Your dominant Enneagram style also has a relationship to its neighboring styles, called wings. If Four is your core style, you will have an intuitive built-in connection to both Three and Five. Your sensitive, subjective Fourish orientation would be modified by a preoccupation with action and image (Three wing) or a less social, intellectual drive (Five wing). If you know your core style and think about it further, you can usually identify your primary wing. You will usually find you have favored one over the other in your history and character.
As with stress and security points, the healthy qualities of your wings are available to you like talents, while the unhealthy qualities exist as potential pitfalls. Depending on your focus, you can tap the high-side resources of your wings or unconsciously fall into their traps.
Technically everyone has two wings. If you only recognize your primary wing, you will still have a natural disposition toward the resources and pitfalls of your other more secondary wing. The connection will still be expressed in your behavior, probably in ways that others see but you don’t.
You might also express your unconscious wing in your relationships by marrying or befriending people whose core Enneagram style is the same as your latent wing. It’s worth searching your experience for the influence of your latent wing because it is there whether you’re aware of it or not.
Roughly two-thirds of the population has one primary wing. The rest are bi-winged and experience a combination of motives and themes that reflect the joint influence of both wings.
Here is a quick list of wings: Ones: Nine and Two; Twos: One and Three; Threes: Two and Four; Fours: Three and Five; Fives: Four and Six; Sixes: Five and Seven; Sevens: Six and Eight; Eights: Seven and Nine; Nines: Eight and One.
Excerpted from The Dynamic Enneagram by Tom Condon
Copyright 2009, 2013 by Thomas Condon
Available as an ebook serial at Tom’s website  http://www.thechangeworks.com
Tom Condon has worked with the Enneagram since 1980 and with Ericksonian hypnosis and NLP since 1977. These three models are combined in his trainings to offer a useful collection of tools for changing and growing, to apply the Enneagram dynamically, as a springboard to positive change. Tom has taught over 800 workshops in the US, Europe and Asia and is the author of 50 CDs, DVDs and books on the Enneagram, NLP and Ericksonian methods. He is founder and director of The Changeworks in Bend, Oregon.
