dayo, in a nutshell

First, who is Dayo? I’ve learned after being in the Enneagram community for a while that there is value in knowing who exactly you’re talking to. It builds authentic trust and rapport and makes this entire process of attempting to present my ideas to you much easier. One of my biggest hopes is that after reading this book is that you feel like I was honest and integral in my approach. I desire to conduct my enneagram practice with as much vulnerability and integrity as I can because I realize that by inviting you into this work, I am asking you to be vulnerable too. It's only fair that I start. 

So, hello. My name is Adedayo Feyisayo Ajanaku. I share my full name because I know that there is power in a name. My first name means “Crown” or “Princess of Joy”. My middle name means “Use this as Joy'' and my last name means elephant! I’m a (currently) 24 year old Nigerian American woman currently attending Berkeley Law (Class of 2024) in the Bay Area. Fun fact, I was actually born in Nigeria but moved to the states when I was two! I am a daughter to two immigrant parents and a sister to four siblings, all of whom I love with a love that fails (as my dear friend Hannah Richardson would always share). I lead with Type One and have a strong wing Two. My dominant subtype is Social, my secondary subtype is Self Preservation and my suppressed subtype is One to One. 

I grew up feeling pretty different from my peers. Even though I’m a social subtype, I always felt like I had difficulty making friends with people who were my age. I gravitated towards older people and felt safer around them. They carried wisdom that I yearned for. I realize now that my “old soul” personality was just the result of me having to grow up a little too fast. As the first daughter in a Nigerian household, I was thrusted into the role of “Mom #2”. Most Nigerian girls accept this role and do the best they can with it. Me? I repelled. It felt foreign to me to be nurturing and domestic. I wanted to make the world better, starting with me. I wanted to be better. I unknowingly turned myself into a project that needed to be fixed because I felt fundamentally flawed and broken, not just as a woman who didn’t enjoy woman things but as a human being who just could not seem to avoid criticism- which was my #1 goal in life. 

These tendencies became more pronounced when I made the decision on my own to become a Christian at age 16. I grew up in church and always felt a pull towards that life but it wasn’t until I had my heart broken for the first time that I felt like I needed something more. The hard thing was that I dove head first into evangelicalism. In the beginning, it was great. I felt like I was on the right team, fighting the good fight. But something always felt a little off. I always felt a sort of disconnection from God. We were told that we didn’t have to earn Gods favor while in the same breath being told that there were certain things we needed to do and ways we needed to act to be in Gods good graces. Otherwise, we’re backsliding. I wrestled with my faith for years. Ad a Type One, evangelicalism had the odd effect of making me more self righteous and less like Christ. I learned the art of “othering” and placed myself on the good side and everyone who wasn’t a Christin- no matter how loving and Christ-like they were - were bad. This mindset followed me into my time at Agnes Scott College where I ostracized myself from the liberal, “God-hating” people at my school that I was taught to fear and condemn. I never took the time to get to know anyone who did not identify as a Christian. It was an extremely lonely experience. 

Fast forward to post-college - I’m a 2020 graduate so you know what that means - my senior year was stolen from me. No graduation and even worse no graduation party. At this point in my life, I am reapplying to law school (not so fun-fact: I applied for the 2020 cycle and was rejected from every school because of my low test scores but that's another story) while I was back home in Texas and watching the world shut down little by little. Even though I was preoccupied with retaking the LSAT and re-applying to schools, I was still paying attention. The one thing that I captured my most attention the most was the response of Christians after the murders of Taylor, Arbury and Floyd. Back to back, we kept seeing and hearing these distressing stories and yet, Christians generally seemed to remain unmoved. This is when my dark night of the soul began. I couldn’t understand it. How could people who claimed to love God so easily and callously disregard human life? So I took a break from the original expression of my faith in order to meet God outside of the confines of evangelicalism. 

This led me to taking my knowledge of the Enneagram more seriously, which I will talk about soon. The Enneagram completely changed the way I saw myself and my relationship with God. The story of my inner work and my faith is still unfolding. I’m learning to be okay with the messy and imperfect in-between that we call deconstructing and decolonizing. I’m relearning how to relate to God and my fellow Christians in a way that feels authentic and honest. Im relearning how to see myself as God sees me while also acknowledging that imperfection lives in me and that I won’t always get it right and that's okay. 

Now let's talk about my Enneagram journey. 

The Black Enneagram was my pandemic project. I learned about the Enneagram in 2019 when a good friend named Hannah Richardson introduced it to me during a time when I was going through major life issues. At the time, the Enneagram gave language to the things that I had already felt instinctively and helped me understand why I did the things I did beyond the surface. After some research and gut-checks, I realized that I resonated most with the Type One. However, I hold the belief that all nine types live in all of us. Through further research, I started to realize that the Enneagram was unlike other personality systems in that it gave me a framework for growth and improvement - a Type One’s dream. I loved it so much that I continued doing extensive research, listening to multiple podcasts, reading various articles and following countless Instagram pages. Needless to say, I was hooked. 

Unfortunately, I slowly began to lose interest when I realized just how few voices of color existed in this space. I want to preface and say that this book is for everyone, regardless of race. The intent of this book is to radically normalize multicultural perspectives and viewpoints. Rather than creating spaces for “only white people'' or “only people of color”, my goal is that we get to a place as a society that whatever room we enter naturally includes all people and should automatically reflect the diverse world that we live in. 

If you’re not aware, there are two worlds in the Enneagram-Instagram space. One space is focused on Enneagram education. These wonderful people are typically certified coaches, trainers and teachers who take seriously the sacred spiritual wisdom of the Enneagram. They typically host coaching sessions, training and courses. The other space is focused on the fun ways we can infuse everyday living - pop culture, entertainment, etc - into the Enneagram to make the tool more “fun” and “palpable” for beginners and seasoned users who need a break from the heavy side of the Enneagram. This is where you’ll see people type TV shows, compare the types to different things like animals and color palettes. In the beginning of my Enneagram journey, I felt seen by the educational side of the Enneagram but not by the fun side. It felt like that space was meant for people who came from white American female backgrounds. Honestly, it made sense. People can only share from their own perspective but as a Black woman, it made me feel like the Enneagram did not belong to everyone, only a select few. 

The examples used and analogies adopted to describe the types felt foreign to me. I often tell the story about two specific times when I felt that the Enneagram-Instagram world felt culturally irrelevant to me. One was when an Instagram post said “you know you’re a One if you’ve rearranged the dishwasher after someone else has already done it” and I immediately thought, “We never used the dishwasher in my Nigerian household. My hands were the dishwasher.”. Obviously even my generalization of the black experience has its issues and there are many black families who may use the dishwasher but it's not super common. From my perspective, she was talking to white people, not me. 

Another instance that made me feel that the Enneagram-Instagram space was not inclusive for people of color was when I searched for a TV typing for my favorite show, A Different World. I deeply wanted to see if I shared a type with my favorite TV show character, Whitley Gilbert. Because the show is a classic for most black people, I expected someone to have done it but no one had typed it. In fact, I could only find typings for shows like Friends and The Office which had predominantly a white cast members. Disappointed at the exclusion, I set aside the Enneagram for a couple months. It wasn’t until during my senior year at Agnes Scott College where I found myself taking a course called “Creativity and Innovation in Business” taught by a brilliant professor named Dr. Amy Briedenthal. One of the projects Dr. Breidenthal assigned us was to think of a novel or innovative product or service that has not been done before. Such an easy and simple task, right? Luckily for me, my mind immediately went to the Enneagram. My mission was simple: start an Instagram page that would serve as a creative and engaging space for people of color on the more fun side of the Enneagram using art and basic Enneagram education. Although there was no requirement to execute our projects, I did it anyway. 

The journey began when I did preliminary research to see if there was anyone out there already doing Enneagram work for people of color and came across an article by Mickey Scottbey Jones on Sojourners titled, The Enneagram is Not Just for White People. Scottbey Jones spoke about how she “ found the Enneagram invaluable [but it was not] equally accessible to all people. The lack of diverse teachers of the system leaves a critical absence of knowledge.” She also shares how “The Enneagram is a tool…  that can be used for that personal transformation work that we need to be doing while we’re trying to change the world. In its best form, what the Enneagram does is offer you a way to understand yourself to do the work of actually integrating soul, mind, body, spirit – all of those things.” Furthermore, she stated something that I intuitively knew to be true. She said, “This system looks really different on different people.” Mickey Scottbey Jones’ words  put language to my frustrations in such an eloquent way that it helped me realize that my page was needed even if all I could offer was a creative approach to beginner Enneagram education. 

My work on The Black Enneagram started by typing every show I wanted to see represented. This included A Different World, Black-ish, Martin, the black characters on This is Us, My Wife and Kids, Sister Sister, Girlfriends, Living Single and so much more. I was giving the world something that I wish I had when I started my Enneagram journey. Then the pandemic hit. That occurrence, coupled with rising racial tensions following the murders of Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s murder, created the perfect storm. Everyone was adopting Issa Rae’s infamous attitude of “rooting for everybody black” energy. Soon, I had an influx of supporters and realized that my page was truly valuable in the Enneagram-Instagram space. Shortly after, there was an increased focus on ending asian hate so I began to intentionally include not just black people, but all people of color in my work. I already regularly watched shows featuring AAPI and Latinx people such as Fresh Off The Boat and Jane The Virgin, so it only made sense to include them in my work. 

My work is meant to give people of color a place where they can feel seen and understood by the wisdom of the Enneagram in a way that resonates with them. Being able to see yourself in a tool is the first step to using the tool and engaging with it in a way that helps you move from information to transformation. That is what I want for people of color. 

The Enneagram is best engaged with a group of trusted friends. Often when we learn about the Enneagram we immediately take an individualistic approach to it but what I’ve found, through the origins of the Enneagram, is that the Enneagram is meant to be done in community. The process is less about you and more about us. Community is a big part of what makes you who you are. Having even just one other person who knows your type and is willing to walk with you through your journey back to the person God created you to be is incredibly important to doing this deep work.