Enneagram test: find out who you are

The enneagram doesn't sort people by what they do, but by where they do it from: nine different engines, each one with a fear at the bottom of it and a desire at the bottom of that. It's why two people can behave in exactly the same way — staying late to help someone out — and be doing opposite things: one because they can't stand leaving a job half-done, the other because they need to be needed. Once you know which engine is yours, a lot of your own reactions stop looking like character flaws and start looking like a pattern.

This test never asks you to rate yourself from one to five, which is where most of us quietly answer as the person we'd like to be. Instead it puts 36 pairs of statements in front of you, and in each one you simply pick the side that sounds more like you. Those are all the possible pairings of the nine types, so each type goes head to head with the other eight exactly once and none of them starts with an advantage. At the end you get your type, your wing (the neighbor that pulls hardest on you), your two arrows — where you head when you're growing and where you slide when you're under stress — and the full breakdown of all nine, because this is a gradient and not a box. If these portraits are your kind of thing, there are more in Tests.