Struggling to stand out in an oversaturated market populated with Enneagram coaches? It may be time to integrate maturity into your Enneagram coaching and facilitate a richer, more comprehensive journey of self-awareness and growth for your clients. And, for yourself.

Current Challenges in the Enneagram Coaching Landscape

The Enneagram personality assessment is becoming increasingly popular. However, that popularity has manifested in pop culture scenarios where Enneagram personality types are stereotyped, and coaches adopt superficial ways of working with the Enneagram. This trend highlights the need for coaches to adopt a comprehensive, ethical, nuanced, and mature way of working with a tool that is frequently misused (and misunderstood).

Additional challenges within the realm of Enneagram coaching include: 

• Diversity and inclusion. The Enneagram tool has the potential to inadvertently push privileged narratives, sidelining marginalised perspectives. To avoid falling into this trap, coaches must ensure an inclusive approach that accommodates diverse perspectives and does not perpetuate societal biases.

• Coaching costs. With the advent of low-cost, scalable platforms like BetterUp and the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI)-based coaching, coaches are under pressure to offer competitive prices for their services while delivering exceptional value to clients. This pressure is magnified by economic downturns that lead to budget cuts in coaching and human development.

• Accessibility. The transition to online coaching in the wake of COVID-19 has redefined the coaching landscape. No longer limited to local or even national clients, coaches must now widen their service offerings and adapt to serve a broader audience.

“Coaches need to find ways to add value to their clients. More and more coaches are emerging, so in certain places, the market is becoming flooded. Additionally, when country finances are under pressure, things like coaching spending and investing in people are often first to be cut.” – Lucille Greeff, Aephoria.

[H2] What is Maturity?

Maturity is far more than just an age metric; it is a continual process of becoming our fullest selves. As we mature, we gain a deeper awareness of who we are, transcending societal norms and cultural conventions. This evolutionary journey enriches our ability to understand the nuances of different contexts, extends our timelines and horizons, and equips us to manage complexity with greater ease. 

Moreover, our agency – our capacity to act and influence the world – also grows with time. A mature individual is capable of embracing perspectives other than their own, thereby enriching their worldview. This progression occurs in stages, incrementally enhancing our ability to create, change, and connect with the meaning in our lives.

What is Maturity Combined with the Enneagram?

Understanding maturity in conjunction with the Enneagram can offer invaluable insights into one’s personal development journey. The Enneagram provides a detailed map of one’s personality traits, while maturity helps to pinpoint where one stands in their developmental arc. This dual lens allows for highly personalised growth strategies. 

“What may be helpful for one person is not for another. For example, an Enneagram Eight needs to calm down and stop using their anger to power through, whereas an Enneagram Nine benefits from being more assertive, connecting to their repressed anger, and showing up to change situations that aren’t working for them.” – Lucille Greeff, Aephoria.

How to Integrate Maturity into Your Enneagram Coaching

Begin by grounding your clients in their Enneagram personality type. Help them discern their inherent biases and orientations. Once they have a robust understanding of their personality type, you can introduce maturity as a lens through which they can think coherently about their growth. This helps the client to seek multiple perspectives and improve their sense-making abilities. 

Note the following tips when integrating maturity with the Enneagram:

• In one-on-one sessions, utilise the intimate setting to delve deeply into your client’s unique situation. This personalised approach allows you to tailor the coaching to specific challenges and opportunities they face. 

• When you’re coaching teams, focus on exploring the dynamics of emotions, feedback, and interpersonal relationships. A collective examination of these elements can offer key insights into individual reactions within teams and how maturity modulates these responses.

• Consider conducting a maturity assessment at the end of the coaching series or leadership development programme. This acts as a tangible measure of return on investment (ROI) and demonstrates the value added to the organisation. Then, re-assess maturity at the end of the coaching series to evaluate ROI and affirm value to the organisation.

• Always circle back to real-world applications. Encourage clients to share experiences where they’ve applied their newfound knowledge or faced relevant challenges. This iterative feedback not only promotes client growth but also serves to continually refine your coaching approach.

The Benefits of Integrating Maturity into Your Enneagram Coaching 

Integrating maturity into your Enneagram coaching might seem daunting. Concerns like “Will it overcomplicate my sessions?” or “Will clients see its worth?” are valid. Yet as the popularity of the Enneagram grows, there’s a need for coaches to adopt innovative methods to ensure the longevity and relevance of their practice. 

Enter the combined approach of Enneagram and Maturity. Maturity is an emerging focus area, and few coaches have integrated this into their methodology. 

“Working with maturity and the Enneagram also provides us with a unique and deep understanding of how a person makes sense of the world. This allows us to help ourselves and others to be more effective at the stage at which we/they are but also to enhance maturity. More mature people tend to be more capable at leadership, inclusion, strategy, transformation, innovation, abstract thinking, and at adapting to chaotic market conditions.” – Lucille Greeff, Aephoria.  

Imagine what integrating the Enneagram and maturity will do for your practice: 

Personalisation

Different Enneagram types mature along distinct paths. By identifying these unique trajectories, your coaching becomes exceedingly personalised, catering to individual growth needs and charting a comprehensive path to holistic personal growth and enhanced professional capabilities. 

This personalised, integrated approach fosters deeper self-awareness, broadens individual identity, and equips your clients for fulfiling interpersonal relationships. 

Sought-After Simplicity

In an increasingly complex world, individuals often yearn for simplicity and certainty. This is a double-edged sword as it often results in superficial problem-solving approaches. However, when you integrate maturity into your Enneagram coaching, you help your clients embrace complexity in a way that isn’t overwhelming yet still comprehensive and effective. 

Differentiate Your Enneagram Coaching 

Few Enneagram coaches offer a combination of maturity and Enneagram coaching; this presents an opportunity for you, a gap in the market. You can set yourself apart from competitors and attract clients who are specifically seeking to grow and develop on a deeper level. 

By incorporating maturity, you capitalise on the Enneagram’s current popularity and prepare for the rising focus on adult development in Enneagram coaching.

Command Higher Rates

Specialised coaching services often command higher rates due to their perceived value. Clients who recognise the uniqueness of your Enneagram and maturity coaching may be willing to invest more in your services. 

Grow Professionally

As you delve deeper into maturity development, you’ll continue to enhance your own coaching skills and knowledge. Your increased self-awareness, capacity to deal with conflict and perspectives across diverse (and challenging) settings, and enhanced critical thinking skills ensure you’re better equipped to serve your clients and derive meaningful results.   

Strengthen Client Relationships

Enneagram and maturity development often involve a longer-term coaching relationship as clients progress through various developmental stages. This can lead to extended and stable relationships with clients, resulting in recurring business and referrals. Satisfied clients will likely recommend your services to others, boosting your reputation as a coach. 

How to Measure Maturity ROI in Your Enneagram Coaching

The ROI of maturity in your Enneagram coaching can be systematically tracked through three core metrics. The first is self-awareness, where the Enneagram serves as the foundation for building self-awareness to offer a nuanced understanding of personality types and inherent biases. 

The second metric is the feedback from systems. You would implement a 360-degree feedback system to gather data from a client’s professional and personal networks before and after the coaching sessions. 

Lastly, consider the maturity shift. Employ pre and post-coaching assessments to measure changes in maturity levels. While the Enneagram remains a constant, the maturity piece is dynamic and should be reassessed. To observe the tangible benefits, we can look at the evolution from less mature to more mature leadership in several key dimensions:

• Performance Management: Shifts from avoidant, aggressive, and undermining behaviours to a more supportive, empathetic, and developmental stance.

• Collaboration and Care: Progresses from a purely task-focused mentality to valuing human interactions as an integral part of effective leadership.

• Feedback Reception: Transforms the perception of feedback from criticism or an attack to seeing it as valuable data for growth.

• Strategic Thinking: Evolves from short-term, linear planning to a more visionary, long-term, responsive approach.

• Diversity and Inclusion: Moves from viewing diversity as problematic to embracing it as a vital asset for fostering a culturally healthy environment.

• Change Management: Progresses from a reactive, command-oriented response to change to seeing it as an opportunity for innovation and growth.

• Complexity Management: Shifts from reducing or ignoring complexity to thriving on it, embracing multiple perspectives in problem-solving.

• Conflict Resolution: Transitions from either avoiding or instigating conflict for defensive reasons to facilitating productive conflict and minimising unproductive tension.

• Innovation: Progresses from recycling old solutions to developing creative, contextually appropriate responses.

Success Story: Maturity and the Enneagram in the Technology Sector

In a recent proposal for a leading technology company, Aephoria outlined an innovative strategy focused on enhancing relational capacity and human resilience in line with its new operating model. The strategy leverages two methodologies: leadership personality through the Enneagram and leadership maturity frameworks.

The client had previously engaged both the Enneagram and maturity frameworks at senior levels, enabling them to develop a nuanced understanding of the organisation’s overarching personality and maturity profile. This provided a robust baseline for initiating transformative changes that align with the the operating model in a very targeted manner. 

What sets maturity apart is its capacity to serve as a foundational methodology for human development — effectively a game-changer in leadership coaching. While the Enneagram is instrumental in building self-awareness, maturity acts as a catalyst for sustainable change and competitive advantage. 

“The fusion of these two methodologies has proved transformative for our clients, expediting the development of awareness, behaviour shifts, and maturity at the individual, team, and organisational levels.” – Lucille Greeff, Aephoria.

The Future of Maturity in Enneagram Coaching

As we look towards the future, integrating maturity into Enneagram coaching presents a shift for the coaching profession at large. Firstly, this integration makes coaches themselves more mature and robust in their practice, qualities that set the most successful and in-demand coaches apart from the rest.

The combination of maturity and the Enneagram also addresses the long-standing challenge in the coaching industry: the quantification of ROI. This combination offers a measurable parameter for success and contributes to elevating the professional standards of the entire coaching industry.

“[Maturity] is also changing the way the Enneagram community works with diversity and inclusion and is giving Enneagram practitioners substance to talk about the journey of growth. The maturity/adult development community needs an expansive way into self-awareness, and the Enneagram offers this to them.” – Lucille Greeff, Aephoria.

Moreover, integrating maturity allows coaches to deliver more individually tailored support to clients. It moves the focus away from prescriptive ‘recipes’ for development and instead encourages a nuanced understanding of client identities. 

Transform Your Enneagram Coaching with Maturity

At Aephoria, we offer a globally recognised accreditation in the Aephoria Identity Maturity Map (AIM) for Enneagram and maturity. With this accreditation, you unlock our AIM for Enneagram and AIM for Maturity assessments and confidently enable your clients’ transformations. Your practice flourishes, and you join a community of AIM coaches for ongoing support and learning. 

“The AIM assessment has had a powerful impact on coaching engagements thus far, opening clients to the idea of themselves on personal and leadership development journeys. I can’t recommend the AIM and the Aephoria accreditation training enough.” – Todd Iarussi, Rhinomind Coaching, USA.

Start now and experience the AIM by Aephoria assessment.