In this episode of the Awareness to Action Enneagram Podcast, Mario Sikora, María José Munita and Seth "Creek" Creekmore talk about the Preserving Instinctual Bias. They discuss what it means to preserve by breaking it down into subdomains and sub-subdomains, and why they don’t call it self-preservation. They dig into the heart of this instinctual bias by explaining why it’s more about how the preserver focuses their attention around their supply rather than the quantity of the supply.

“When it comes to holidays, I’m a big holiday person, and I don’t know if it’s the cultivating of nostalgia or if it is more of that preserving the way things were.” - Seth "Creek" Creekmore [12:12]

“There’s a lot of times, it’s the why of what we’re doing in addition to the what of what we’re doing.” - Mario Sikora [13:00]

“It’s not about having a lot or a little. Because depending on the type of strategy, some people would like to have the minimal, optimal amount of things. Some people would like to have a lot, but I know how much I have. I know how much time I have until I run out of it. I’ll probably go and buy before I run out of it or put money in the bank before I run out of it. So it’s the attention I pay to the supply rather than how much I have or I don’t.” - María José Munita [31:33]

TIMESTAMPS

[00:01] Intro

[01:57] Laughable moments about preserving

[08:00] What is preserving

[09:45] Can you preserve with ideas?

[15:49] Attention to preserving personal resources

[18:28] Preserving as a subdomain

[23:15] Introversion vs extroversion

[27:36] Risk management

[35:53] Health and maintenance

[40:27] Contradictory behavior in preserving domain

[48:15] How a preserver navigates and transmit

[56:09] Outro

Connect with us:

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Mario Sikora:

IG: @mariosikora

Web: mariosikora.com

Pod: Enneagram in a Movie

Maria Jose Munita:

IG: @mjmunita

Seth "Creek" Creekmore:

IG: @creekmoremusic

Pod: Fathoms | An Enneagram Podcast

Pod: Delusional Optimism

Welcome to another episode of Awareness to Action Enneagram podcast. My name is Seth Creekmore, but you can call me Creek and with me is María José Munita.

And you can call me MJ.

There it is. And we have Mario Sikora.

How can we call you, Mario?

Just call me sir.

What's your middle name?

My middle name is John. Believe it or not.

MJ. Okay.

There you go. There you go.

All right. So, ironically, we are talking about preserving in this episode.

And I can't wait.

The other two on screen have the sniffles or they're recovering from COVID. So, and I just got back from having a physical in which I found out I have 20/13 vision. So I don't know what that says.

Wow. It’s like Superman. You can see through lead or something?

Yeah. So you have 20/20 vision, which is like the average. And then you have all the way down to 20/10. 20/10 is what most people can see at 10 feet, I can see it 20, but I have 20/13. So it's like what most people can see it 13, I can see it 20 feet.

Gotcha.

So.

I never had any idea of how that worked. I never knew what any of that meant.

I don’t that. I still don't. I didn't understand anything, but it's a good thing. So it's a good thing?

It's a good thing.

That’s good enough.

So a foot is a third of a meter.

Yeah, kind of getting that.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah. I mean, I can't explain it again.

No, no, no, no, no.

It means that...

I want to know if it's good or bad.

We are all navigators on this episode, on this podcast. Okay. So we all have an interesting relationship with the dreaded word of preserving. What is a laughable moment that you have found yourself in the past couple of weeks, where it's like, oh, yeah, I'm not paying attention to preserving?

I'll share one. I don't know that it was in last few weeks. It was actually a few years ago. But it's one that always sticks out on my mind. So we moved into our house some years ago, and we have four kids. And so we were at some parent-teacher thing at the kids school. And we've been living in this house for a good five years. And so I'm talking to one of the other parents, and we're talking oh, where do you guys live? Blah, blah, blah.

And so I am describing where we live. And she says, "Oh, so your house is the Tutor with the blue trim, right?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, that's it." And as I'm walking home, because we live right around the corner from the school, I'm walking up to my house, and I look at the house, and I realized we do not have blue trim. We have brown trim.

So for five years, I'd been living in this house and hadn't noticed. It just had not registered on me what color the trim was of the house, which shows this indifference to preserving things, right? The preserving is all about nesting and nurturing. And I just, you know, I couldn't care less. Even to this day, you'd asked me what color my living room is, I could not tell you with any degree of accuracy.

Interesting. You have anything, María José?

Yes. So it's interesting, because lately, I've been sick. Since COVID, been having one thing and another, and nothing too serious, but I've been thinking a lot about health and preserving things. However, I realize how unimportant those things are to me in real life.

Like, for example, my daughter who was away for six months. One of my two daughters is now here. I have to prepare lunch for two kids. They don't eat the same. So it's two different lunches every day. And I know that I have to do that. I want them to eat healthily. And every night, I forget to prepare lunch. I need to think about what they will eat the next day. And I have to improvise something in the morning and I find something to do.

But it's like, I know it's important in my mind, but I don't do it. I mean, I end up doing something, but it's not probably good enough or whatever. But...

You're a bad mother.

No, I'm not. I'm so good in so many other ways.

The evidence, you know. I don’t know. Just as an outside observer.

Yeah.

How 'bout you, Creek?

Well, so, many people... This actually might be the first time I'm saying this live on air. I would have previously put myself in the preserving category, but Mario just wanted to be right, so he suggested...

Own it, Creek. Own it.

He suggested that I might be a navigator and...

I get paid extra, Creek, when I convert people to something...

There it is, so it's been a journey to figure out if that is accurate or not, and I feel like it's accurate. For instance, I would imagine, this is pointing to the indifference of preserving, but I rarely look at the total of my bill at the end of a meal or groceries. Just like welp, I'm buying these things 'cause I want these things and here we go.

I made the choice. Move on.

Yeah. Right. I'll figure it out later.

Later.

Yeah, I don't have as many stories because I've been living most of my life in considering that I am a preserver. So we'll see. We'll see how...

So I want to comment on this, because, number one, confirmation bias is a big thing. And when I first was working with the Enneagram, I was convinced I was a Self-Pres Eight for a couple of years, and I remember going to the Riso-Hudson training where it was focused on the subtypes. And I knew Don beyond just being at the trainings. We had a mutual friend and during the training, Don comes up to me and he says, "Mario, have you figured out your subtype yet?" And I said, "Yeah, Don, I'm Self-Pres Eight." And he says, "No, you're not. You're social," and walks away.

And now, of course, you're not supposed to do that. That breaks Enneagram teacher, we know, 101 rules, but he was absolutely right. And he was Don Riso, and I was not, so I paid attention to it. But what I realized is that there were a few things that I do that we could throw into that preserving domain. And that's what I was fixated on. That's what I saw, because I latched on to those ideas. And that's what I kept telling myself, and it was confirmation bias. But when I stepped back, and started looking at getting what we call navigating now, it was just everything in my world. It's where my attention went all the time. So it's not uncommon for people to miss identify their instinctual bias because they get a couple of ideas in their head.

And I do think that the main thing for me, the hardest part for me, was the amount of what I would label as preserving activities that I am interested in and do on a regular basis and think about, that I couldn't quite see the navigating part of those preserving activities. But we can get into that later, but let's just start from the beginning. Preserving, what does that entail?

So we always think of preserving in a real simple way as nesting and nurturing. It has to do with how do I take care of my well-being? How do I take care of my environment? How do I take care of my offspring? And this is why we don't call it self-preservation, because it is a cluster of behaviors and adaptations that ensure we have the things that we need, but it's not with the goal in mind of preserving ourselves, like we talked about before.

It's just, I preserve things and that way I have them when I need them. And yes, that serves the preserving of me, but usually, like we talked about before, these instinctual biases work elliptically. I don't crave oranges. I crave sweets, and that might turn into a craving for orange but it extends beyond that in case we run out of oranges. So it's at its heart, preserving our nest, ourselves, our well-being, etc.

And the nest could be my office, my team. Doesn't have to be just the nest at home. So it's at home, but for example, for a preserver, usually the team, it's kind of the offspring. But it's usually a limited circle. It's not a big circle that I would include as my offspring and as part of my nest. I mean it's rather smaller than bigger, but it's not just at home.

And it's not a literal nest. I don't live in a nest as we've established already, I live in a Tudor with brown trim so...

Is a nest always a physical place or physical thing? Or can you preserve with ideas?

A nest is a state of mind, Creek.

Oh, wow. Okay.

No, it's not always a nest and it's not always physical resources. In fact, one of the things we'll talk about is holding on to traditions. Now again, not every preserver is focused on traditions, but we see a high proportion. And this is an important thing to say before we go any further. These things we talked about, nobody does all of them. Nobody does anything all the time. Not every trait is as visible in every preserver as some of the others that we're going to talk about.

But very often, what we see in preservers is I want things to be the way they were when I was young. I want this continuation of traditions in some way. Holidays are often a big deal, and again, not always, but the other thing we see, some really, really common, is photographs. A lot of preservers are fanatic picture takers of the kids and the offspring. María José, were you gonna say something there?

I'm just agreeing with my face.

Yeah.

With your eyes?

This is an audio format here, María José.

That's not supposed to show, so I'm just doing it. If you want I can stay... I can freeze.

No, no, no, speak, speak. Do it.

No, I was thinking about my husband who is a preserver, who likes to take a lot of videos, not just pictures, and we're doing anything, he's shooting videos. And we're all like, come on, stop it. Let's live the experience, but years later, we're all happy watching the videos.

Yeah, my wife does the same thing. I mean, terabytes and terabytes of pictures, and that she sorts through and then goes on the Walmart website to have these photo albums put together, these books of different trips, and all that stuff.

Using this as just a platform to continue figuring out my own navigating/preserving things. So I'm a Four, right? And...

We're sorry.

It's the worst. When it comes to holidays, I'm a big holiday person. And I don't know if it's the cultivating of nostalgia, or if it is more of that preserving the way things were. I'm also the person who is sneakily recording special family moments, or whenever I get my grandma talking about her time in Denmark during World War II, I just turned my phone on record and I'm preserving these stories of my heritage.

Happy moments? And difficult moments? Just any moment?

Both. Just any moment. Yeah, yeah.

So I don't want to fall into the trap of trying to explain everything from a particular point of view. And there's, a lot of times, it's the why of what we're doing, in addition to the what of what we're doing. So for a lot of preservers, when I want my Christmas to be exactly like it was for my children, it just feels right to be that way, right? I can't even put it into words. I have no justification for it. It just feels like how else would it be? It just makes me feel good.

And yeah, there's an element of nostalgia. There's an element of, you know, again, takes me back to this warm, comfortable, safe place. Now, some of the things you're talking about, you could also look at that through the lens of collecting stories about society and environment. And that can be a very navigating activity as well.

And identity.

And identity, you're absolutely right, María José. So there's lots of different ways to look at this. And so, Creek, the reason this whole thing came up regarding you again, look, I don't get paid any extra for somebody being a different type.

If anyone was in doubt.

And I have no investment in it. All I know, is that whenever I talk to you, and we talk regularly, and we've spent time together days at a time, it's just all navigating stuff. I mean, that's just what comes up, and it's different than, say with David, who's with us. There's a different conversation happening. And so for us, it's, again, not so much getting too caught up in any specific thing, but what is the trend line? What is the bulk of the activity focused on?

Yet, I think that there's something that might be useful as well for people to understand about preserving. And what I see in preservers is that there is this attention to preserving my personal resources, my energy, my time, my money. I want to pay attention to how much energy I have and how much I want to spend.

When I look at you, Creek, you're willing to invest and spend your energy in things that might not have a return necessarily. You're willing to do that. And navigators tend to that, but preservers are more careful with that. So regardless of if you'd like to cook or take pictures and all of that, there's this preserving, as I said, my personal resources that I see most preservers.

And I've never in my life met a Preserving Four who's not going to look at the check. I mean, just, you know...

And try to make you pay for it.

I didn't want to go that far, but you know. I mean, look, again, we add the type into this conversation and with the Four, it's envy. And so what we get with the Preserving Four is timeout, that's mine. Don't touch it. And in fact, you know, I think you got a little of mine by accident, and I want it back sort of thing. Again, I've just never seen any of that in you. Sorry, to my Preserving Four friends, but you're cheap.

I do think... And I think the questions like for me about the holiday thing and the recording, it's so easy to think, well, yeah, I love holidays. I think what I'm more searching for is how can this action be explained in the navigating way, because it looks preserving. And I think those are the tensions that I'm feeling within myself. I'm like, yeah, but I love working out, and I'm very conscious about what I eat, and money's important. Nice things are important. Cozy places important, but it's...

As they are to everyone.

Right. Right.

Okay. And this is what it comes down to with the instinctual bias. What is it that separates our individual behavior from what everybody does? Everybody wants enough money. Everybody wants enough food. Everybody wants to be healthy. It's just once we get beyond that baseline, how much of our attention goes to it?

I always like to think of this as discretionary attention. Meaning, I don't have to think about anything. Where does my mind go? Now, if I haven't eaten in two days, I'm gonna be preserving. And we see at different points in people's lives, their mind, their attention goes to a particular area.

You want to see transmitting, go to a college town on a Saturday night. You're gonna have 90% of the population that's in transmitting mode at the local bars. Why? Because they're young adults looking for love. All things being equal. And when we're talking about discretionary time, where does the mind go? Where's the energy go? Where did the values show up? And that's how we know.

Yeah, that's helpful. So let's transition a little bit deeper into the actual topic of preserving. And we talked about the subdomains and the other things associated with the subdomains. So Mario, why don't you go ahead and share with us those things.

So as we've talked about before, we're not talking about one singular instinct that drives a whole bunch of behaviors. We're talking about a multitude of adaptations that respond to specific environmental stimuli. And we can group those into subdomains, and then sub-subdomains. In one of the earlier episodes that we talked about, we talked about those three, that kind of next layer down of things within the preserving domain, and those are security, well-being and resources and maintenance. Okay, so am I safe? My offspring safe? Do I have the things that I need so that I'm comfortable? And am I keeping the things around me in good repair?

But we can take each one of those and break them down a little further. Now there's a million ways to do this. We talked about that before as well. Russ Hudson has his way of kind of grouping them, and it's just fairly arbitrary. And we could extend this out. We could have made this 12 categories if we wanted, but you got to stop somewhere within the security area. So first of all, there's basic safety. I locked the doors. Am I not going to get run over by a car, you know, those sorts of things, but, those are silly examples, but ensuring that my environment is one that is safe and secure.

Now, the second area is one that's really important to understand when we're having this conversation. It's about relationship. Because I've met so many people who say, oh, I'm one-to-one, because... I'm sorry, yeah, I'm a one-to-one or sexual subtype, because it's really important to me to be close to my significant other. My primary relationship is fundamental to me, but that's not transmitting. And in fact, what we often see in preservers is this need for closeness to the significant other.

It's more of a blanket.

I want you close. Exactly, it's a security blanket. It makes me feel good. You make me feel good just by being here. Don't touch me, but don't go away either. Or maybe touch me, but it's not all about... it's not this passionate thing we always think about in that other domain, but it's, I feel safe this way.

And when you say, feel good, that's going to be defined differently from a preserver to a navigator to a transmitter.

Absolutely right. And so what it is with a preserver is I just, I feel safe. When you're there, I feel safe. And not because I think somebody's gonna come hurt me if you're not here. But just, again, like María José, it's like a security blanket. Just okay. I feel complete now in some way.

Yeah. And we're not talking only about partners. I can think of my mother who is... She's a preserver as well. She's a Preserving Six, and she needs to talk to me every day. I have 10-year-old kids, and I don't need to talk to her every day, but my mom does with me. And I'm a lot older than my kids.

And if I don't respond to her messages, she's like, is everything okay? And it just makes her feel good to know that I'm there, to know how I'm doing, and she needs it. And I don't. So it's not a matter of just being a mother, it's a matter of how preserving she is. And I'm not.

There's another element related to this. We'll hear people talk about, oh, I'm one-to-one or the sexual subtype, because I like to interact with one person at a time or in small groups. But that, again, is a very common preserving way of interacting with people. I want to interact with a small group that I feel comfortable by, that doesn't get too complex.

It's not too draining.

It's not too draining. It's not distracting. It's not hard to follow. I've got this little group. My two or three friends, we hang out together all the time, and everything is good. Okay. There's a really interesting book called "Social Chemistry" by... Woman's name is Marissa King, and she describes different networking styles. And they track exactly to the three instinctual domains. And the preservers are all about this small group that feels comfortable and safe for me.

How would you differentiate between someone who would consider themselves more introverted, that the energy thing is a component with any social interaction, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are preserving.

Introversion and extroversion are complicated terms. And there are different aspects of each of them. So we tend to call somebody introverted if they don't talk too much. And somebody extroverted, if they talk a lot. We also can talk about how people get their energy. Do I get my energy by going away? Or do I get my energy from being out around people? Nobody is pure in either one of those things. It all manifests itself differently.

And there are multiple factors that go into that. Instinctual bias, for example, but also type can be a factor as well. So we get this kind of complex stew happening around introversion and extroversion. Now, typically what happens is with preservers, I get that I need relationships. I get that I need to interact with people at work or socially, but it drains me. It is something that I do when I have to, but there's a cost associated with it.

Now with navigators, we get into a different phenomenon. Navigators are not extroverted in the classic sense, because they don't always need to be engaged with people or talk to people, and they don't like to be around people that they don't find very interesting. That's kind of common among human beings, but it's very clear thing with navigators. But they're also afraid of missing out on things. So when there's something interesting happening, if there's an interesting group of people meeting or being around, I want to be there, and I'm probably going to stick around to the end because I don't want to miss anything.

Now that'll look a little bit different from type to type, but usually at the end of a party, the people left sitting around at the end are the navigators, because they're just having good old time conversing. Now, most navigators, you ask them, are they extroverted? They're gonna say, no. Kind of, maybe somewhere in the middle. Now, with transmitters, they look extroverted. They look like, oh I'm the life of the party. I love being here, et cetera, et cetera. And while they're around people, they will be outgoing and expressive and transmitting. And there's a part of them that wants to go home.

And they would define themselves as introverts many times.

Yes. Yes. Even though anybody looking at them would say, this is an introvert? What are you talking about?

Yeah, there are many times very private about their lives and certain aspects that they don't want to share.

It sounds like you're saying none of them would identify themselves as extroverts.

I have yet to find anybody who says, Oh, absolutely. I'm an extrovert. You might occasionally see somebody, oh, yeah, I like to be the life of the party or something like that. But they will always then say, but you know what, there's this other side of me that's really introverted.

Read any interview with any Hollywood actor or actress. And they're all going to talk about it. Everybody looks at them, Oh, my goodness, is such an extrovert and so forth. And they're all going to talk about needing their privacy and wanting their privacy.

You haven't met my mom.

Well, there's still time, Creek.

She exchanges recipes with strangers in the grocery store on a regular basis.

But see, again, that's... And again, I don't know anything about your mom, but that is a transmitting sort of thing. And what is her Enneagram type?

Two.

Well, there you go. So that is kind of, hey, let me connect you by sharing this thing with you, and I'm gonna give you this recipe, whether you want it or not. And you're gonna love it and all that sort of thing. And I need somebody to connect with, and this is the way that Transmitting Twos transmit is by connecting to people, so they can transmit to them. But I guarantee there's a part of your mother that wants to be left alone when she's ready to be left alone.

So the last sub-subdomain is risk management. María José, you want to explain this?

Yeah, sure. And it's interesting, because we used to have risk avoidance in these as this concept. And we've noticed that preservers can take risks, but they're managed. They know what they're getting into. They know what the potential pitfalls are, and they know how much they want to invest, whereas it’s time or energy or money. So they don't do it without thinking. They do take risks, but they're very well-managed. They pay a lot of attention to it.

You know, from there, so that's kind of the safety things that we talked about. Risk management, relationships, people that keep me safe, etc. And then we have well-being and resources. And this is what people mostly talk about when they talk about the self-pres subtype. Am I comfortable? Do I have enough toilet paper, all these sorts of things. We break those down into comfort, supply and health. And toilet paper is a leading indicator.

Yeah, let me share this. Let me share this.

Yeah, go ahead.

So I just hate so much to buy toilet paper that there was this toilet paper or things for home on sale some time ago. And I didn't pay any attention to what I was buying. And people are still making fun of me for how much toilet paper I bought. It's just massive. They left it. I live in an apartment in a building, and downstairs where they left the toilet paper, the guy who is in charge of the security and the building in general, was laughing with my husband because of how much toilet paper. Like do you have people invited to go to the bathroom here? So what's the thing? What's going on?

What are you charging a quarter?

And you could say that I'm preserving, but I bought a lot of toilet paper because I hate doing it. So I said okay, let's take advantage of this sale. And I bought too much because I didn't even pay attention to how much I was buying.

Yeah. And so again this gets to the subtlety of these issues, because we joke about toilet paper being a leading indicator. People always buying loads of toilet paper and so on, but the key is always rather than once a year, I just get fed up, and it's like, if I have to go back to this freakin store one more time and so I'm just going to be done with it and get it over with.

Buy six pallets.

Yeah, exactly, but it's not because I'm thinking, oh, I'm afraid I'll run out of toilet paper, and then life, as we know, will be over. But it's, I just can't stand thinking about this any more than I have to, so I'm going to be done with it.

And I think that the pandemic was very useful in showing how toilet paper is important. It's one of the things that most supermarkets run out of when the pandemic started. And it's because, okay, I can run out of several things, but not toilet paper.

And by the way, how one places the toilet paper roll on the holder is an indicator of one's instinctual biases.

Wow.

I was seeing how far we can milk this.

There's only one way. The right way.

Says the one.

It's the right way.

All right, so enough about toilet paper, and so...

Yeah, but this is about part of it, it's supply and how much resources I have, and how much do I need and for how long it will last for. So it's not about having a lot or a little, because depending on the type of the strategy, some people will like to have the minimal, optimal amount of things. Some people will like to have a lot. But I know how much I have. I know how much time I have until I run out of it. I'll probably go and buy before I run out of it, or put money in the bank before I run out of it. So it's the attention I pay to the supply rather than how much I have or I don't.

And that's the key thing, right? It's how much do I think about this? How much of an internal dialogue am I having in my head around these things? So share a story. So María José and I obviously have been working together a long time. And she lives in Chile. I live in the US. And I don't know how long ago María José, seven, eight years ago, when...

It was 2014.

2014, so eight years ago, María José and her husband came to the United States, and we're in New York. And Tanya, my wife and I live 90 minutes away in Philadelphia. So we got together, and they had never met before and María José's husband and my wife are both preservers, and so we're together having lunch.

We were at a bar, I think like in the afternoon.

Well it dragged on all day. Yes. So it started off at Carnegie Deli, and then went to the the other place we went, and it was just this litany of preserving things. Where can you buy this? And how can you save on that? And oh, I love to order things this way. And my wife and her husband were just baba, baba, baba, and María José and I are sitting there looking at each other like, oh, my God. When will this end?

Torture.

It was, but they were in heaven, because they each finally had somebody to talk to about the things they really care about. Again, it's about the energy and energy that we put into something, the energy and attention to it, rather than, oh, he went out bought a bunch of toilet paper, so he must be preserving.

Yeah, in this well-being and resources will also comfort, as I think you mentioned before, and it's how do I prioritize or make decisions? So what am I going to wear? Is it going to be based on how it looks? Or is it going to wear based on comfort? I might decide to not wear high heels because they're just uncomfortable, or wear high heels for the first hour and have my sandals in my bag and change during the party, you know.

So it doesn't mean that all preservers are never going to wear high heels, but it's the attention that I pay to how comfortable or uncomfortable I'm going to feel in a particular situation. In my case, as a navigator, I couldn't care less. I want to fit. I want to use, wear or do what's going to help me in the navigating domain. Position myself in a particular way, be seen in a particular way, even if it's uncomfortable.

Is comfort always related to physical well-being or is there also like emotional or psychological comfort?

No, it's all of those things. It is, I want stability. So again, we'll find comfort in different ways psychologically or emotionally, but usually what the preserver is looking for is some sense of stability and consistency. You could say, if you think of the Big Five, neuroticism, and neuroticism is, we tend to think of it as a really negative thing, but it's a desire for stability and consistency in our world.

And when we start to lose that, we start to get anxious, and so forth. So in that way, preservers will tend to score a little bit higher in neuroticism on the Big Five assessment. So it's not just my physical well-being, it's my emotional well-being. It's my psychological well-being. It's my spiritual well-being.

It could be very comfortable in the job that I'm doing, and not want to move from it to another job.

So health is, again, it's something that always gets talked about. And again, we run into an issue there because people of all instinctual biases work out, go to the gym and do so religiously. Some do. Some don't. And there are some preservers who are terrible at taking care of their health. But again, it's how much of my psychic energy gets tied up in this thing.

And so what you'll hear the preservers doing is talking about it a lot. It'll come up a lot at every opportunity. They'll talk about their aches and pains. They'll talk about staying safe from illness, all that sort of thing. Again, I know you work out all the time.

And I play tennis.

María José plays tennis and for exercise, and I listen to you guys talk about playing tennis and working out. But no, but I did martial arts for years. For 10-12 years, four or five times a week, I was training, but I wasn't doing it because I was anxious or nervous or concerned about my health. Yeah, I gotta stay healthy, but I enjoyed it. It was a social activity for me. I had a social community there around the martial arts school.

But there'll be these different reasons. And so again, even though I know you, Creek, and I know that you exercise, and that sort of thing, it's not something that comes up in our conversations. It's not something that you work into the conversation. Now I do have a brother-in-law who's a Preserving Four, and he works it into the conversation. So every time I see him, it's part of the conversation, even though I couldn't care less about it.

Yeah, I think in some ways, the desire to be healthy and to feel healthy is a way in order to continually maintain the things that I enjoy for a longer period of time.

This is exactly the way navigators tend to think about their health and well-being. If I stay healthy, I can navigate more. I can get out and see the world. I can be comfortable. I can be engaged. I can live the life of engagement in some way that I want to, rather than being frail and limited that way.

Yeah, to me, it's like freedom, now that you mentioned it, and I'm doing a sport that people can do until very old, and that it's very social. And if I exercise a workout apart from tennis, it’s so that I can play better tennis and not hurt myself or anything like that. It's at the service of continue to do it for a longer time.

That makes sense. Great. So finally, we have maintenance.

Yeah, so this is ensuring... You know, I told the story in one of the earlier episodes about the swan in Bruges. It's just this kind of knee jerk response to maintaining my environment. This sort of automatic noticing of what needs to be fixed, what needs to be done, etcetera. Now again, María José has pointed this out number of times, it doesn't mean the preservers always act on it. They might notice and complain and say, Oh, we really have to do something about that, and they might not do anything about it. But they'll keep noticing it and they'll keep talking about it.

They'll keep bringing it up, but it doesn't go away. And so it's what needs to be fixed. I do assessment interviews with clients and that sort of thing, and it's almost universal that men who are preserving will talk about oh, yeah, I like to do woodwork. I like to fix plumbing, do things around the house, remodel things and gardening, yard work, all that sort of stuff. Now do only preservers do that? No, but... And does every preserver do it? No, but it's highly correlated.

Yeah, my husband is a preserver and I think he's a Preserving Five. So he's not into any of those activities that you mentioned, but he likes to stay in the nest. He likes to read. He likes to do things in the nest, and he feels very comfortable there. He doesn't need to go out. So he's nesting in a different way, not with a lot of activity, but he's in the nest.

And it goes back to again, nobody does everything, you know, all these things. We're looking for preponderance of correlation really.

So to round out this conversation around preserving, there's some contradictory behaviors within the preserving domain that can be confusing and not appear to be preserving.

As we've described, we're not just talking about one monolithic instinct, we're talking about different adaptations. And the way our brains have evolved is in response to environmental forces. And humans throughout time have faced different environmental forces through which different adaptations have required. And there's more than one way to skin a cat.

So what I mean by that is that we can preserve ourselves sometimes this way and other times that way. They both foster preserving, but they seem like opposite kind of behaviors. For example, our ancestors lived in a time of scarcity of food. So I come across, I kill an antelope. Great. I have a choice. Okay. I can't freeze the excess. I can't eat it all. I can't pace myself with antelope meat. So I face a choice. Do I try to save some of it for later? Do I try to save some of my resources for when I might need them? Or do I think you know what, you got it now you better eat it.

So when it comes to the preserving domain, there are different ways of preserving either by full nourishment now, or pacing myself out. And so we have these contradictory patterns in the brain. Some of them are internal, things that I'm wrestling with, and we call that a dissonance. In the preserver, that dissonance, that internal stress, is being conservative versus being indulgent. Meaning, do I save my resources? Or do I indulge myself? They're both perfectly valid from the macro level of preserving.

Yeah, and the indulgence doesn't have to be something unnecessary. It could be something that will be good for my health, for my well-being, and I just don't want to spend the resources on it. My mom is just all the time like that. It's like, I need to change the mattress, but I don't want to spend too much money on it. And I want to eat well, but this is too expensive. And it's all the time with these inner monologue of like, where do I spend the resources and for something that is preserving as well.

Yeah, this is on sale, so I'm gonna buy it, because I'll save so much money, but I really shouldn't buy this because I don't really need it, but it is on sale, and so I'm be saving and this, you know. And this, should I buy this coat? Well, you know, man, I like it, but it's gonna keep me so warm, but then again, it's expensive. But if I get it now... And so it's this torturing that the preserver does around how I use my resources. And we call it a dissonance because it's an internal stress.

Something my dad always says is, we can't afford to save any more money.

Yeah, I think that's a Dad thing. Yeah.

We haven't gotten to that episode yet.

But it is. It is that kind of thing, and this is something that preservers can convince themselves of. Oh, I saved so much by buying this thing, but no, when you spend money, you're not saving money. So yeah.

So it's interesting, because, as I said, my mom does that all the time. So a way she has found to solve it is to have me buying it for her. So she pays for it, but I buy it online. She recently changed her bed, and I bought it for her. So in her mind, it was just easier, because she didn't do it, and she's so happy with her new bed. So comfortable. Yeah, but she's struggled for years with that issue.

And we all do this to some extent, but this is not a big internal conversation for navigators. It's like, you know, sometimes sure if I don't have enough money or there are really constraints but preservers spent a lot of time thinking about this. Navigators might do it sometimes. Transmitters might do in something, but it's like the inner state of the preserver. Do I conserve or do I indulge? Now, that's the internal thing.

There's an external manifestation that we see, and we call that the contradiction. And each of the instinctual biases has both a specific dissonance and a specific contradiction we talked about. The contradiction is an external manifestation. And well, at least what I like to say is, the dissonance is how I drive myself crazy. The contradiction is how I drive you crazy. And for preservers, it is selfishness versus nurturing. Yeah, nurturing versus selfish.

And it's puzzling when you observe them, because sometimes they're very nurturing. They give a lot to their environment, especially those people close to them, but when it comes to giving, there's a certain point when they say, I need to have enough for myself that I cannot afford to give these to other people. And they seem to be very selfish. It's like, what's the problem? Why can't you give now to these people. I mean, they need it. You have the money or the resources in general, but you can see like this line that they cross, and they seem selfish, and sometimes very nurturing.

The way I like to think of this is, here have a piece of pie but if it's the last one, do not touch my pie. So it's, I want you to be okay as well. And that'll vary based on the type, for example, as well. Of course, there's always variation in these things. Because again, the preserving is not just self-preservation, it's preservation the people that I care about and their well-being too. So I want to give, except when I feel some scarcity, and then you better stay away from my stuff.

I believe my father is a Preserving Five, and he will literally, quote squirrel away snacks so that we don't eat them.

Yes.

So then it becomes my quest to find his hiding spots.

Yes, yes.

Some of the biggest fights we've had here at home, it's like, who ate this? You know? Like, does it really matter? We can buy another one. No, but who ate it? I need to know.

That's amazing.

When I was a kid, my mother's a Preserving Nine. And when I was a kid, she would squirrel away these Devil's food cookies. On top of the refrigerator, there'd be this pack of these delicious Devil's food cookies. And we weren't allowed to have them. They were hers, and they were up there taunting us. You could see them up there. She's kind of rubbing it in our faces.

But for me, it was all about getting those just for spite. Just because who are you to tell me I can't have something. And as soon as I could, I would buy my own and eat them in front of her just to, again, show dominance, but you're right, it's don't touch my stuff.

So our final segment for the preserving episode is how does it preserver navigate? And how does a preserver transmit?

So we talked about these zones, right? The zone of enthusiasm, meaning it's the instinctual bias that is most interesting to us. We get energized by. The zone of inner conflict, meaning I kind of do it, kind of don't. I do it, but it comes at a cost. I'd never feel like I'm doing quite well enough. And then the zone of indifference, just don't care about it.

With preservers, what we hear over and over and over again... I'm actually working with a group of 20 people right now. I'm about to do a three-hour Enneagram session for them. So I'm doing pre-interviews, and they're with a bank. And so there's a high proportion of preservers among these 20 people. And I keep seeing the same thing over and over again. They're all about the preserving. I want order. I want structure. I want process. I want to take care of my physical well-being.

In the navigating domain. Yeah, I get that it's important. I understand I need people around me, in case I need something. I need a backup plan. Okay, so I have a small group of people that I'm close to, but beyond that small group, it becomes an energetic drain. And I just, I can go to the party and have a good time for a while, and then I want to leave. I can follow the office politics or gossip for a while, and then I want to get back to work. So it's the zone of inner conflict.

Yeah, and it's like, I'm able to understand the politics. I'm able to understand who is who to identify them, to know what's going on, but I want to get out of there. I want to do it too much, and I don't want to be one of those people who are all the time doing it, because it's a waste of time.

There's also this aspect where preservers are a bit anxious about not surrounding themselves with more people, not reaching out to people who might be important, useful today or in the future, and they are aware of it. They understand the importance of it, but many times, they're not willing to do it now. I'll do it later. I have it as a to-do thing on my list, but I don't get to do it, or as much as I think I need to.

And there's also an insecurity about it. So they'll question themselves about their social engagement. Meaning, should I've said this? Or should I really said that right? Maybe I should have put it this way? And they'll agonize more over emails and that sort of thing, because I don't feel as comfortable in the navigating domain as navigators do.

Now, when we're younger, we feel uncomfortable with those things. Just take a 25-year-old navigator, and they're gonna have anxiety in the navigating domain, but a healthy 45-50-year-old navigators, this is what I do. I know how to do this. I know how to write an email. So there's this anxiety in the expression of that domain as well as insecurity.

So my mom's still working. And she's very good at what she does. And I think she can deal with pretty much any situation, but if she needs to write a politically challenging email, she'll call me. What should I say here? And I'm thinking, why is she asking me something so simple, in my mind. But it's because it's challenging politically, and that she's not comfortable enough with.

In the third domain, the transmitting domain, what we find with preservers is they're just not that interested in it. Again, I hear preservers over and over again saying, you know, you do a good job, keep your head down, and you'll get ahead. You'll get a promotion by doing good work. I'm not going to be somebody who's pounding my own chest, telling everybody how great I am, trying to stand out, trying to show off. I'm just going to do my job, and that's enough.

And what always ends up happening is that they're doing a great job, but nobody's paying any attention to it. Nobody's noticing it. They don't get recognized. They do not promote themselves, which is a very much transmitting activity, and they get overlooked. So this indifference leads to a vulnerability.

Yeah. And it's like, I shouldn't need to do that. It's not necessary, but it's not supposed to be necessary. And we need to remember, I think that this is how much I value each of these domains. So preservers don't value the transmitting domain as much as they value the other two. So I shouldn't need to do that. Now we saw ways in all profiles, I think, these distortion around the different domains.

And when you ask them to think about transmitting, they'll usually in their minds portray the worst case scenario. That transmitter who is talking about peace or her accomplishment with no substance, and talking all the time. So in their minds, when they think about it, they think about that version of transmitting. They don't think about a healthy adaptive transmitter, who promotes themselves fairly and not too much.

No, no, no, they go to the extreme. And understanding that really helps when you're working with them. Understanding that that's where their minds go when you're talking about it.

Yeah, you hear preservers all the time, particularly the workplace, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be that person who always needs to have their voice heard, who always has to find something to say, I want to just be the opposite of that. So they fall into this binary thinking about it.

And I imagine it can be mistaken as humility.

Yes. Yes. And it's kind of a false humility. Well, so it can be an indifference. Yeah, I want to be careful about that.

I would say that it's an unnecessary humility, because it feels authentic to them, but it's not useful. It's not necessary. It's not fair. It's not showing the value of the person in an accurate way.

Now, again, we gotta be careful, because the strategy, the Enneagram type, will have variation when it comes to this. Particularly with Threes, Preserving Threes. Preserving Threes can look a little bit... they can look more transmitting than they really are, but it's because they're striving to feel outstanding. But it's a different set of things.

In this group of 20 people that I just talked to, I'd say at least seven of them were Preserving Threes. And each one of them scored really high on the transmitting elements of an assessment, but they all say, yeah, I don't... I want to be recognized, but I don't want to draw attention to myself.

Yesterday, I went out with a Preserving Three. She was just appointed a huge role that I don't want to mention so that I don't expose her. And she's like, yeah, who am I to do that? Do you see me doing that? Or it's like, she doesn't, and she doesn't want that role to define her either. But when you see her on stage, she's great. She does such a good job. She's brilliant. But there's something about not believing that and not only believing but not wanting to show off with those kinds of things, labels.

Well, I don't know about you, but my belly is telling me it's time to eat. So this will be the end of the preserving episode and tune in next time. We're gonna be talking about navigating.

Thanks for listening to the Awareness to Action Enneagram podcast. If you're interested in more information or talking to Mario, MJ or myself, feel free to reach out to us through the links in the show notes or by emailing info@awarenesstoaction.com. All episode transcriptions and further information can be found at awarenesstoaction.com/podcast.