Coaching with the Neuro-Based Enneagram
A Pathway to Joy, Presence, and Christlike Transformation
The Ache Beneath the Surface
In a world saturated with burnout, self-help advice, and performance-driven spirituality, Christian leaders are desperate for something deeper. The Neuro-Based Enneagram offers more than personality insight; it provides a neuroscience-informed map back to joy, presence, and spiritual flourishing.
According to Barna’s most recent data, one-third of pastors (33%) have seriously considered leaving full-time ministry in the past year. Still a significant number, even though it reflects a slight rebound from the burnout peak in 2022. Fewer feel confident in their calling compared to when they first started. Lay leaders often feel as burned out as staff members. The cost of spiritual leadership today is not just external; it’s deeply internal.
For many, faith has become a function of performance: do more, serve more, give more, prove more. And yet underneath the surface, there's a quiet ache. Leaders often wonder: “Why do I keep repeating the same self-sabotaging patterns?” Or like Paul in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
What if the root of this struggle isn’t a lack of willpower—but a story your nervous system still believes?
The Neuro-Based Enneagram (Neuro-Based Enneagram) is a relational tool rooted in Dan Siegel’s Patterns of Developmental Pathways (PDP) and supported by Harmony Enneagram frameworks. It doesn’t label or reduce us to "types." Rather, it helps us compassionately recognize patterns of attention and motivation—formed early and reinforced over time—that shape how we show up in life, ministry, and relationships.
I. “Why Do I Keep Doing the Very Thing I Hate?”
Despite all our knowledge, training, and desire for growth, many of us find ourselves stuck in familiar, frustrating patterns, especially under stress. The Neuro-Based Enneagram helps us trace these patterns not just to personality quirks, but to adaptive strategies that were once essential for survival and connection.
These are not flaws; they are the nervous system’s best attempts to secure love, safety, or agency in environments that may not have offered all three.
From a neuroscience perspective, these patterns are etched into our implicit memory, the part of us that “knows” without words, formed long before conscious awareness. They are rooted in attachment, experience, and the body’s response to threat and belonging.
In coaching, we don’t try to fix these patterns. We explore them with kindness. We ask:
When did this strategy first feel necessary?
What fear, hope, or need lies beneath it?
What new response might be possible now?
This is the movement from reaction to response, from striving to trust. As we recognize our patterns, we make space for the Spirit to reshape our identity by deeper presence with God and others.
II. From Burnout to Belonging
Burnout isn’t just about doing too much; it’s about doing too much while disconnected from what truly matters. Ministry leaders are especially vulnerable to this, as their pattern often pushes them to earn love through performance, rescue others without boundaries, or carry burdens alone.
In 2023, only 11% of pastors described their mental and emotional health as ‘excellent,’ and fewer than one in five rated their overall quality of life that highly (Barna research). The numbers improve slightly when it comes to vocational satisfaction, but spiritual, relational, and emotional depletion remain serious concerns for ministry leaders across generations.
The Neuro-Based Enneagram recognizes that different people burn out for different reasons:
Some patterns drive us to over-function out of fear of being irrelevant.
Others push us to isolate emotionally to maintain control.
Still others lead us to merge with others' needs and lose our sense of self.
These are all attempts to protect against pain. But they disconnect us from presence, the place where joy is found, where grace restores, and where the Spirit leads.
Burnout recovery begins by noticing the pattern, then gently stepping outside of it, with support. Coaching offers a relational space to do just that: to reconnect with your true self, your calling, and God’s unhurried love.
By Erich
III. The Story Your Nervous System Believes
Transformation begins with story—the implicit narrative your body and brain learned through relationships: Am I safe? Am I loved? Do I matter?
The Neuro-Based Enneagram helps uncover these often-hidden scripts and replace them with something truer. Through coaching, we ask:
What did you learn about love, safety, or trust from your early relationships?
How is that story still shaping your expectations of God or others?
What might God want you to know now?
Neurobiology shows that new relational experiences—being seen, heard, and accepted—can literally rewire the brain. This is the power of safe, attuned connection. In coaching, the presence of another offers a new “relational blueprint,” one that mirrors the secure, unshakable love of God.
As clients begin to notice their patterns and receive love in those very places, the Spirit works transformation, not just at the cognitive level, but in the very structure of the self.
IV. Coaching as Relational Rewiring
Coaching with the Neuro-Based Enneagram is more than a conversation; it’s a laboratory for new neural pathways. Through practices like attunement, reflection, and compassionate curiosity, coaching becomes a space of integration.
This is the essence of mental health: linking differentiated parts of the self—emotion and reason, body and mind, past and present—into a coherent whole.
This means that in coaching:
Insight meets embodiment.
Story meets safety.
Pattern meets presence.
In this space, transformation is fostered gently. Clients begin to put off old masks and protective strategies and live from a deeper, Spirit-led self rooted in joy, peace, and relational trust.
By daisha
V. Becoming Like Jesus—From the Inside Out
The goal of the Neuro-Based Enneagram is not self-optimization. It’s not to become a better version of your pattern. The goal is Christlikeness.
As spiritual formation scholars remind us, transformation isn’t about knowing more or trying harder—it’s about experiencing love in ways that change how we relate. This is what the Neuro-Based Enneagram makes possible: a pathway to align our implicit knowledge (what we feel, fear, and believe at the unconscious, gut level) with our explicit beliefs (what we know to be true about God).
We’re not transformed by sheer effort—but by love.
As Dallas Willard would say, grace isn’t opposed to effort, but it is opposed to earning. There is absolutely nothing you can do today that will cause God to love you any more or less than God loved you yesterday. God’s love for you right now is whole, perfect, and complete. What a relief!
When clients come to know—deep in their bodies, their relationships, and their stories—that they are loved, safe, and chosen, the fruit of the Spirit begins to emerge not as a natural overflow.
This is not just coaching. It’s discipleship. It’s healing. It’s the slow and sacred work of becoming who we already are in Christ.
Conclusion: From Pattern to Presence
We all carry stories about who we need to be, what it takes to be loved, and how we must protect ourselves. These stories form patterns in our nervous systems, often outside our awareness. But they are not the end of the story.
The good news of the Gospel is that we are not trapped in those patterns. In Christ, we are invited into a new way of being—a life rooted not in performance or fear, but in presence, belonging, and love.
Coaching with the Neuro-Based Enneagram is one way to engage this transformation. It’s a sacred space to notice, name, and gently revise the old survival strategies—so we can live more fully from the identity we’ve already been given: beloved child of God.
If something in this article resonates with you—if you’re feeling the weight of burnout, or sensing the invitation to become more whole, more attuned, more present—I’d love to walk with you.
Let’s Connect
If you’d like to explore how coaching with the Neuro-Based Enneagram might support your personal or spiritual growth, contact me by clicking my name at the top of this article. Let’s discern together what it could look like for you to move from pattern to presence—and from striving to joy.
Tomorrow’s post will be about spiritual direction and the Neuro-Based Enneagram.
Sources:
Barna Group. (2024). The State of Pastors, Volume 2: How Today’s Church Leaders Are Pursuing Resilience and Stepping Into a Hopeful Future. Ventura, CA: Barna Group.
Siegel, D. J. (2023). Personality and the Path to Wholeness: A Guide to Integrating the Enneagram, Developmental Neuroscience, and Therapy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
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