The Enneagram, vocational personality test and fortune telling
Last Christmas when I was having dinner with my cousins’ family, we had a conversation about how my uncle went to see a fortune teller for my two cousins. The fortune teller predicted that one of my cousins was going to have two wives in his life. “I won’t follow what he said. I am going to marry three wives,” my cousin said.
Are the results from fortune telling actually going to happen in the future? Many of us may doubt it, but the result does indeed affect our decisions, or at least make us think, like my cousin did. People are interested in what will happen in the future and fortune telling provides such predictions. This is actually close to what the vocational personality test measures and predicts.
Vocational personality test, or career test, is one of the interest inventories that measures one’s preference or personality and suggests a suitable occupational choice. It seems that people prefer to believe in a career test than fortune telling, but both are in fact, just predictions.
A few years ago, the Enneagram personality test was so popular everywhere on Facebook that people were checking what jobs would best fit them based on their personality types from the Enneagram. So I jumped on the bandwagon and checked my Enneagram personality type. The result showed I am a type 1, type 3, type 4, type 5, type 6, and type 7 person with very close percentages for each. As I obtained 6 out of 9 types of personality from the result, I started to wonder if I have no personality at all, or if I actually have multiple personality disorder. The Enneagram was not helpful to me.
Nonetheless, many of my friends believed that it was a good indication of their future occupational choice. They started to choose majors that were close to the suggested fields. I have a friend who used to be a boyish rugby player and now is a classy flight attendant because she did the tests and attended some vocation workshops that made her realize that she actually preferred customer service to doing sports. No matter how much we ended up following the path suggested by those tests, it does inspire people to think if they will be more satisfied with the predicted field or industry.
Furthermore, the Enneagram test or other career tests give different results or predictions to the same person over time. It is believed that each of our acts right now can determine and change our future. There are no definite prediction of one’s life or occupation, and likewise with fortune telling. Last but not least, it is our decision whether to believe and follow these predictions or not. Finally, I sincerely hope that my cousin will not break the hearts of too many wives.
