You know it all must make sense somehow. Your gap in knowledge is simply a gap in information. Maybe if you study it some more, you’ll be the one to make the connection, to extract the knowledge that was missing.
But if you’re going to do that, you need the time and space for it. You must gather and collect your energy, hold onto it tight, and focus it all on this problem. Feelings? No, those won’t help. Box those up, please!
Next thing you know, you’re an expert on the matter, and doesn’t that feel good? Now, do you share your knowledge? The last time you did, some idiot came and challenged it, and you weren’t there to have a discussion, you were there to teach. You’re the expert, after all. Why invite you just to insult you?
There’s one thing you know for sure about yourself, and it’s that you can figure out anything that you put your mind to. The tougher the problem, the more you detach from it emotionally and retreat into your mind.
And then one day, you look around and wonder where your friends went. Ah, well, they probably couldn’t keep up.
If you didn’t like reading any of that and seeing that part of you put into words, then you’re probably an Enneagram Type 5, the Investigator. The above example is delivered tongue in cheek (the way you like it), so don’t take it too hard. The stereotype of the Five as a big floating head is just that: a stereotype. There’s so much more to you, but if you currently feel a little trapped in that brain of yours, keep reading!
Welcome back to this series where we explore what motivates us and how we might build a life that works with our creative impulses rather than against them.
Today, we’re talking all about the Enneagram Five, “the Investigator.” We’re going to dive deep into what motivates someone with these core fears and desires, and how we can build a multidimensional author life for ourselves if this is our type.
If this isn’t your type, I strongly suggest you read it anyway. Not only will it help you write strong Individualist characters, but I guarantee you have a Five in your life, and understanding them will only strengthen the relationship.
At their core, Fives’ desire is to be competent. Their fear is that they’re incompetent. The concepts of knowledge, learning, and self-sufficiency are central to the way the Five relates to the world.
The relationship between knowledge and learning is a complex one, and it’s in these details that Fives can entrap themselves. Knowledge is a virtue. The desire to learn is a virtue. But believing one must know to be competent is the quickest way to stop learning in its tracks.
It’s not the need to know but the need to already know that begins to pull Fives into the dangerous pattern of isolation and withdrawal that severs their connection from the world and from themselves. And this stems from the fear that if they do not already know, they are not yet competent.
A Five who hitches their wagon to an identity of being a learner not a knower is one who stands a chance of living a life in the healthier levels of their Enneagram type.
However, we always need to tread lightly when it comes to our personal identity and ego. That tired phrase about eggs and baskets applies in this case, and Investigators who build their entire identity around their intellect become overly sensitive to even the most basic constructive criticism, which is obviously not conducive to that value of learning.
A Five who has put too much stock in their intellect while ignoring their feelings can become stingy with their ideas and knowledge for fear of that criticism, and you can probably imagine how this begins to stifle the creative process. It looks like withdrawing even further into the mind and living in a world of thought without feeling or doing. To feel more powerful and self-sufficient, the Five withholds the knowledge from the world rather than sharing it, and the flow of information is stifled until it dies.
When I’m working with an Investigator who’s struggling with motivation, it’s usually because they’ve stopped trusting the natural flow of energy around them. Their need for self-sufficiency and competence has made them hold onto more of that energy than they need and not share it as they should. They’re practicing detachment from the world (severing the connection and taking more of an outsider’s view) rather than non-attachment (trusting that restorative and loving energy always flows in and out as needed).
Detachment severs connection not just to others, but to parts of ourselves. For Fives, it can take the form of compartmentalization. Head and heart function separately from one another, and Investigators tend to neglect the latter entirely. Even parts of a person’s life and history can be severed through compartmentalization—happy memories, trauma, past relationships, etc.
And why would that stifle creativity? To create something new, to innovate, one must lay out all the tools and resources one has access to and find new connections. By compartmentalizing, a Five is diminishing their items to choose from and may end up stuck in the realm of dusty old ideas.
The Investigators who make the biggest impact are those who don’t limit themselves to a few intellectual pursuits. They’re well-read across many subjects, not just the ones they wish to become “experts” in. They pull ideas from all sorts of places to contribute to their understanding of their chosen pursuit, and through that process come up with new ideas that seem obvious and elegant once explained. Scientists read about the humanities, artists read about the stock market.
So, if you want to leave a creative legacy like fellow Fives Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Annie Leibovitz, and Werner Herzog, a broad range of learning is your friend.
Each of the nine types of the Enneagram has nine Levels of Development within it. Three are considered healthy, three are average, and three are unhealthy. We move through these levels at various moments of our lives, but we usually have an anchor point or baseline that’s our default. As we unlock some of the unconscious patterns associated with our type, our anchor point can move slowly upward toward healthier levels.
Below are descriptions of a Five in the three categories of development (healthy, average, unhealthy)
Healthy: Visionary, open-minded, finds fresh ways to view the world, possesses extreme perceptiveness and insight, curious and eager to learn, focused and easily engrossed in a subject, strong skills of prediction.
Average: Leans heavily on conceptualizing, insists on preparing ideas completely before sharing them with others, more concerned with their own views and interpretations than reality, detaches and compartmentalizes knowledge, antagonistic to protect inner world, becomes a provocateur instead of an innovator, takes up extreme or radical views.
Unhealthy: Retreats into isolation, adopts a nihilistic view of reality, need to know ferments into a focus on the arcane or a disturbing reality no one else understands, obsessed with threatening ideas, horrified of the world, prone to a psychotic break from reality and self-destruction.
If you’re not a Five, you’re now thinking of someone you know who is. Or maybe even a character. As you can see, Fives can make great heroes or villains in your books, depending on what development level they most often inhabit.
Okay, so how do you use this information to motivate yourself as a writer?
Unfortunately, you’re going to have to trust.
Trust yourself. You don’t have to know things to write about them. The beauty of fiction is that it’s a playground for us to experiment with and explore new ideas we haven’t completely fleshed out. And in writing those down and publishing them, we share what knowledge we’ve gained in the process and encourage others to develop the ideas even further. Trust that your emotions have something important to contribute as well.
Trust others. You may not be the person to have the break-through you’ve been seeking. The good news is that you don’t have to be. Trust that other people will bring fresh perspective to the ideas you’ve been developing, and maybe by sharing with them, you’ve just opened it up to the missing piece that they can add. Greater understanding is the goal, right? It doesn’t matter whose ego gets to claim that final piece of the puzzle.
Trust the universe. This one is the hardest. Some people call it faith, but because there’s no scientific proof that a benevolent invisible force exists, it can be tricky for some Fives to “let go and let God.” No problem, honestly. Faith doesn’t require religion. But the lack of faith or lack of trust in the universe/humanity leads straight to a scarcity mindset, and this is where we hold on to more than we need out of fear that our needs won’t be met otherwise. Our sympathetic nervous system runs on overdrive when we live our lives this way (this means lots of fight/flight/freeze/fawn), and it leads to—surprise!—us running on empty and at a lack later on (as well as various health issues). So, for the sake of your nervous system, run a little experiment: see if everything falls apart if you loosen your grip on your time and energy. Go connect with the world instead of observing it. You may find that the connection gives more energy than it takes.
You have a mind, yes (and it’s a good one!), but you also have a body and emotions. Give those a spin. Will you feel tired afterwards? Yes! But that could be because your emotions and body have been underworked and need to get back in shape. Sleep can fix that problem for you, so it’s only temporary.
The Enneagram Spectrum of Personality Styles says something so profound about the Five that I’m just going to share the quote directly: “being known, seen, and revealed (transparent) is just as vital as knowing, seeing, and revealing.”
If you’ve spent a lot of time alone and feel the motivation waning, there’s an easy fix. Go connect with the world and let it see and know you.
Then come back and write stories with that lived experience enhancing your understanding. Write probing stories on topics you’re still struggling to understand. Write stories that challenge the intellects of others without positioning yourself as the expert. Ask the important questions. Expose your readers to the vast array of subjects you’ve explored. Learn to admit it when you don’t know.
Every type has a wake-up call associated with it to tell us we’re plummeting down the development levels and it’s time to pause, take a deep breath, and reevaluate some of the premises we’re working from. For the Five, the red flag is conceptualizing. This is the first sign of detachment, and usually signals it’s time to gets one’s hands messy in the real world.
The problem with conceptualizing is that it’s a form of withdrawal, and withdrawal of any kind is a severing of connection to self and others (conceptualizing just happens to be a Five’s poison of choice). Once this disconnection starts, let the slide toward unhealthiness begin!
It's easy to spot an Investigator writer when you read them because their work is necessarily challenging. And when the Five has integrated their intellect with their emotions and intuition, watch out, because you don’t stand a chance against it. You’ll be transported and educated, whether you want to or not.
Fives who’ve stopped compartmentalizing can be incredibly compelling communicators. The works of Ursula K. LeGuin, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and Eckhard Tolle are solid examples of writing that engages both intellectually and emotionally. And Gary Larson, creator of “The Far Side” comics, is a prime example of how a Five can boil down a concept into one clever or pithy phrase or idea. (I wallpapered one of my bedroom walls with The Far Side comics back in high school, and most things in life still remind me of the comics.)
So, if you’re struggling to put the words down or feel like you’re using the same tired ideas over and over again, see if any of these are running on loop in your head:
“This will go over their heads anyway.”
“I’m not ready to write on this topic yet.”
“They don’t deserve this effort from me.”
“I just feel like I’m giving a lecture.”
“If I don’t publish faster, I won’t be able to pay my bills.”
“I don’t trust my editor to catch what she needs to.”
“I know everything there is on this subject, so it’s boring to me now.”
“The success of this is all up to me.”
“I’m not done thinking about this.”
“The world isn’t ready for this yet.”
All of these stifling ideas can be cured by treating your stories as part of the learning process. Through your fiction quest is where you find the elixir in the underworld of your hero’s journey.
Take your need to know out of the hands of your ego and hold it up as a valiant pursuit, something you dedicate yourself to act toward each day. There is no finish line, but that’s okay, because you enjoy running this race. You were built for it.
Drawing conscious thought to our subconscious scripts is like drawing blood to an injury to help it heal. And that’s how we begin to break these cycles that hold us prisoner so we can move to healthier development levels of our type.
It’s also how we keep ourselves motivated and connected to the work when we’re Investigators.
So, if you’re a Five who’s struggling with motivation:
Shift your identity from a knowledgeable person to a seeker of knowledge.
Ask yourself how you can share what knowledge you’ve gained with those around you on a daily basis. (If there’s no one around you, then leave the house and find people.)
Learn about emotions! Gifting yourself with the vocabulary is the first step to accessing those things you’ve wasted so much energy keeping at bay.
Read, read, read. Read broadly and deeply. You don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Build off the backs of thinkers who’ve come before you. (Don’t forget to share what you’ve learned!)
Keep an eye out for scarcity mindset, and incorporate daily practices that remind you of the natural flow of energy in the universe (meditation, journaling, stimulating conversation, walks in nature, etc.)
Ask for help. The reason this is so hard is that somewhere along the way you learned that self-sufficient and competent people didn’t need help. But that notion has been disproven time and time again. No one has ever done it all on their own. Collaboration is the truest pursuit of knowledge and understanding, not isolation.
Build relationships with other authors, and relax into the exchange of information. Strong boundaries eliminate the need for isolation, so practice those, but don’t be afraid to share what you know and ask what others know.
Next week, we’ll discuss how to find you writing motivation if you’re a Type 6, the Loyalist. This is the type of J.R.R. Tolkien, John Grisham, Eleanor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility), and Hamlet.