- 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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Discerning home base – Part 1
Each of the nine strategies taken separately reads like a piece of good advice. All nine may be good advice in different situations. One of the nine may even be a favorite piece of ‘advice to yourself’ – which you repeat to yourself like a proverb and make a conscious effort to follow. Following this favorite piece of ‘advice to yourself’ may take some effort – but it extends the range of what you can do.
If it takes some effort, and it extends the range of what you can do, it is almost certainly not your home base strategy. Your home base strategy is the advice you never needed to be given, the approach that comes most naturally, the strategy you use automatically without pausing to consider or decide. Your favorite piece of advice to yourself – requiring some effort and extending the range of what you can do – is far more likely to be one of the pieces of advice diametrically opposite your home base on the board. The strategy that comes naturally, and the advice that you drill yourself to follow, are opposites in concept – and opposites on the board. Only if you had spent years away from home base, for whatever reason, would you need to give yourself the ‘advice’ of home base – and it would feel wonderfully effortless and natural – like a homecoming – whenever you took it.
Your attitude to your home base strategy is more likely to be one of rebellion than choice. You identify some version of your underlying strategy as the source of your worst temptations, and rebel against it, determining to use a different approach. But that new approach will never come naturally: it will always be an effort in itself – and in reality it has its own pitfalls, just like the natural approach you are trying to escape. Despite its temptations, it is your natural home base sector that reveals your true gifting and vocation – and while you may travel widely, it is the only place that will ever ‘feel like home’.