Why I started Ninefold
For most of my life, I couldn't understand why people felt the way they felt, or thought the way they thought. Then I read one page that explained me to myself.
Something wasn't missing
I'm a Type Five. Growing up, I watched the people around me feel things quickly and openly, and I wondered what I was missing. My feelings were real, but they came to me slowly, and usually through my head: I'd think my way into them, sometimes days later.
In college, through Chi Alpha at Indiana University, I came across the Enneagram. The first time I read the description of a Five, everything clicked at once. Nothing was missing in me, and nothing was wrong with me. I simply process emotion by understanding it first. That one realization changed how I saw myself, and how I saw everyone else.
Understanding the people I love
It helped me understand the girlfriend who is now my wife, and the friends, family and coworkers around me. People who had puzzled me for years started to make sense, not because they fit in a box, but because I could finally see what they wanted and what they feared.
My wife is an Eight. A Five and an Eight see the world very differently: she meets life head-on, and I want to understand it first. We think we may be a less common pairing, and we're a living case study in how two very different people can love each other well. One day Ninefold's own data will tell us just how common our pairing really is.
Today we have four daughters, and we love helping them learn and grow strong. We're in no hurry to type them. Personality takes years to show itself, and we're excited to watch each of them become who God made her to be.
A Five goes all in
Being a Five, I didn't stop at one book. I read everything I could find, listened to every podcast I could, and went looking for real statistics about the types. Mostly I found guesses. I started teaching what I was learning to my small group, and they found it as life-changing as I had.
I also found the gaps: tests that left people unsure of their type, descriptions that stereotyped, numbers nobody could source, and Christian teaching that sometimes borrowed ideas Scripture doesn't support. Ninefold is my answer to those gaps.
“I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Your works, and I know this very well.”
What I learned in that first reading: not a defect to fix, but a way God made me, with its own gifts and its own sins to bring to Him.
“But in fact, God has arranged the members of the body, every one of them, according to His design.”
Different on purpose. The people who puzzle us are often the parts of the body we most need.
Our mission
Ninefold exists to be the most accurate and robust Enneagram platform there is, to help as many people as possible understand themselves and the people around them, and to help them grow in spiritual health, with Scripture as our authority and Christ as our identity.
The most accurate test we can build
Motivation-based, adaptive, honest about uncertainty, and checked against expert interviews before we publish any accuracy figure.
Depth, not stereotypes
Instincts, subtypes and countertypes, wings and lines with both their high and low sides, and levels of health.
Real numbers
Statistics from our own opted-in data, with sample sizes shown, instead of the guesses I kept finding.
Scripture first
A tool for self-examination, never a source of truth or identity. Growth is the Spirit's work.
Jeremy Snyder, founder