Reading Room | An Enneagram Podcast

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues through Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, exploring the places we go when we search for connection: belonging, fitting in, insecurity, invisibility, disconnection, and loneliness.

This time, we're not just talking Enneagram, but Spiral Dynamics, and Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship—asking what separates relationships built around usefulness or pleasure from those rooted in genuine care for one another’s growth. This episode explores why authentic belonging requires both a strong relationship with ourselves and the vulnerability to be truly known by others.

Lastly...

What happens when falling short becomes a verdict about who we are?

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff continues through Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, exploring shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment, perfectionism, and self-compassion. We look at Brown’s distinction between “I did something bad” and “I am bad,” why empathy can disrupt shame, and how perfectionism can turn achievement into a measure of our worth.

The conversation also pushes into Enneagram territory: Do different types experience shame differently? When does healthy striving become perfectionism? And if we are not what we accomplish, w...

Empathy is harder than we think.

In this episode of Reading Room, Jeff continues through Chapter 7 of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart, exploring the emotional landscape of compassion, empathy, pity, sympathy, boundaries, and comparative suffering.

Along the way, Jeff connects Brown's research with Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Buddhist thought, and the Enneagram, asking what it actually means to accompany another person in pain without trying to fix, rescue, or distance ourselves from them.

The conversation explores why empathy is a skill rather than an instinct, why compassion requires both courage and restraint, how pity a...

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Hope. Courage. Grief. Longing.

Continuing through Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart, Jeff explores what happens when suffering changes not just how we feel, but how we imagine the future. Why does despair convince us tomorrow will look exactly like today? Why is being unseen in our suffering one of the loneliest human experiences? And why does returning to our center matter so much when life becomes disorienting?

At the heart of the discussion is a simple conviction: hope is not naïve optimism. It is the fu...

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Why are contradictory emotions so uncomfortable—and why might they actually be signs of growth?

In this Reading Room episode, Jeff explores Chapter 5 of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart through the lens of the Enneagram. From bittersweetness and nostalgia to cognitive dissonance and paradox, the conversation examines why mature people learn to hold tension rather than rush toward certainty.

Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and the Enneagram, this episode explores intellectual humility, reflection versus rumination, and the surprising wisdom found in amb...

What happens when we stop trying to have all the answers?

In this episode of Reading Room, Jeff Cook continues through Chapter Four of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart, exploring the emotions that arise when life stretches beyond our understanding: awe, wonder, confusion, curiosity, interest, and surprise.

The conversation examines why awe reconnects us to the natural world, why confusion may be one of the most important conditions for learning, and why curiosity is not simply a feeling but perhaps one of the great human virtues. Along the way, Jeff reflects on philosophy, science, e...

In this week's Reading Room, we dive into Chapter 3 of Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart : "The Places We Go When Things Don't Go as Planned."

Jeff explores boredom, disappointment, regret, discouragement, resignation, and frustration through the lens of the Enneagram, asking what these emotions reveal about desire, courage, vulnerability, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Why does disappointment occupy so much of our emotional lives? What does it mean to name what we truly want? And how can regret become a path toward wisdom instead of shame?

In this week’s Reading Room, Jeff explores Brené Brown’s discussion of comparison and the surprising emotions that can grow from it: admiration, reverence, envy, jealousy, resentment, schadenfreude, and freudenfreude.

Along the way, he reflects on why some comparisons inspire growth while others expose our wounds, how resentment may be rooted in hidden envy and unmet needs, and why celebrating the success of others might be one of the deepest forms of connection available to us.

From Enneagram insights to questions of justice, self-worth, and belonging, we're invited to pay closer attention to what our e...

This week in The Reading Room, we continue our journey through Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart by exploring "comparison."

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As we elevate other topics in ths text, it seems good to sit on this experience for a moment. Drawing from Brown’s research, we examine how comparison shapes our relationships, self-worth, emotional life, and even our sense of the future.

In this Reading Room episode, Jeff continues our summer study of Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, exploring the emotions and experiences that emerge when life feels uncertain, overwhelming, or simply too much.

Drawing connections between Brown’s research and the Enneagram, this discussion covers stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, fear, dread, and vulnerability—and asks what these experiences might be trying to teach us.

Topics include:

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We've selected our next book.

Brené Brown's Atlas of the Heart is one of the most influential books on emotions in recent years, and we're going to talk through it this June and July.

The first 2 classes are free to all free members.

Register : HERE

In this episode, Jeff highlights fifteen key ideas from the introduction that connect emotional awareness, language, and personal growth with the wisdom of the Enneagram. Along the way, he reflects on the relationship between feeling, thinking, and b...

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff begins wrapping up Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by turning to one final piece of the framework: how the nine Enneagram types respond when their usual ways of solving problems stop working.

This time, Jeff compares Siegel’s “emotional regulation modes”—upregulating, downregulating, and shifting—with what Around the Circle calls coping styles. Are these simply three tools that healthy people learn to use flexibly, or are they part of a deeper pattern involving how each type moves between the body, heart, and mind? Jeff uses Enneagram On...

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff steps away from the text of Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy to ask whether Siegel’s framework might help explain one of the strangest—and most important—features of the Enneagram: our movements in stress and security.

This time, Jeff proposes a simple theory. When we move along the Enneagram’s traditional lines, we aren't mysteriously becoming another number. Instead, just one element of our personality pattern changes: either our center of intelligence shifts or the direction of our energy shifts. Jeff works through all nine types to s...

Previously released as "The Enneagram Book Everyone’s Talking About | A Review and Critique".

Find all our material on Dr. Siegel's Book : HERE

In this episode, Jeff Cook sits down with Danielle Fuller (Scientific Enneagram) for a deep conversation on Dr. Daniel Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy—the book many are calling the most important scientific contribution to Enneagram theory in years. Together they unpack the book’s core framework around agency, bonding, certainty, emotional regulation, and developmental pathways while wrestling with both its strengths and frustrations.

Jeff and...

In this episode of the Reading Room, Jeff continues through Daniel Siegel and the PDP Group’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, focusing on how our developmental pathways become the patterns we recognize as personality.

This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s ideas about temperament, adaptive strategies, emotional regulation, and the possibility of becoming more flexible without somehow becoming a different type. Along the way, he connects Siegel’s framework with familiar Enneagram concepts like centers, coping styles, wings, stress, and integration—and asks what the science might add to existing Enneagram theory.

Lastly, the chapter...

In this episode of Around the Circle’s Reading Room, Jeff continues through Chapter Four of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, digging into one of the densest—and potentially most useful—sections of Daniel Siegel’s Enneagram theory.

This time, we look at how the three Centers organize themselves around the primal needs for agency, bonding, and certainty, and how anger, shame/separation distress, and fear function as protective emotional responses. From there, Siegel proposes three different ways we handle that emotional energy: experiencing and expressing it, containing and channeling it, or reframing and redirecting it. Together, these pa...

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, turning to one of the biggest questions in Enneagram theory: Where does your type actually come from? Daniel Siegel and the PDP group propose a biological and developmental framework in which personality emerges from fundamental motivational systems connected to agency, bonding, and certainty—and the emotions of anger, separation distress, and fear.

This time, Jeff follows the science behind the nine types. The chapter connects the traditional Body, Heart, and Head Centers to underlying motivational and neural systems, then co...

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room through Chapter Two of Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, examining Dan Siegel’s emerging framework for understanding the Enneagram as nine patterns of inner experience. The conversation begins with both appreciation and skepticism: How strong is the scientific evidence for the Enneagram, and what can thousands of first-person narratives actually tell us about personality?

This time, Jeff digs into Siegel’s claim that personality develops through the interaction of temperament and experience—and that repeated patterns of attention, emotion, and behavior can become increasingly automatic. He con...

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff continues the Reading Room with a deep dive into Chapter One of Daniel J. Siegel’s Personality and Wholeness in Therapy. Siegel is attempting something ambitious: translating the Enneagram into a scientifically grounded, clinically useful framework that connects our inner motivations, personality, and patterns of behavior.

This time, Jeff explores Siegel’s three fundamental ideas, including the relationship between temperament and experience, the three emotional systems of anger, separation distress, and fear, and our underlying drive toward agency, bonding, and certainty. The discussion also gets into how repeated experiences may...

In this episode of Around the Circle, Jeff launches a new season of the Reading Room with a deep dive into Personality and Wholeness in Therapy, Daniel J. Siegel and his collaborators’ ambitious attempt to bring the Enneagram into conversation with neuroscience, developmental theory, and psychotherapy.

Drawing on tens of thousands of first-person reports, the book asks what science can—and cannot—tell us about the nine personality patterns.

This time, Jeff approaches the book as a philosopher, asking what it actually means to say that the Enneagram is scientifically supported. He examines different kinds of evi...