Type 8 Initial Self-Belief: “I am disempowered as I am.”

Type 8 Compensation: "I must be direct in going after what I want and stand strong against being controlled or taken advantage of."

Type 8 Core Focus: Empowerment comes from being in control and not being controlled by people or rules. This requires that I confront obstacles and people that are in my way and move directly toward what I want. Don't show weakness in a world that takes advantage of innocence and vulnerability.

Personality characteristics that might arise from the type 8 core focus include:

• Takes action decisively and sometimes impulsively
• Fills up the space around them with their presence and big energy
• Speaks directly and bluntly when making a point
• Often guards against vulnerability by denying softer emotions
• Naturally assumes role of leadership when there's a power vacuum
• Directly confronts others to reveal the truth of a situation
• Protects or seeks justice for those unfairly taken advantage of
• Anger arises in service of making things happen/getting things moving
• Prefers to make their own rules rather than follow others' rules

The Challenger, The Powerful, Dominating Type: Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational¹

Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others, of violation¹

Basic Desire: To protect themselves, to determine their own course in life¹

How Eights Pay Attention: Eights have several ways to not perceive threatening information. Their psychological defenses revolve around an idea of themselves as more powerful than any potential opposition, so consequently their perceptions tend to maximize their own strengths and minimize an opponent’s real advantages.²

Basic Proposition: You gain protection and respect by becoming strong and powerful, imposing your personal truth and hiding your vulnerability.²

Strengths: Courageous, strong, fair, truthful, determined, generous, protective of others²

Challenges: Excessive, angry, dominating, lustful, afraid of vulnerability²

Energy goes into: Control and dominance of my space and inadvertently of the people and things in my space. Taking direct action and facing conflict. Protecting the weak and innocent. Gaining respect by being strong and just.³

The Challenger: Commanding, intense and confrontational, they are motivated by a need to be strong and avoid feeling weak or vulnerable.⁴

Asserters are direct, self-reliant, self-confident, and protective.⁵

Focus of Attention: Eights naturally focus their attention on power and control—who has it and who doesn’t, and how it’s wielded. They think in terms of the big picture and (mostly) dislike dealing with details. They see the world as being divided into “the strong” and “the weak,” and they identify with “the strong” to avoid feeling weak.⁶

¹Book: The Wisdom of the Enneagram; Website: The Enneagram Institute

²Book: The Enneagram; Website: The Narrative Enneagram

³Book: The Essential Enneagram; Website: Dr. David Daniels

⁴Book: The Road Back to You

⁵Book: The Enneagram Made Easy

⁶Book: The Complete Enneagram; Website: Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy

Type 8 Fixation and Trap

Fixation: Vengeance comes from balancing the scales of justice when others attempt to take unfair advantage.

Trap: Justice pushes to reveal hidden truths that you imagine others to be hiding beneath the surface.

The fixation of vengeance points to the mental preoccupation of the type 8 ego. The trap of justice keeps an individual stuck in the fixation.

Type 8 Holy Idea

Holy Idea: Holy truth is knowing that each person has their own truth to live by and often it won't be the same truth that seems so obvious to you.

The fixation of vengeance and trap of justice keep an individual stuck in the type 8 fixation. The way out of that fixation is through holy truth.

Type 8 Passion

Passion: An excess of energy that needs to be released through activity and expression. "This energy feels natural for me but I may have to sit on it when others find it too much."

The passion of excess is the emotional energy that serves the fixation of vengeance and trap of justice.

Type 8 Virtue

Virtue: Innocence appears when you allow yourself to experience tenderness and vulnerability instead of habitually pushing out against the world.

The virtue of innocence is what appears when the passion of excess subsides.

• Lust
• Punitiveness
• Rebelliousness
• Dominance
• Insensitivity
• Conning and Cynicism
• Exhibitionism (Narcissism)
• Autonomy
• Sensorimotor Dominance

One method used to bring the types to life when teaching the Enneagram types involves interviewing people of a given type about how that type plays out in their life. This may be done through panels and one-on-one interviews.

Self-revelatory videos can also be useful where a person simply describes their type to a camera without the prompting of an interviewer.

Note that sometimes a person in a video may have been mistyped and may not offer an accurate representation of type when that happens.

Once their Enneagram type is known, celebrities or famous people can also offer interesting examples of and insights into Enneagram type as revealed through interviews, lectures, writings, and the person's work.

However, it's not like the Enneagram panels, interviews, and self-revelations where people are specifically describing how they experience Enneagram type in their lives. It's more a matter of looking for glimpses into how Enneagram type is operating in the person.

It can be difficult to type someone at a distance. Look for a consensus of opinion on a person's type from multiple sources and hold it loosely. Celebrities and famous people are often typed differently by different Enneagram authors, teachers, and enthusiasts.

It needs to be made clear that fictional characters are not real people, even when they are based on real people. There can be a temptation to assign Enneagram type to every character in a story, but many characters don't have that kind of consistency or depth.

Not only might there be a number of different people, usually of different types, influencing the creation or portrayal of a character but often the character is nothing more than a vehicle for telling the story and moving it along.

While once in a while a character appears that you can attribute an Enneagram type to, generally it's more accurate to look at specific scenes as examples of a type rather than the character as a whole.

Tom Condon wrote a book called The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide that you may find useful for seeing type in fictional characters.

Although they do exist, there are few song lyrics that can be attributed to one particular Enneagram type. Most songs have both lyrical and musical elements that can be attributed to a number of different Enneagram types.

Songs are extremely subjective. There are many songs that listeners, and even performers, interpret in a very different way than the song writer intended. A number of songs also emphasize the sounds of words rather than their meaning.

As such, different people hearing the same song often will experience it as representing different Enneagram types.

Enneagram type 8 wings (8w7 and 8w9)

Enneagram type 8 subtypes (sp 8, sx 8, so 8)

Enneagram type 8 tri-center (gut, heart, head)

• 8 vs 1
• 8 vs 2
• 8 vs 3
• 8 vs 4
• 8 vs 5
• 8 vs 6
• 8 vs 7
• 8 vs 9

Enneagram Type Preference Test
This test produces a scored list of all nine types.
Questions are forced-choice, similar to the method used by the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indictor (RHETI).
Use to determine type, wings, gut/heart/head types, and tri-center.

Enneagram Type Comparison Test
This test compares any two types. The preferred type will have the higher score.
Use when you've narrowed your type down to two or three possibilities you'd like to compare.