Certified Enneagram coach based in Alexandria, Virginia. She explains how to better understand your attitude, feelings, and perspectives through this test, which ultimately results in a profound self-discovery. Katherine also shares her insights as a Type Three on the Enneagram, which pertains to high achievers and powerful inward thinkers.
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Everyone, welcome to the show. TERN Talks is our podcast where we get to interview some of the most amazing student mentees, as well as amazing leaders, mentors, and alumni who have already taken that route from collegiate to career. They have created some amazing things in their work on the other side of what I like to call the snow globe. I have a wonderful guest by the name of Katherine Touhey.
She is a new friend to me because we were introduced in a way that was very powerful. It had to do with self-work. I am going to introduce Katherine really quickly and welcome her to the show, just so you have a background on her. Katherine is a Certified Enneagram Coach who is based in Alexandria, Virginia. If those of you who do not know the Enneagram, that is okay. We are going to talk about that on the show. Katherine helps individuals and teams use the Enneagram as a powerful model for growth and personal transformation.
She is trained by two of the world’s leading Enneagram teachers, Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes. Katherine brings both deep expertise and lived experience to her work. She is a Type Three, which we all know is an achiever, and she knows firsthand the power of turning inward to discover what is truly possible. Welcome, Katherine, you Three you.
Thanks for having me, Tina.
I wanted to kick off the show to let all the audiences know how we met and then get into what this Enneagram thing is all about. When I ask people if they know what the Enneagram is, they say no. We are going to get into that. I want to get into your story a little bit. How did we meet? Katherine is doing some work with a company that I am connected with. In that work, she and I needed to sit down and talk about my test results as they pertained to this Enneagram, which is a personality type profile test. In our discussion, it just became this fascinating conversation about self-work and what the Enneagram has meant to us and how we were both introduced to it in the first place.
Katherine is someone with whom I have found conversation with her has been so deep and insightful. I asked her if she would please come on this show to share what it is that she knows, because one of the things we study at TERN Mentoring is self-awareness. This is between our mentors and mentees. The mentees have a chance to look through their mentors through a different lens and gain a different perspective. Katherine, can you just give us a little bit about your background in Enneagram and tell the whole audience what Enneagram is all about? You are going to do a much better job than I.
I have always been a seeker. I have always been interested in human growth and development, and what is out there in the bigger world, and how we humans interact and live to our fullest, most lively selves. It was interesting because I had someone ask me the other day, “When were you first introduced to this?” I thought back, and it was actually in ninth grade. We were required to take a full-year human growth and development class as part of our graduation requirements for high school.
When you go back to that, you are like, “What did you love as a kid?” When I went back, I loved every aspect of that class. I loved learning about attachment theory and Piaget and all of the different phases of human growth and development. It kind of sat on the back burner. I went to college, I did the things that I thought I was supposed to do, and checked all these boxes, all the while on the side. My side little thing was a seeker.
Yoga teacher training, meditation, breath work, retreats, and going deeper internally. I always loved those experiences, and nothing ever quite clicked. It was good enough. It was like a good breadcrumb, a good nice nugget, a good unlocking, but nothing was ever like, “This is it. That makes sense for me,” until COVID. Is that not like everyone’s experience? COVID, and then this happened until COVID.
COVID was the great mandatory surrender.
I am so thankful for COVID for a variety of reasons. I get it, I was in a very fortunate situation, but for my family and me, it was a gift. During COVID, my husband left corporate. He had been a career corporate employee in the same company for twenty years, and he left. He started working with an executive coach who specialized in entrepreneurs, and the foundation of his coaching was the Enneagram. I had never heard of this.
We received my husband’s report. Sometimes you can get a report. I looked at him, and I said, “Please tell me you see this, because this is what I see.” It was put in a language and a foundation that did not come across as judgmental, did not come across as criticism. It really gave him, and me as a result, the clearest picture and description of him that either of us had ever experienced.
Immediately, I was like, “I want in, I want to know more about myself.” I did a typing interview, and I got a report back. The initial type that the person gave me, it clicked enough. What was beautiful for us during that time was, I call it, the third point it gave. It was my husband and his type, and it was me and my type. We were given this thing called the Enneagram to work with. It is this outside thing that we could begin to discuss.
It was not me giving him a hard time because of his tendencies or his not understanding. We could pull it out and say, “Let us look at it through this different lens.” I just took a deep dive. I went into a two-year course, a deep study, became certified, and now I call it, drink the Kool-Aid. I am obsessed. I see the Enneagram everywhere. I live it, I breathe it, and it is just a life changer.
Talk about the Enneagram as it pertained to, I mentioned earlier, since you’re the expert, I hate to say personality profile test, because you are probably like, “No, it is so much more.” For all of us lay people out there, I call it a personality profile test because I have taken DISC, I have taken Myers-Briggs, I have taken CliftonStrengths, and What Color Is Your Parachute? All these different types of personality profile tests out there.
One of the things that I always tell the students that I work with is that if you are given the opportunity to take these, it is not a bad idea to take them. It does not hurt. You do not have to give blood. Let us just go ahead and take these things and do not look at them as personality profile tests, as though this is who you are. There is everything about you for eternity.
I ask them to take a look at those things and find the words that speak to them to help them as descriptors when they are going for interviews or internships, because to say, “I want to get into sales because I am a people person,” that is not very descriptive, right? If you can talk about how you connect with people and where on these different tests you show up, that allows the interviewer to understand you more.
How would you describe the Enneagram, because it is thick, that is why you took a two-year course, without having to go into all the details of the Enneagram, how would you describe the Enneagram in comparison to those other personality profile tests that I mentioned, and people are probably more familiar with?
A DISC assessment, a Myers-Briggs, those are great, and they are going to tell you behaviors, and they are going to tell you what I call, if you can imagine an iceberg, the tip of the iceberg, everything that everyone sees on the outside. The Enneagram will name that, and the Enneagram is a circle with nine types. It is nine archetypes, nine different profiles, nine different personalities.
The biggest difference between the Enneagram and one of those other modalities is that the Enneagram really gets to the motivation. What motivates those behaviors that people observe? As I said, with my husband, I could observe these behaviors. I did not understand them, and I did not know what was driving them. The Enneagram gets to those underlying motivators. It is everything, if you’re imagining that iceberg, everything below the surface, the internal experience that is driving outward behavior.
The difference, another main difference between the Enneagram and another one of those assessments, is that it gives you a map, and it gives you a road, a guide to how to understand and then live beyond. It is like living in a glass box that you never knew you lived in, and the Enneagram blows that open and says, “This is where you could go. This is where you are as your type, and we are going to open your world up to nine other types, nine other ways of seeing the world, nine other ways of being motivated.”
The Enneagram is one of the unique tests, or one of the unique modalities, where you type yourself. At the end of the day, you determine your type. No test can tell you your type. No Enneagram expert, no guide can tell you your type. You live your lived experience. You self-disclose, you choose, you decide, you determine what is true for you.
That kind of blew the cap off of things for me was when we started going through the Enneagram. Katherine said to me, “I know you’ve always typed as a Three with a two wing, but there’s this eight.” I was just joking with my husband, like the day before, about how you are not supposed to type young people, right? Really, you need to type as an adult. Is that correct? You should not be giving this to twelve-year-olds.
No, because this comes up a lot in the Enneagram community of “When can you start typing?” My teacher will joke, “If they’re understanding TikTok videos, then they can begin to type themselves.” You do need enough lived experience for the personality to stick. You do need to have gone through some adversity, navigated some challenges, to begin to really understand what that process looks like or how you overcame it.
You need enough lived experience for the personality to stick. You need to go through adversities and challenges to know how to overcome them. Share on XI do know some young people who I feel like have lived a thousand lives because they have had a lot of adversity, and they have come through with tremendous resilience. I guess that is why there was no number as to what age, it is like you said, it is the lived experience. We were joking because my husband and I did not take our kids through the Enneagram test. We felt like they were still too young. They have not had that lived experience. We were joking about my youngest son, and we were like, “Maybe he’s an eight.”
For those people who do not know what each one of the numbers represents, the eight represents the challenger. You can imagine we have a teenage boy. There it is, right. We were laughing about it a little bit. When I got on the call with you a day or two later, and you said, “No, it seems like you might be an eight, have you ever considered that?” I remember going back to my son and saying, “I want you to know we were kind of talking behind your back, but here it is, I’m going to tell you now.”
Katherine ended up telling me I might be an eight, and he is so clever. He looks at me, he goes, “I guess, Mom, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree now, does it?” I said, “Maybe not.” You have given us a context of where the Enneagram lies in conjunction with other personality profile tests, all very useful, all very helpful. Anything else that we should know as it pertains to this Enneagram and how it could help people by taking it? What is your role in that, as somebody who works with people in the Enneagram?
There are a ton of resources out there. There are books, and there are various tests. I would say, take any test with a grain of salt. The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson is a fantastic book, as well as The Complete Enneagram by Beatrice Chestnut and Uranio Paes, who are my teachers. It is a great beginner’s guide. Throughout the book, they have a couple of checklists to begin to see, “Could I be this type?” I will say, if you do an online test, take all those results with a grain of salt and just try it.
Just live into it. If you test as a couple of different types, just begin to observe, do I show up as the helper? Do I show up with an agenda where I want to achieve certain things? Am I more withdrawn in my emotions? Am I a seeker of various experiences? Do I play the mediator, which would be a type nine? Can I see all sides of an issue, but maybe not speak to my opinion of it as loudly as being able to manage everyone else’s opinions? As you begin in the past type, does it feel true to you? If it does not, then maybe you can explore another type or one lands right away.
That happens too. As a guide, I am here to help you on that path, to help you begin to understand the language, to begin to understand the foundation of it, to begin to understand what it means to live that type, but also to provide nuggets that would maybe challenge and push you, or to be the mirror to be like, “Is that true? Is the story of being a Three that you experienced? Is that true, and how true is that?”
Talk to people about what the experience of the test is like, because those of us who have not taken the test, we should probably know, where do you get this? How long does it take? What types of questions are they asking? What should they expect?
There are a variety of tests out there. Some are free, some are paid. You could take a very basic one like Truity, and Truity does a really good job of giving you three different ones to explore. You could take a RHETI test, which is Russ Hudson’s test, which I think is a low-cost one. That is $12. Really, what it is going to ask you is the same question, but from different perspectives, to see where you land and to see which type you might be answering the most questions from. This is where I say a test is not going to truly reveal your inner experience.
It is going to give you a snapshot, and it is going to give you a starting point. The Enneagram really wants you to look at your life as a whole, not situationally. I work with a lot of moms who fall into type two as a helper, but that is their role as being the mom, meeting the needs of little kids. That is not who they are, given the context of their entire life. When you bring it back to college and being a college student, that is probably the healthiest time that you are living into your personality.
Your college years are probably the healthiest time you are living into your personality. Share on XYour personality is being mirrored. You are making decisions and choices on your own for the first time. You have a sense of autonomy. It is really a time when your personality can shine. It is actually, that is a beautiful time to begin to explore your Enneagram type because you get to try it on where the stakes are really low.
I had never considered that, but you have a very valid point in that. For the students, I just want to remind you of what Katherine just said because they are thinking, “I only have two nickels to rub together, Tina. You know how much college is?” You can take the Enneagram test online for free. How long are these tests typically, even the free ones?
Twenty minutes at the most.
Do not be in a rush to take this test. Give yourself time to be in a space where you can be calm, not a lot of noise, not at a party, and you can take this test so that you can be thoughtful in your responses and hopefully get a decent response back. It can start for free. What is the difference between some of the free ones and the paid ones?
The free ones will just give you a snapshot. Some of the paid ones will give you a deeper report. That is where I say there are so many resources out there. Many great websites. CP Enneagram is a great website. Narrative Enneagram is a great website. Russ Hudson has great material. There are a ton of people I follow on Instagram that are just putting out amazing material of what the different types look like, which is another way to begin to see yourself.
You can touch in on the cheap. At the same time, the journey is long. We have an opportunity to upscale, so long as you are interested in going and doing deeper work in knowing thyself. At this stage of my life, part of the reason why I am partnered with Katherine to do my own work is that I want to show up as my authentic self because I want that level of vibration in this world and to be able to connect with you and have open conversations about how you feel about this and where that impacts you. How does this rub you the wrong way? It has really been a wonderful conversation. It is just, for me, I think it is a higher-level conversation. I mean, I could talk about the weather. We could talk about a lot of things, but you and I, there is never a loss of words for self-discovery.
A lot of the experience that I just described of taking the test, beginning to learn the nine types, is going to stay surface-level. Your personality will serve you until it does not. That is where I think a lot of the people that we are working with in leadership positions, or when you are in relationships that become challenging, that is when this deeper work of exploring occurs. Why am I showing up the way I am? Why are they showing up the way they are? How do I begin to unpack it? That is really where the depth and the beauty of the Enneagram come to light.
Let us go back because you are a graduate somewhere. When I found out where you graduated from, the funny thing is, being an East Coaster most of my life, I know the school names. Sometimes, if you say James Madison University, it is just JMU to those of us who went there or Go Dukes. If you are the University of Connecticut, we just say UConn.
As I get a little bit further west and I am working with more and more universities going that way, I realized we have different names. You went to, I am going to say the whole name. Tell me, like for those of you who went there. The University of California at Berkeley is where you went to school, completely the other side of the world from here. You were a collegiate athlete. Tell us about the younger Katherine Touhey. Tell us about yourself.
Younger Katherine Touhey was very aspirational. I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. Northern Virginia is a hotbed for swimming. We have a lot of amazing swimmers who come out of this area. I just happened to, from a very young age, excel at swimming.
What was your swim team?
I grew up swimming at the Army Navy Country Club, and like a lot of us, I grew up in summer league, where it is fun all the time. Swimming is just fun.
I give a shout-out to the OG.
That is where it started. That is where I learned how to swim in my grandparents’ backyard. They had a pool. That is where it officially started. Yes, I had success as a very young kid. In the Northern Virginia area, there are a lot of opportunities to swim for a club team. Swimming then becomes a year-round sport, and you get thrown into this larger thing called USA Swimming. My career quickly progressed from there. All the while I am doing all the things.
Playing soccer, going skiing, playing tennis, golf, and touch football back in the day with my friends. We did not have flag football. It was touch football. Sometimes, boys would get aggressive tackles. All the while, I always swam. My career progressed to the point where in my junior and senior years, I started figuring out what the next steps would be and what it would be to compete in college, and at what level I wanted to compete.
I was competing nationally at that point. I really aspired to go to a D1 school and go to a top fifteen school and really see where my career could continue to take me. I explored a lot of different options. I explored the Naval Academy, I explored Princeton, I explored UVA, and Southern Methodist. I had the opportunity to go on a recruiting trip to California, and that sold it right there. My parents could not understand for the life of them why I would want to go to school 3,000 miles away.
They were like, “UVA is right down the road, and it’s in-state rates. Why are we going?” I get that.
At Cal, you have the opportunity to design your own major. It got to the point where I was trying to figure out what I was going to major in because I did not have the hindsight to go back to my ninth-grade year in high school and be like, “That’s really what I want to study.” I had the opportunity to design my own major, interdisciplinary studies. I took this really cool class on Islamic studies. It really opened my eyes up to the Cold War and US foreign policy during that time, what the US relationships with Iran and the Middle East were.
I ended up designing my own major and doing a deep dive into US foreign policy during the Cold War, writing a thesis, and taking a class with Ayatollah Khomeini’s godson, which only in a Berkeley education could you do and experience. A total shift from what I initially thought I would ever study, but I took advantage of the opportunity at Cal to really learn. I took a class from Ralph Nader’s sister on groupthink and really went all-in on the Cal experience.
That is really cool. You are the first person I have talked to who decided to study that and interdisciplinary studies, although it now seems to be more broad-based. Back then, it sounded like that was very California. You get to design your own major, which I think is wonderful. Now that you have the hindsight that you have, what would you have studied?
Psychology, kinesiology, and more of the lived human experience.
Bring that forward. You end up leaving school, and you have a life after school. Catch us up on your life after school and how you ended up getting into the Enneagram. What did the Enneagram result in for you?
Being 3,000 miles away from home was not the easiest for me. I graduated, and I came back East. I needed some time at home because going that far away, I did not have the luxury of just coming home on the weekend. I made up for that time. I had aspirations to work for a think tank and work in the Pentagon.
It did not fit. It did not feel right. I always loved athletics. I ended up working for Georgetown in the athletic department, Georgetown University in their athletic department, and working in day-to-day ops, ticketing, and with their fundraisers and the booster program. I loved that. I loved sport and event management, and being still in that athletic world and working with athletes and working with people who love athletics and support sports.
I did that and then progressed and actually worked for a sports agency in their event marketing and event production side of it. I did fundraising events with Andy Roddick and a lot of tennis events, and worked with some professionals there, like Andre Agassi. I loved that. It was still the human experience part of it, working with these well-renowned, amazing athletes, but at the same time, knowing that they were human and they were dealing with human things just on this really big stage.
It always piqued my interest. I got married, and I had kids, and my career switched, and I taught PE for a little bit. I was like, “Let me work with kids.”Our second child came, and I stayed home with the boys. We had a third child, and I stayed home with the boys. I hunkered down with little kids and was in that world while my husband did the corporate thing. The itch came back. It was like, “What am I going to do next? Where is this going to take me?”
In the Enneagram world, we like to say that the Enneagram finds you. You do not find it. It finds you when you’re ready. That is where I say when I found this modality that finally stuck and really made sense to me, that is when I made the choice, like, “This is what I want to take out into the world.” This is, and I always say, the Enneagram is a gift. It is like, “This is the gift that I want to be a conduit for.”
Those are beautiful words. We heard earlier that it was really your husband who brought this gift to your attention. You had forgotten that in ninth grade, it was there all along, but you started doing a deep dive into yourself. What was the revelation in the deep dive for yourself? If you want to share what your number is and all of that, that would be great. By the way, for those of us who talk Enneagram, it becomes this whole other fun little language, and you are like, “That’s so Three of you.”
We will do mini roasts of each other based on our numbers. As somebody who had typed Three with a two-wing, I really understood you very well. At the same time, I realized that maybe that was just a mask and that I could really be a different number altogether, which feels more in line with the work that I am doing right now. Talk about the revelations that occurred when you got this tool, you got this insight, and what came of that for you?
I had always thought of myself as highly motivated and driven, with the ability to achieve, the ability to collect accolades in swimming, the ability to compete at the highest levels, and go to a D1 school. Even afterwards, continue to move towards excellence and to move towards just that idea of accomplishment. It really meant a lot to me. As a Type Three, we are considered the achievers. We achieve a lot of success.
We do not show it, but we work really hard in the background. I call it the duck effect, where we are calm, cool, and collected on the top, but underneath, we are flailing. That is a Three. We show up as easygoing and no big deal, but internally, there is a huge drive to achieve and a huge drive to meet the next goal. We are very aware of what the next goal is. We will become very frustrated if someone gets in the way of us achieving that goal.
That is where the impatience of the type can show. Once I began to unpack what achievement meant for me, and I began to look back and see why I was doing some of the things that I was doing, what was really underlying the motivation behind that. Some of it I can point to was pure joy, pure joy, pure just loving being in the experience of the hard work and the hard work paying off. There were other times where I could look back and be like, “That was a checkbox, and that was miserable. I was doing it for all the wrong reasons.”
I can hold both. I can hold both when the personality really served me and then when the personality really let me down. Now, being able to understand the full scope of it, I have so much more clarity in the direction in which I am going, so much more discernment about the choices that I am making, and what is meaningful. Not only meaningful for me, but meaningful for my family, because Threes can be workaholics, and we can become very transactional, which for a child, does not work.
They do not want to be transactional. They do not want a workaholic mom. They want something soft. They want to surrender. They want presence. They want empathy. As a Three, those are skills that I had to learn. I say learn because they did not come naturally. That idea of slowing down did not come naturally. I expected my kids to work at the same pace I did.
Children do not want a workaholic mom. They want softness, presence, and empathy. Share on XI feel you on that. I actually have a little story; it just popped back into the front of my head. I remember I was asking my one son, and he was very young, I think he was like 4 or 5, and I had said to him, “Honey, mommy’s checking in to see what kind of job I’m doing, and is there anything you would like to give me feedback on?” It is like a job interview. This is the ridiculousness that is my life.
He is a very smart kid, and he just looked at me and said, “No, I don’t think so.” I said, “Okay.” I am not kidding, it was like six months later, and all of a sudden, he comes up to me out of the blue, and he says, “Mommy, you remember when you asked me to give you some feedback?” I said, “Yes,” and the world stopped, right? He says, “Maybe you can tell me to do one thing at a time.” I was like, “Got it.” My list of things, and you are like, at this point, age five and a half, six, maybe a little too much.
I love the way that you describe how you can hold both at the same time. You can be an achieving Three and you can find the joy in that, but then you also were able to reflect upon the times where it was like, “This is not serving me, yet I cannot help myself and I probably was not showing up as my best self, but I was just doing that duck paddle underneath and it was out there, so I need to go for it.” How did that play out for you?
Threes are very image-conscious, and it is horrible to say, but you can kind of live through your resume. If you can put D1 swimmer, all of those great things on your resume, but if that is what you are living through, then you put a lot of pressure on yourself to make sure that the walk you are walking shows up as exactly what you want. While internally, you could be struggling.
That idea of, “I’ve worked so hard to reach this point that I’ve earned this,” and Threes will not admit failure. Failure, they fear failure. They do everything they can to make sure they avoid failure. The idea that what I was working towards, and then when I am there, that it is not working or that it is not serving me, or I am, God forbid, I actually admit that I am miserable, like there are three grappling with that.
They are not going to want to admit that what they were working towards was the wrong decision. I go back to that workaholic piece because mind over matter. If you do not mind, it does not matter. Threes are really good at suppressing emotions. Emotions, you and I know, are the signals to say, “Ding, something’s up, you should listen. Something’s going on here. Can you please pay attention?” Three will go, “No. That’s inefficient. No, that doesn’t serve me. No, not right now. That will slow me down or affect my image.”
I am going to take us to a new place. Because I met you, I started doing Enneagram work with you, and then, quite by accident, I looked up your name, and I thought, “Is this the same Katherine Toohey?” Sure enough, it was. This Enneagram work that you were doing on yourself revealed something else, revealed something about your past that you are currently dealing with in the present. Do you mind taking us there?
As I said, I was a D1 athlete, and I swam at Cal, and my experience that I thought was going to be at Cal was not. If you had asked me prior to four years ago about my, “You swam at Cal. You swam D1,” my answer would have been, “Yes. I got injured, and that ended my career.” That is what I would have said. I would not have talked about it. I would have ended the conversation as quickly as I could. If you wanted to hear about my swimming experience, I would talk about my experience in high school. My experience at Cal, what I made sense of up until a couple of years ago, was that I got injured, and my body quit.
During my Enneagram studies, it came out that my coach was abusive. Mind you, I was there from 2000 to 2004. The language around abuse at that point was sexual and physical abuse, when in actuality, what I was experiencing was psychological and emotional abuse. An investigative journalist wrote a large piece about my coach. When I read the article, I began to see a different experience of how I had made sense of my experience at college.
I began to think that maybe that was not a badge of honor that I had endured. Maybe that was not just being an elite athlete in a D1 program. Maybe, actually, what I was experiencing was abuse. I had to take a hard look in the mirror. I had to do a lot of inner work, and thankfully, I had the Enneagram because the Enneagram was my roadmap to begin to understand my experience in a different way, understand that I was not a failure at the time.
The Enneagram is your roadmap to understanding your experiences in a different way and realizing you are not a failure. Share on XI was in a system that was never going to work for me because the coach was abusive, and I began to understand that maybe I am not as weak as I had been telling myself that I was at 18 in a really unfortunate situation. I began to do the work, and I began to heal, and I began to tell my story, which for a Three was really scary, to tell my story that what I had worked up to did not work and was damaging to me.
What I had labeled for so long as me being a failure, I had to rewrite that script. “I did not fail. I had an abusive coach. The system failed me.” By me revealing that and telling that story, what I met with is how courageous I am to finally speak my truth, which I had to unpack and learn and do a deep dive into what that truth meant, but to speak about what really happened to me there and take steps and actions to right the wrong.
We are not going to go into the details of all this because there is a case that is currently being litigated. I want to respect that case and the sanctity of that case. For anybody who is interested, they can look up Katherine Touhey’s name, and you can see a little bit about her online, as she had told me. You Googled me. I find the fact that you were able to, many times we do this, right?
We rationalize the heck out of things that our gut is telling us, “This isn’t right,” but our head just takes over, and we overthink things in a way, and when I say we, I am going to say me. I can overthink things in a way where I just rationalize the heck out of it and say, “No, this is okay.” The work that you did in the Enneagram allowed you to have some level of definition and see where you had shown up, and you were taking blame for yourself, and you were rationalizing things for yourself.
Let us move into what you think it could do for people who have never done this work. What do you want to do now? What are your goals as far as you have really embraced this? We have had great conversations. You have worked through your own things that the Enneagram has revealed, and now you have chosen this as a path that you want to connect with people in the world. If there is one thing I am always about, it is interpersonal connection. This is at a new level. This is at depth. What do you want to do with this moving forward?
The one thing that I loved about the Enneagram is that I have such comfort in my own lived experience. We talk about that iceberg. You have the patterns of behavior on the top, and then you have all the underlying motivations and all the internal dialogue and the internal experience. The problem is that so many people either unconsciously or consciously filter what is coming from the bottom up. The beauty of the Enneagram is that it blows all of that open, so there is no difference between what you are experiencing on the inside and how everyone else is experiencing you.
That idea of anxiety and worry, yes, it still exists, but you are able to play with it and understand it and have grace and compassion for it at the same time. I always say things like, “I am so much more alive and so much more comfortable in my own skin.” In return, I see people for who they are, knowing that they are uniquely them. It is an opportunity to learn from them because I know even if I were talking to a Three, I have so much to learn and gain from their experience and our exchange.
Just walking through the world with that curiosity, that curiosity of like, “I am confident in how I show up, but every interaction is an opportunity to learn because I know that person is coming with something different.” The cool thing is, if the other person knows their Enneagram type, then game on. Game on, the conversation is going to go really deep, and it is really deep, really quick. It is going to be a beautiful, magical thing.
However, if you do not know their type, then the world is your playground, because then you can begin to explore how they are showing up differently than you. Once again, it is kind of like the Mel Robbins theory of letting them. Let them be in their personality. Let them do them, and then let me begin to be curious about how I am responding to them. The Enneagram gives you the language of exactly how you are responding to them. The beautiful thing is when you guys can do that dance together because you both know the Enneagram.
You know when someone is in a flow state. As an observer of you just sharing that last bit, you just know that you have found the thing that just makes you sing. When you were just talking, you were really singing. It is just so lovely. I have been very fortunate to meet you, to do the work with you. Katherine is someone who obviously has this background in D1 sports.
She knows what it means to be an elite athlete. One of the talks that we had was about you being able to connect with college coaches and talk to them about how the Enneagram could serve them in their leadership as a college coach, which I think is brilliant, because then you have all of these student athletes who are also trying to figure themselves out.
They are not just trying to figure themselves out as an athlete, but they are trying to figure themselves out as, “Who am I going to be if I am not going to continue to be an athlete post-college?” You and I were the ones who talked about somebody who was a Duke lacrosse player who had put their Duke lacrosse experience at the bottom of their resume. Was that you?
Yeah.
I could not believe it. It was like, “We are going to put Duke lacrosse at the bottom of the resume? What about you being in an elevated program, and teamwork and time management, and what about all of that is not going to translate into the business world? Why are we hiding that?” To be able to have someone like you come in, work with the coaches, and work with the students, it is good work. It is really good work.
I look at it from two different ways. One, it is the coach knowing how they are leading, like any good leader of an organization. What are they leaning into? What patterns are they implementing that the kids are receptive to? Here is the thing about the Enneagram. It brings the subconscious consciousness. The coach needs to know what they are leading with. They also need to be respectful of the fact that the people, the players on their team, are also coming with something different. I will talk about that dance.
The Enneagram brings consciousness to the subconscious. Share on XIf you are playing that dance well between leader and player, there is a high level of trust there, and you are given this amazing opportunity because sport is a playground. You fail all the time. You fail all the time in sports. What better opportunity to understand how you are persevering, how you are being more resilient, how you are pivoting and adapting, than to bring language to that? The Enneagram brings the language to it to then be like, “I have these skills, I can own it, I’m living it, I’m being rewarded for it because my performance and the coach are telling me in real time, my teammates are surrounding me, and also mirroring this back to me.”
The pivot of “What does this mean after college? What does this mean in the workforce? What does this mean for this experience in the field? How do I translate it to something like my authentic true self? Yes, I am my authentic true self on the field, in the pool, on the tennis court, whatever it is. I am also that same person in a job interview, in the workforce, in my relationships.”
I love it. There is such good work that is going on there. Katherine, I could talk to you about this forever, but I think we have given enough information for people to look up a lot of stuff, get online, start taking the Enneagram, and contact you if they want to. By the way, how can they contact you? What is the best way to contact you? Is there a website? Is there LinkedIn? Is there an email? How would you like to be contacted?
I am on LinkedIn, Katherine Touhey, and my website is KatherineTouhey.com, and you can reach out to me that way.
That sounds great. With that, I just want to say thank you again for the time that you take with me personally, the time that you are taking with student athletes, with their coaches. You are also doing great work in the home. You have three lovely boys who have an outstanding mom, and you are going to be able to help them get a little bonus in this world because you are in their lives. I look forward to seeing you very soon.
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