Understanding Your Emotional Patterns with the Enneagram
Interview By Brandi Fleck
Micky ScottBey Jones shares how emotional patterns shape behavior, why change feels difficult, and how the Enneagram can help you understand and shift those patterns.
I met Micky ScottBey Jones at an International Coaching Federation (ICF) networking event for coaches in the Nashville area. She was so interesting and just has this presence that commands respect and that also piqued my curiosity. So, I asked her to come on the show for an interview because you NEED to know her and her work. Below, you’ll find the text version of our entire conversation about her expertise and personal story of working with the Enneagram as a tool for growth.
If you’d rather listen than read, you can do that here, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
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Being Connected to Others Makes Us Human
Brandi Fleck: What does being human mean to you?
Micky ScottBey Jones: To me, being human means being human with other humans. I don't know that you can be human by yourself. It's a deep tapping into what it means to be in a relationship with one another.
Brandi Fleck: I love that. Everybody, today we are welcoming to the show Micky ScottBey Jones. Micky, I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks so much for coming on.
Micky ScottBey Jones: Thanks, Brandi. I'm excited to be in conversation with you today.
Brandi Fleck: Before we get too deep into the conversation, can you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Micky ScottBey Jones: Describing myself is always a challenging thing because I feel like I've been so many people over so many lifetimes. I mean just the one life I've had, but it feels like a million lifetimes.
Today, I'm a mother, I'm a motherless daughter, I am a partner and a coach and a facilitator. More than anything else, what encompasses all of that is that I'm an accompanier.
Over all of the work I've done over my life and the different careers that I've had, what it boils down to is that I accompany people, typically during times of their own hero's journey or challenge or transformation. It's not about me. I bring skills and education and experiences to the table, but it's really about walking alongside folks on their journey.
Brandi Fleck: I love that, an accompanier. That goes with how you describe what it means to be human too.
Ubuntu, Sankofa, and the Idea That We Are Not Alone
Micky ScottBey Jones: I'm deeply influenced by several concepts. The symbol behind me is an Adinkra symbol, and I have an Adinkra symbol on my body called the Sankofa bird. There's also a concept I learned from my friends in South Africa called ubuntu.
“I am because you are.” I don't actually exist outside of other people and the reflection we have of one another.
Even the word Sankofa, which is the symbol I have on my arm, is a bird reaching back to an egg on its back and pulling it forward. It's the idea that I'm always reaching back into the past to learn from my ancestors and elders and those who've gone before—both cautionary tales and wisdom.
You innovate into the future, but it doesn't come from nowhere. That egg is coming from those who have come before. I don't believe we exist in isolation. I think that's the great lie. We feel isolated. I battle that as well. I feel so alone.
But the truth is that both in reality and in emotional, spiritual, and philosophical realms, we're surrounded by others who have been there before. Even though we may not know it today, we don't exist in a vacuum.
What Is the Enneagram and How Does It Work
Brandi Fleck: I've had chills the entire time you've been talking. I love that. I know your primary focus with work right now is the Enneagram. Enneagram coaching. Is that correct?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I do a lot of coaching, facilitating, and teaching for folks in the social sector—people doing good in the world, nonprofits, philanthropy, community work. The primary tool I support them with is a model called the Enneagram of Personality.
I'm trained as a coach and have a background in human development and have been in nonprofit work for over 20 years. I bring a lot of different things to the mix, but the primary tool I use to help people understand themselves and each other and build a language around that is the Enneagram.
Brandi Fleck: How does the perspective of being an accompanier tie in with the Enneagram, or does it?
Micky ScottBey Jones: You can approach the Enneagram in different ways. Some people have had a terrible experience. Some have had a life-changing experience. Sometimes people hear about it from friends or family saying, “You must be a type three because you do X, Y, and Z.”
That can feel like someone is trying to put you in a box or tell you who you are based on what they observe.
But it can also be used differently. My experience was learning about these different types or strategies. Your way of being in the world, your habitual patterns. I realized I'm not broken or wildly outside the human realm. There are other people who share this type.
There are also people who don't share it, but I'm not alone. It helped me understand how regular I am. I'm not uniquely bad or broken.
Those nine types helped me understand that. It connected me to myself and opened up an understanding that human beings come in these particular ways. It's not the only way to understand people, but it gave me a framework to have more compassion for myself and empathy for others.
Brandi Fleck: For our listeners who haven't heard of the Enneagram or aren't familiar with it, can you give us a quick rundown on what it is?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I like to keep it simple and clear. You'll find lots of information and different takes because there is no single Enneagram. There are many ways to talk about this model of understanding personality and human behavior.
There are major schools that have developed over the last 30 or 40 years. But simply put, Enneagram means nine. “Ennea” is nine and “gram” is figure or symbol. It's nine points on a symbol arranged in a circle.
We've used that diagram to overlay a system for understanding personalities in human beings. I'm trained in a method called Awareness to Action Enneagram, and that's what I primarily use with my clients today.
Even though I'm trained in the Narrative Enneagram and have had other trainings as well, and I do use that some, in Awareness to Action we try to use both the nine types that the symbol is named after and these three instinctual biases, which help us understand what we value or pay attention to.
When you combine those two elements, you can use just one, either the instinctual biases or the nine types—but when you use them together, it's a powerful way to understand what we prioritize with the instinctual biases and what we do to get those things in the nine types.
It really opens up understanding for yourself and for the people you love and work with.
How the Enneagram Helps You Understand Yourself and Others
Brandi Fleck: Would you categorize the Enneagram as a personality test, or is it more than that?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I think that helps people understand the genre. If you're trying to understand different kinds of music, you might say, “This person is like this person.” It helps you understand the category.
You can get to your type and instinctual bias through tests. There are online tests and people who develop them. I don't think that's the most accurate way to understand these things.
Working with a trained professional who understands the model and has the acumen to recognize patterns is a better way to determine type. Or even doing that work yourself. Sometimes I lead sessions where I explain the model and people self-type.
It's such a dynamic thing. We game tests or answer how we want to appear. We think, “I'm this way, so I should answer this way.”
When someone is just talking, like in what we call a typing interview, I can discern their type and instinctual bias. There are things I catch that aren't in the answer itself. A computer-generated test is designed to look for certain things, but it can miss others.
So it's not a personality test in that way. It's also not a personality test because it isn't about putting you in a box. It's about recognizing your patterns.
Depending on the model, we want to recognize patterns and build awareness, but also move into, what does it look like to choose another strategy? What does it look like to expand your strategy?
There are ways to look at this that are about growth, and ways to look at it as, “This is just who I am.” With things like extrovert or introvert, we don't really talk about growing or changing that.
The Enneagram, at least how I teach it, is about how can I grow, how can I be at my best.
Brandi Fleck: That's a really great explanation because you don't hear a lot of people talk about that, at least in the mainstream internet world where everyone is very into typing themselves.
I was going to ask you, how has the Enneagram impacted your life in terms of what you've learned about yourself? But you said earlier it's helped you not feel alone. Is there anything you might add?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I have a kind of dramatic Enneagram origin story. Most of us who work with the Enneagram do, because we start studying it and become facilitators or coaches after it changes our lives.
It has a deep impact on relationships or how we show up at work. I was introduced to the Enneagram as I was moving from more conservative, restrictive theologies into more progressive ones in the Christian world. More open, affirming, and expansive ways of understanding God.
It wasn't just about me being good all the time or somehow earning worthiness. I had gotten into that mindset at a very young age.
My faith journey into more progressive spaces is where I had friends talking about the Enneagram. I was interested in self-improvement and knowing more about myself, but I didn't know anything about it.
Those conversations led to the experience I mentioned earlier about being labeled. But it was also a good experience because I hadn't done that kind of self-reflection before.
It had always been about searching for how bad I was. The Enneagram helped me not hate myself because I realized these things I thought were bad were just a way of being.
I say all the time in my trainings, no strategy, no type, is better or worse. Not good or bad. They just are. Each one has its own logic.
When you understand that, you have more compassion. That's what it did for me. It opened up compassion for myself.
I've still had to do a lot of work around understanding who I am and accepting that, but it gave me more room. It helped me not hate myself because I didn't think I was broken.
Some people stay in the awareness phase. They learn their type and stop there. But there's more. I'm interested in helping people move into how to change what needs to be changed.
We don't need to change everything, but if something is causing pain or friction, knowing our patterns gives us a shortcut. That's probably where the problem is. Then we can work with it.
That's what excites me now, finding that piece of the pattern and getting right to it.
How Religious Messaging Can Shape Self-Worth
Brandi Fleck: That's really powerful. I heard you say twice it helped you not hate yourself. Did you know that you hated yourself?
Micky ScottBey Jones: Probably not. I think it was under the guise of religious rhetoric that I didn't realize I was consuming. I didn't understand that I was being taught to hate myself.
If the theology, sermons, and music are all saying you're a wretch, a sinner, there's nothing good in you, you're meant for hell, and then God gives you another chance. I didn't understand what that was doing to my psyche.
I recently got my childhood journals back because my daughter is getting married in October. She was looking for my wedding dress and found a trunk in her grandmother's attic full of my things. Shout out to my ex-mother-in-law for not throwing my stuff out. I'm grateful for that.
The trunk had diaries from when I was 10 years old through my early 20s. I haven't fully gone through them yet, but I glanced through them.
I could see the shift from normal pre-teen writing to after my conversion experience. I had been in church as a child, but the messaging was different in the traditional Black church—less condemnation overall.
In the conservative white evangelical spaces I moved into as a teenager, the messaging shifted. I could see in my writing how it became about how bad I was compared to a good God.
I wasn't shocked, but it was striking. I didn't realize how much it shaped my thinking.
I'm grateful now for a more expanded understanding of the divine. I'm not stuck on what to call it, but I feel better about myself than I did then.
There are still cultural messages I wrestle with, but seeing that shift in my writing. How I learned to see myself as bad, it hit me hard.
It was wild to see it because you don't think about your teen years often. It feels like a gift to have those journals back.
Brandi Fleck: That is going to be a really powerful experience when you take the time to sit with that more.
Is it your mission to help other people love themselves and who they are more?
What It Means to Support People Through Change and Growth
Micky ScottBey Jones: I think this is where it comes back to being an accompanier. Everybody has different work to do. For some people, the work is to love themselves more. Some people have that on lock.
They might have other work to do. I want to help people do the work they need to do.
I still do some work in faith-based spaces. For about a decade, that was my primary work. Faith-rooted justice work or supporting faith leaders. I still do that when called upon. I have theological training and have worked in multi-faith spaces across a spectrum.
But now I’ve expanded into spaces of social good. Most of the people I work with are not primarily in faith-based nonprofits. They may be in philanthropy or community-based organizations.
My point is that I want to help people go on their journey. I want to be that support person. Coaching is about mirroring people and helping them ask better questions of themselves.
I can give resources and use tools like the Enneagram to provide a framework for understanding themselves and others and points of friction. But I want to help make things easier for people.
I can’t do the work for you, whether that’s a difficult conversation or creating a strategic plan, but I can support you so you can do the work.
When I was a doula, I couldn’t make the birth easier or shorter or make the baby get in the right position, but I could be there with you. That human component of walking alongside each other makes it easier.
Brandi Fleck: Let’s pivot. It feels like the Enneagram has exploded in recent years. It’s become so popular. People love to talk about it.
Why the Enneagram Is So Popular Right Now
Why do you think people love the Enneagram so much?
Micky ScottBey Jones: On a shallow level, people love to talk about themselves, even though we say we don’t. People will say, “I hate talking about myself,” and then talk about themselves for an hour and a half.
Think about the rise of podcasts. I know we’re on one, but essentially podcasts are a way for people to talk about themselves or what they think about things.
The Enneagram has a lot to learn, but it’s fairly accessible. Other systems like astrology can feel complicated. With the Enneagram, you don’t have to make it complicated. There are nine types, and if you add the three instinctual biases, it’s still not a lot to learn.
On a deeper level, it’s popular because it makes sense. It resonates. People see themselves in it. They see people they love, people they work with, people that frustrate them. When something feels useful and resonant, people are drawn to it. They feel seen.
I hope we move toward it being more useful rather than just a way to label people. Some people get too enamored with the model itself instead of what we can do with it.
It’s proliferating in interesting ways, candles, paint colors, T-shirts. It can feel diluted, but maybe not. We’ll see.
Brandi Fleck: It’s funny you brought up astrology because I was thinking about that too. People use tools like that to get to know themselves, maybe discovering parts of their personality they didn’t know.
I was thinking people just want to know themselves, but you brought up that they feel seen, which feels different. What do you think is special about being seen?
What Responsibility We Have to Each Other as Humans
Micky ScottBey Jones: I’m thinking of a Zulu word, a South African word, sawubona. It’s a greeting that means more than hello. It means “I see you and I see your people.”
I see your mother, father, grandparents. The people who came before you. It’s an incredible greeting. It also means that now that I’ve seen you, I’m responsible for you. I have a responsibility for what I’ve seen.
You don’t come from nowhere. You come from a history and lineage. If I think I’m seeing you without that, I’m not actually seeing you.
It’s like when people say, “I don’t see color.” If you don’t see my skin color, you don’t actually see me. Culture treats people differently because of that.
I’m not saying we should assume things about people, but our brains categorize automatically. That’s part of how we stay safe. The issue is what we do after that—how we assign value or treat people.
We have to see each other fully. If I go to my best friend’s house and see pain on her face and don’t acknowledge it, that’s a problem.
Being seen in the fullness of who you are can change your life. It can change conversations and relationships.
Even if you see someone imperfectly, it can open something up. There’s something powerful about seeing and being seen that goes beyond surface-level interaction.
It takes time and commitment. In sawubona, there’s a responsibility that comes with seeing. That part is often missing in our daily interactions.
Brandi Fleck: What does it mean to be responsible for what you’re seeing in someone?
Micky ScottBey Jones: That’s the question. Society has been trying to figure that out for a long time. My second child is studying philosophy, and it feels like that’s what we’ve been trying to answer since antiquity. What is my responsibility to you as a fellow human being?
We try to legislate it, create religious laws, and set community standards. Those can help as guide rails.
But there’s also something that comes from being human together. Some of those guide rails are implicit, part of the cultural fabric. It’s something we absorb. If it’s missing, we notice. If it’s present, we may not even realize it. We don’t always know how to teach it.
Micky ScottBey Jones: You know what I'm saying? Those classrooms where students help each other and feel like they belong to each other. They know it because the teacher or school has set it up that way.
It’s a way of being like, we’re going to walk together, we’re going to be together, and we’re not going to leave you behind. It’s like the Lilo & Stitch thing—family means nobody gets left behind. We’re going to do this together.
But that’s really tricky, especially when we have a larger cultural message of take care of yourself.
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, the rugged individualism. It’s interesting when you bring up guide rails like legislation and religious laws. It takes me back to what we were first talking about—how the Enneagram can put you in a box, even though it’s meant to help you grow.
Those guide rails can help, but they can also put us in a box. It’s a matter of how we want to deal with them and what we want to do with them.
Practical Enneagram Tools You Can Use in Real Life
Let’s pivot into the practicality of the Enneagram. What are some practical ways people can apply what they learn about themselves to their real lives?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I’ll give you two things. In the Narrative Enneagram tradition, we have a practice called Notice, Pause, Allow. It’s learning to notice when something comes up in you. Someone says or does something that feels off, and you notice your reaction. Your face gets hot, your heartbeat increases.
Often we jump straight to reacting instead of noticing. So noticing, then pausing with what you’re noticing. We actually have a physiological response before we have a thought, but it happens so fast we don’t realize it.
If we can pause, we create space. Then Allow is letting yourself have whatever feelings you’re having without immediately acting. Acting might be necessary, but without noticing and pausing first, we often make maladaptive choices instead of adaptive ones.
That’s something people can apply without much guidance. It’s not easy, but it’s accessible. I believe that came from Dr. David Daniels, one of the founders of the Narrative Enneagram.
Micky ScottBey Jones: From Awareness to Action Enneagram, which I mostly use, we have a built-in change model.
First is awareness. Learning your type, understanding your strategy, and your instinctual bias. That builds awareness of what you prioritize and how you go about getting it.
If we recognize something we want to change, something causing friction or pain, we start there. But we can’t just jump to change because our brain defaults to habitual patterns.
So the next step is authenticity, expanding your understanding of your pattern. For me, my strategy is striving to feel perfect. I feel best when I feel right or good.
In the past, I had a narrow definition of that, especially shaped by a more conservative worldview. When I expanded that definition, I could see more ways to experience that sense of “rightness” without being locked into one way of being.
That’s building a more authentic understanding of the pattern. Then comes action. I help clients identify very small actions aligned with that expanded understanding. They try one new behavior over a week or two.
That gives new data, which feeds back into awareness. This awareness, authenticity, action cycle repeats, helping us build new patterns.
Even though it’s a simple system, there’s a lot to work with because you’re not just one type, you’re connected to others and can expand into those strategies.
Brandi Fleck: This is the perfect segue into change and transition. It seems like the people you work with are ready for growth.
But often, even when people want change, there’s fear around it. What would you say to someone who wants to grow but is afraid?
Micky ScottBey Jones: Fear is very informative. I’m reading a book called Behave by Robert Sapolsky. It’s about behavior and neuroscience.
It’s helping me understand how much of this is our brain firing in certain ways. We attach moral judgment to fear and emotions, but they’re physiological processes.
Fear has kept humans alive. It’s not a bad thing. The challenge is that our brains are wired to run from threats like bears, but we don’t usually face those anymore.
So how do we honor fear while still changing? In the Awareness to Action model, the authenticity step is where we ask, do I really want to change?
Often we say we want to change, but we don’t actually believe in the new behavior. If the change doesn’t align with our internal story, we won’t do it.
You can’t force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, not for long. You might just re-traumatize yourself. So how do we make change align with what we believe?
How to Work With Your Brain Instead of Against It
For example, as someone who strives to feel perfect, people might tell me, “It doesn’t matter, just accept things as they are.” That doesn’t work for my brain.
But I might feel more “perfect” if I have a few flexible dinner options instead of rigid planning. That small shift works within my pattern instead of against it.
When something small works, my brain extrapolates it to other areas. I realize I can approach other situations with that same flexibility.
That’s how we move past fear. Your brain is saying, “This works for us,” and it’s right. So we expand into something else that can also work.
Why Personal Growth Requires Small, Incremental Change
And then we have to try it out. When we have the evidence, our brain can relax and expand. Change doesn’t happen quite the way we think it does. It’s so incremental. We have to help ourselves along because we don’t really trust new data. We only trust what we know.
It’s been interesting, instead of trying to change people into something else, to expand what their brain already believes is true. That makes more sense than just saying, “Do the other thing.”
Brandi Fleck: Yeah, and I guess the evidence provides safety in a way.
Well, thank you for sharing all of that. This has been awesome. I want to ask you too, is there anything I didn’t ask that you feel is important to share?
Micky ScottBey Jones: The only other thing I would share is that your teacher matters in all of these things. We’re both coaches. You work with trauma. I often support people going through transformation, deciding whether to change jobs or stay on a certain path.
It can be other things too, like finding a dating coach. I’m obsessed with cults and cult documentaries. I think it’s because of the human relational aspect. People are searching for a place to belong, for someone who knows something and can help them figure it out.
Nobody joins something thinking, “I hope this is a cult.” But we end up there because we’re looking for guidance and belonging.
There’s so much talk about religious trauma and people leaving religions. We have more people identifying as “nones” than ever before.
Your coach or teacher matters. It’s okay to question people, interview multiple people, Google their background, talk to others who have worked with them. It’s also okay to trust that feeling inside you when something doesn’t feel right.
I remember letting a therapist go, actually a couple of therapists, and how difficult it was. I thought maybe I wasn’t getting it, but that wasn’t the case.
I want to encourage people to research the person they invite to walk beside them. Whether it’s organizational work or individual coaching, it’s okay to search before choosing someone. And it’s okay to stop seeing them after you’ve chosen them.
Your teacher matters. Their training and education are important, but so is who they are, how they interact with you, and how they treat you. That feels important to encourage as we figure our way forward.
Brandi Fleck: I totally agree. Thank you for that. Micky, how can our listeners find you if they want to learn more about your work?
Micky ScottBey Jones: I have a website. I’m the only Micky ScottBey Jones in the world, so my website is just my name, mickyscottbeyjones.com.
I have a YouTube channel. You can Google my name or search it on YouTube.
I’m taking a social media break right now. I took it off my phone and just scroll TikTok occasionally, but I’m not really active elsewhere. That could change, but for now the best way to keep up with me is my newsletter.
It goes out every two weeks, and you can sign up for it on my website.
Join the conversation!
Feel free to share your own experience and let me know if you have any questions in the comments.
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Hi, I’m the founder of Human Amplified. I’m Brandi Fleck, a recognized communications and interviewing expert, a writer, an artist, and a private practice, certified trauma-informed life coach and trauma recovery coach. No matter how you interact with me, I help you tell and change your story so you can feel more like yourself. So welcome!
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