use my understanding of my enneagram type and my Jungian personality as a means of self improvement and in setting my goals

My enneagram type is 4w5 so/sx instictual variants.
I used to see the enneagram as solely a means of understanding myself and I wasn’t as focused on the growth aspect and levels of health as much. But now I am! As for my level of health, it’s usually around level 3 and 4, and when a I’m focused on the concept of integration and I’m wondering how I can develop some healthy one traits.

And I also just learned that for a 4, growth doesn’t stop at integrating to type 1, we go through a journey of 5 other types before coming back to our core type.:

“Once the integration journey is begun, it continues and you follow the successive arrows to the other types. For the Type Five the journey takes then first to Eight but arrows continue on to Types Two, Four, One, and Seven. Through the influence of the arrows and the wings all the types, any specific type has contact with all the other types so as to facilitate growth”

Right now though I’d like to focus on what it means to integrate to 1 and how I can do that.

In some literature, I’ve seen type 1s described as idealists and I can definitely connect to that image. It’s something I long for my self. The 4 tends to spend a lot of time dreaming and imagining but to me it seems like 1 is interested in actually acting, going out in the world and making those visions real and that appeals to me immensely! In fact, that’s part of the reason get back to my goal setting and get involved with this site again. It helped me reach some of my goals last year. Being more grounded and moving towards action is an idea that really excites me.

One problem I’ve had with being a 4 is the idea of being an unrealistic dreamer who has beautiful profound visions but doesn’t manage to turn them into something. I’ve struggled with this and I know that those beautiful visions can be torture. But I think a move toward the action and realism of type 1 will help me balance this out and turn some of my dreams into reality.

Here are some other words that describe a healthy functioning type 1, which is what I’m aiming for:

Descriptive Adjectives for High Functioning Ones

Disciplined
Conscientious
Consistent
Advocate
Idealistic
Crusader
Ethical
Tolerant
Principled
Moral
Just
Good
Fair
Realistic

I’m drawn towards all these things and I’ve already started to see some of them in myself. Being disciplined and realistic are the harder qualities for me, but moving towards them would be really healthy and I intend to hone them through my goal setting.

My 5 wing probably also integrates so it would be a good idea to look at type 8 qualities and see how I can move there. I think being assertive and determined is a step towards that.
and I’d love to see how the instinctual variants can be uses as tools of growth. I’ll definitely flesh out all my ideas here later but I’m really excited about this goal and my head full of new ideas that are just starting to germinate. 3 years ago

I think we need to take unique approach to self improvement and goal setting based on our personality type and perhaps other factors.

I know this insight is nothing brilliant or new and may seem like common sense, but I’m realizing how profound it is!
I’ve been familiar for the enneagram for a long time now and I’ve been familiar with in depth Jung/MBTI for about a year now. I saw these as tools in understanding who I am and understanding why I’m the way I am and how I fit into the world. Though I’ve always been very interested in self improvement and goal setting, I’ve never thought much about using my understanding of personality as a way to accomplish this.

Sometimes in my goal setting I seem to hit a wall. Could this be that I’m not taking a personal approach that plays to my personal strengths and constructively develops areas that I fall short in? Sometimes I research goal setting or a goal I want to accomplish and the approach ends up not being very in line with my personality or there’s something missing and I end up moving away from it. It dawned on me that it would be much more productive to create my own constructive approach to goal setting. Often the goals I set are in line with my vision and the vision is in line with who I am (though I can also use my understanding of personality theories to improve this aspect too), but the process I use to get there isn’t always in line.

I can see how this will be really useful in Jung and my Jungian understanding of my MBTI code which is INFJ.
In playing to my strengths, it seems like a good idea use my 4 non-shadow functions and focus especially on my first two functions. (I know I can already use Ni to envision a good approach for me.)

I also have some enneagram ideas too.

I have lots of ideas on this and I’d like to use personality more constructively too. I’m going to explore this goal/idea and come up with a plan and write more later. 3 years ago