What is the Enneagram 6w5 personality type? What are its key traits, strengths, weaknesses and fears? We’ll answer these questions in this article.
This is one of the 18 Enneagram Wing Types, which don’t exhibit traits of just one profile, but blend two adjacent ones. The 6w5 is a blend of the Enneagram 6 and the Enneagram 5. They are both part of the Head triad, which makes for a cerebral personality.
We’ll start by talking about how this profile is composed of 6 and 5, then talk about its core traits. We’ll round off with a field manual for the Enneagram 6w5: a summary of its core strengths, weaknesses, fears and desires.
What is the Enneagram 6w5 Type?
First, let’s clarify what the Enneagram 6w5 is. It means an Enneagram 6 with a 5 Wing. It helps if you understand the 9 Enneagram Profiles in some depth.
If you have a 6w5 personality, it means you’re predominantly an Enneagram 6, but exhibit some traits from the adjacent profile, number 5. It’s also possible to be a pure 6, or a 6w7.
If you want an approximation of what a 6w5 looks like, take the core 6 and 5 traits and blend them together, with 6 dominating. If you know somebody who is primarily a 6 but has significant traits of 5, they might well be a 6w5.
The folks at personalitydata.org found that only 1.4% of Enneagram 6s exhibit a 5 wing. 88.3% are pure 6s, while the other wing type, 6w7, makes up the remaining 10.3%.
Remember, the 6w5 is predominantly a 6 but shows significant 5 traits.
6s are great at observing, analysing situations and coming up with complex solutions (The Loyalist), while 5s are knowledge- and idea-focused, introverted, and innovative (Investigators).
6w5s are predominantly a 6, so are outer-focused, keen to contribute to group tasks and great at thinking through problems, but the 5 wing means they exhibit some of the core Individualist traits. So they also have a thirst for knowledge, information and expertise, and are intellectual and reserved. They tend to be heady yet more focused than a typical 6.
In a nutshell, the 6w5 is highly motivated tosolve concrete problems and contribute to group success by racking its brains and making new discoveries.
For your information, I refer to personality types as “it” because they’re abstract profiles derived from real-world data, detached from any one person. Though the Enneagram possess huge explanatory power, nobody is a cookie-cutter 6w5.
The Core Traits
The Enneagram 6w5 Type is called the Defender because it is at once creative and clever, yet concerned with protecting and guiding others.Its basic desire is to work on practical, logical challenges whilepushing the boundaries of knowledge, relying on all its learning and investigation.
Like a typical 6 it thinks things through and weighs up different approaches before tackling an issue. This jives with the strong 5 drive to lock itself away from social life, hell bent on accumulating knowledge and solving mysteries, like a rogue scientist. That said, its headiness and reliance on hard facts can hinder or slow 6’s tendency for incisive problem-solving.
As with all Enneagram Profiles, there are downsides to the 6w5. For one thing, the Type 5 can be aloof, unapproachable and overly cerebral.
Combine this with 6’s need to take action and be a changemaker using knowledge and facts, and you can get a nasty combination. The 6w5 can wind up endlessly running circles in its head, and feel impotent or useless when they get no traction.
The 6w5 really doesn’t want to be perceived as incompetent. It needs to be recognised as the Sherlock Holmes, the great problem-solver that it constantly strives to be. As a result, it can aim to endlessly accumulate knowledge and competency. It’s prone to introversion and loneliness. It becomes anti-social, hermitlike, indecisive and emotionally illiterate. It can over-analyse people and become suspicious of them.
Whether we have a 6w5 personality or not, we can learn from its successes and struggles. It’s a universal fact that if our prime directive is to accumulate knowledge and competence while thinking through problems to find the best course of action, we can end up like a mad scientist or lonely intellectual, lost in analysis paralysis.
The best professions for the Defender are those that favour problem-solving and intellectual power, like lawyers and journalists.
The Enneagram 6w5 Field Manual
The core fear of the 6w5 is to let the group down, and be incompetent and unproductive.
Its core drives are to be a crafty problem-solver, independent, competent and knowledgeable.
The strengths of the 6w5 are its ability to build knowledge and expertise and bring them to bear on immediate practical issues.
Its weaknesses are its oft-excessive inner focus, tendency for withdrawal, sensitivity, and lack of social and emotional nous.
The 6w5 is at its best when it contributes in a unique, innovative way, dives deeply into tasks and is recognised for its unique contributions and perspectives.
Master the Enneagram with my series of articles on the Enneagram Wing Types
Join tens of thousands of like-minded people today.
Follow the Deep Psychology PodcastSubscribe on YouTube
- Spotify
- YouTube
The post The Enneagram 6w5 Type Explained first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post The Enneagram 6w5 Type Explained appeared first on Deep Psychology.
