The Wisdom of the Enneagram

by Don Richard Riso

Sixes dislike having too many options. They feel more confident in situations with well-defined procedures, guidelines, and rules, such as the legal profession, or accounting, or academia. When the demands on them are clear, however, they can be highly effective at creating structure and organization—often serving as the head of a group or corporation that governs by consensus. Not all Sixes are comfortable in organizations, however, given their suspicion of authority. Many Sixes find a great deal of flexibility and creativity within the security of known boundaries. For them, it is no more restrictive to play within the rules of an organization than it is to play tennis with the net up or to read a book starting at the beginning. As far as they are concerned, things have a natural order, and they are usually content to work within it—as long as they also retain some choice about whether to ignore it. (They may never exercise this choice, but they still want to know that it is there.) Even artists, writers, therapists, and other creative individuals who are Sixes like working with established forms (the Blues, Country, sonatas, haiku) and find freedom within these structures. Sixes feel safer when they have some sense of what to expect, so they typically dislike sudden changes. Having a certain amount of dependable predictability is comforting to their anxious minds.