- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Three resources *
- Meeting the world
- Nine strategies *
- Nine types
- Gut types
- EIGHT *
- NINE *
- ONE *
- Gut types review
- Corruption and redemption
- Heart types
- TWO *
- THREE *
- FOUR *
- Heart types review
- Symmetry of the board
- Head types
- FIVE *
- SIX *
- SEVEN *
- Head types review
- All nine sectors
- Discerning home base part 1
- Gifts and temptations
- Developing all three resources
- Taking the advice of the opposites
- The path to redemption part 1
- Celebrating all of who we are
- Neurology
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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TWO
TWO is a heart-gut combination – the heart, taking the lead, reaching out in the service of love, and the added gut influence giving an instinct for direct action in the world. Direct action in the service of love is giving and caring. The strategy of TWOs – in the service of the heart – is to give and to care.
TWOs have powerful talents for their task – beginning with a remarkable heart-and-gut intuition for where needs lie: TWOs can sense a hidden need at a hundred paces, and they can read you like a book. From the same heart and gut combination comes a direct engagement with individuals: TWO’s natural domain is the one-to-one relationship. TWOs have a memory for detail which is like a vast filing cabinet storing information on each of their one-to-one relationships in turn: when you meet only for the second time, TWO will remember every detail of your interaction the time before – how you take your coffee, where your family lives, the names of the friends you were seeing that evening. And finally there is TWO’s charm: the heart and gut combination means that TWO connects with you immediately, and you are drawn in straight away.
This is a powerful set of talents – insight, one-to-one engagement, memory for detail, and charm. On the telephone or at the enquiry desk TWOs are totally attentive and could not be more helpful. As a company representative a TWO could convince you that the entire organization is committed exclusively to your welfare. TWOs could sell you anything and make you feel good about buying it.
As for the virtue of giving and caring to stir up love, it all depends on whether TWO is stirring up love for the sake of love – a high Christian calling – or stirring up love for the sake of TWO – fishing for compliments, giving in order to receive. Either way, TWO has a powerful set of talents to hand.
Turned to self-interest, the strategy and talents of TWO can be smothering, demanding, intrusive, intimidating – even manipulative. This TWO wants to keep control of every aspect of the relationship – and ultimately control you. It can be patronizing and possessive.
Turned to the interests of love alone, giving and caring TWO becomes the perfect biblical model of selfless, generous, unconditional love. TWO redeemed will care for your nourishment, education, welfare, even self-belief – would stand by you in any suffering or pain or conflict, whatever its cause – would forgive anything, give their last ounce of energy, come running in a crisis – and would care like this for friend and stranger alike, for the respectable and for the outcast, and await no reward, not even recognition, not even from the beneficiary. This is the high Christian calling to stir up love for the sake of love alone, to give and care unconditionally for the good of all creation.
Either way, it is through giving and caring to stir up love that TWO finds a role in the world, a way to interact, a strategy.
Mother Teresa is the patron saint of TWOs – of all natural benefactors, givers and helpers.
In the Scriptures, the traditional Mary Magdalene is TWO, washing Jesus’ feet with her hair – a simple act of generous and compassionate kindness and care; also Martha, fussing with the serving instead of listening; and supremely Saint John, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ promoting and promoting above all else that we must love one another.
The national stereotype for TWO is the Italian mother: powerful, strong, caring – and demanding.
A cartoon animal for TWO is the clucking mother hen, marshalling her brood – or the enthusiastic licking puppy: the affectionate attention is charming at first, but after a while its target may be saying ‘enough now! Go away!’
The temptation of TWO is pride: ‘I do all this giving, they all depend on me, I have earned my reward.’ The potential gifts of TWO are a genuinely unconditional kindness and generosity.
On the path from corruption to redemption, TWOs come to recognize that their individual high Christian calling is just one small part of God’s much wider plan for the good of the whole world: TWO is not alone in an endless task, but a co-worker with God and with others; God has other plans for some of the needs they see – and cares about TWOs as well. ‘Let go and let God’ is good advice for TWOs: it gives TWOs the liberating permission to invest at least some of their resources in nurturing, strengthening, and cherishing themselves, rather than investing everything in others. TWOs can then engage with the hearts of others with generosity, instead of neediness, to the fore. It also makes it possible for TWO to form some healthy, symmetrical ‘co-worker’ relationships, where TWO can both give and receive freely as an equal, perhaps for the first time. Making some space to nurture and refresh the self, balancing action with contemplation, TWOs – natural givers – learn to receive – from God and from others – and move toward their perfect vocation to be agents of God’s compassion in the world.