Coaching Type Six: Risk Assessment Isn’t Always Risk Aversion

So, Mario, tell us about striving to feel secure.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So that's how we talk about type six.

The preferred strategy is striving to feel secure.

This is what fundamentally motivates sixes, right? It's this, I need to be safe.

I need to be, I need consistency.

I need stability.

I need to know, you know, that things are as I think they are rather than as they fear they might be, as I fear they might be.

There's a lot of talk about sixes being loyal.

Some people call them the loyalist or the whatever kind of loyalist.

I think that's a huge misunderstanding.

That always actually kind of irritates me because I find sixes to be no more loyal or less loyal than any other Enneagram type.

And whatever loyalty there is is usually in service of this striving to feel secure.

I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about sixes, and a lot of that has to do with the Enneagram world being filled with a very specific population of people, right? I think this permeates all the descriptions, is that you get descriptions of the kind of people who go to self-help workshops, right? And so the sixes who go to self-help workshops are more likely to look a certain way, and Sixes outside of that environment may be a bit different, you know, so there is an issue around fear, but not all sixes are the chicken little, you know, skies falling, Woody Allen-esque sort of characters.

We encounter a lot of sixes who are very assertive, very confident, very successful people, and See a lot of sixes, you know, in senior levels and organizations.

So, yeah.

But the thing they all have in common is this tendency to look for what could go wrong and what can I do to make sure that it doesn't.

Yeah, and most times, or a lot of times, that's a good thing.

It helps.

It's just that under stress, they just get too fixated on it.

And it's not all they see, but it looks like it is.

Or that they look too pessimistic.

But it is a helpful thing to have around or to do for yourself.

As I've been reflecting back on these podcasts that we've done on coaching the different types, I've been becoming more and more aware of this issue of population selection, right? The people that Maria Jose and I work with tend to be a generally different population than the people that a lot of Enneagram teachers might work with in kind of more self-help environments.

So, Mario, tell us about striving to feel secure.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So that's how we talk about type six.

The preferred strategy is striving to feel secure.

This is what fundamentally motivates sixes, right? It's this, I need to be safe.

I need to be, I need consistency.

I need stability.

I need to know, you know, that things are as I think they are rather than as they fear they might be, as I fear they might be.

There's a lot of talk about sixes being loyal.

Some people call them the loyalist or the whatever kind of loyalist.

I think that's a huge misunderstanding.

That always actually kind of irritates me because I find sixes to be no more loyal or less loyal than any other Enneagram type.

And whatever loyalty there is is usually in service of this striving to feel secure.

I think there are a lot of misunderstandings about sixes, and a lot of that has to do with the Enneagram world being filled with a very specific population of people, right? I think this permeates all the descriptions, is that you get descriptions of the kind of people who go to self-help workshops, right? And so the sixes who go to self-help workshops are more likely to look a certain way, and Sixes outside of that environment may be a bit different, you know, so there is an issue around fear, but not all sixes are the chicken little, you know, skies falling, Woody Allen-esque sort of characters.

We encounter a lot of sixes who are very assertive, very confident, very successful people, and See a lot of sixes, you know, in senior levels and organizations.

So, yeah.

But the thing they all have in common is this tendency to look for what could go wrong and what can I do to make sure that it doesn't.

Yeah, and most times, or a lot of times, that's a good thing.

It helps.

It's just that under stress, they just get too fixated on it.

And it's not all they see, but it looks like it is.

Or that they look too pessimistic.

But it is a helpful thing to have around or to do for yourself.

As I've been reflecting back on these podcasts that we've done on coaching the different types, I've been becoming more and more aware of this issue of population selection, right? The people that Maria Jose and I work with tend to be a generally different population than the people that a lot of Enneagram teachers might work with in kind of more self-help environments.