Thinking. Motivation and enneagrams

I love personality test stuff. I've been down the Briggs-Myers road and explored the world of cholerics, sanguines, melancholics and phlegmatics.

Since we moved here, however, I've been confused by the constant references in the young women's group I'm in to numbers. "Oh, she's a definite 2," they'll say. Or, "Well, of course you would say that. You're a 4."

So now I'm into the enneagram. It's a way of defining people based on their motivations and it features nine different categories.

Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.

Type Two is demonstrative, generous, people-pleasing, and possessive.

Type Three is adaptive, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.

Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.

Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and isolated.

Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.

Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible, and scattered.

Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.

Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.

I began by thinking I was a 1 - a perfectionist who hears voices in her head telling her she's not good enough, but frankly, you just have to look around my kitchen to see that I'm not a classic 1. I live with too much mess and chaos. The motivation for the 1 is being right and perfect. They say, "I am happy when I'm perfect." 

After a bit more reading and doing a few (online) tests, I think I'm a 3 - an achiever and self-promoter who thrives on outside affirmation. It makes sense. After all, who but a 3 would have a website with their own name big and bold in the title. And I've always seen my life in terms of projects to achieve.