Julie Lamoureux 0:00
One isn't necessarily making decisions based just on data. David Gray, from the big hormone Enneagram, talks a lot about what does he say? Ones know everything that God knows or something like that. That's one of the things he said. And I am not claiming a divine connection here, but I'm not not claiming it either, okay,
Josh Lavine 1:16
There is also a lot of two energy in Julie's typing. So one wing two plus also a two fix. And so there is a relational, interpersonal dimension that I think softens and warms up what we would typically characterize as the severity of one. We also explore in this conversation the difference between one being a competence type and three being competence type. Kind of comparing her experience as a competence type with her pursuit of music and art and even dog training, with my experience as a three also musician and we also touch on some classic one themes like activism and advocacy. And Julie tells a really compelling story about how she got involved with a town hall debate about a potential development that would have destroyed some of the environment around her hometown that she just moved to, and another classic one theme around being a teacher, teacherliness, which is sort of especially in one wing two space, but Julie has gravitated towards being a teacher in various pursuits of her life. Finally, the other thing that Julie really insisted on bringing to this conversation was to point out one's sense of humor and ones have a line to seven built into the Enneagram. Symbol that sort of symbolically captures this. But just one's appreciation for the ridiculous and the absurd that Julie has a real appreciation for, and also comes through in her general storytelling as well as in her explicit calling out of this theme. So if you'd like to learn more about what a type one is and about the Enneagram in general, then you can go to our website at the Enneagram school.com and I especially recommend you check out our intro course, which is a perfect on ramp if you're a beginner or a great back to basics if you're an advanced student. All that is at the Enneagram school.com
and without further ado, I'm very excited for you to learn from Julie. As part of my preparation for this interview, I looked at your artist website, and your paintings are amazing. They're, let me just explain, and I'll maybe we'll put some still shots of your paintings in the video, or certainly we'll put a link to your website, but you have these
Julie Lamoureux 0:26
and there's just some things that I know, and as I've gotten older, it's a lot bigger. Welcome
Josh Lavine 0:32
to another episode of what it's like to be you. I'm Josh Lavon, your host, and on this show, I interview accurately typed guests about their experience as their Enneagram type Today, my guest is Julie Lamoureux, who is a self pres, social one, wing two with 126, trifix. I think you'll notice Julie's oneness right away, even in her body language. So one is characterized by a kind of structural uprightness in their body language that contrasts with nines, relaxation and flow, and also eights kind of bluntness and forcefulness. So one, even in the way that she pronounces her words, there's a precision and articulation, a care that she takes. And you can see, yeah, just in her posture, a kind of architectural dignity.
paintings of grizzly bears and wolves and other wildlife that are striking in how almost like you're looking directly into their eyes. You're seeing like into their souls. You're trying to capture. In a certain my sense is, what you're trying to capture, what comes through is the animal's dignity and sovereignty and wildness, but also, at the same time, there's a softness in each one. There's sort of like a sense of their hearts, you could say, or their their essence. And there's something very both one ish and two ish about it, I find because there's like, there's a an almost, let's see how to put it, like, there's a profound detail to each painting. You know, each hair is painted with such care. And also, the fact that you're looking into the eyes and the soulfulness is coming through feels very too ish as well. So I wonder if you could just tell us about, first of all, does that feel right as a reflection to you? And also, how did you get into art, and how did you become this kind of artist.
Julie Lamoureux 4:45
What you said about the paintings that I'm doing now is what most people would say, especially the part about the eyes. And I won't make this long, but my interest in art, I remember being in kindergarten, so five years old, and. And I had a kindergarten room where there was a bunch of stations that you had a sandbox, and there was a toy blocks and different things, and you put your little name on the station you were going to and there was in the corner a painting station, and it was never open, because they didn't want a bunch of five year olds flinging paint. They needed supervision. So every day that I was in school, and I had my little name tag. Where was I going to go play the painting station? Is it open? Never open, but if it was, that's where my name was. I was at that painting station. So I was always interested in art, but I was not actually that good at it. I am much more intuitively good at music, and because I really wasn't that great at art, I just didn't do it. My father is a six who was into art and just sort of through living with him, I did different things through high school. I actually sold stuff through that's how I made money. In high school, my dad had a kiln in the house ceramics. He did porcelain, and I would paint stuff, and I would sell it at Christmas markets. So I always did it. But again, I wasn't very good at it. What I am good at is teaching and almost really, before I knew much about how to paint, I had a pretty successful business teaching art. And the paintings that you are speaking of only happened that started in 2018 when I moved to a small town in the mountains and I like animals, and I have been painting my dog and other people's pets, and I decided, Oh well, I'm now in this small mountain town where there's all sorts of wildlife around and lots of affluent people to buy painting. So I'm going to start painting animals wildlife. And it turned out to be specifically grizzly bears primarily. And yeah, it's my paintings are, in a lot of ways, pretty one ish. And the problem, because there's always a problem with one, is I decided, all right, six months after I moved here, I joined this art guild, which is a lot of seniors. They display their art at close to a library. And so I joined this and I was just getting my feet wet in the community. I had gotten a part time job working at a gallery, and I decided to sign myself up to be the featured artist at a show that was going to be happening in a few months. So I got myself the biggest canvases I had ever seen for me, and I started painting on them. And I think I did five of them, and one was, it's pretty big. It was 60 by 40, which felt huge. It was a mother and cub walking together. And I put them on display at this art Guild, and within 48 hours, there was a buyer for that one, even though no, nobody in this art guild, they they're lucky to sell a $5 art card because it's, it's primarily seniors that go to this art guild, close to the library. And this was a $6,000 painting. Wow. That sold, right, right, the first weekend that it was open because it whether you liked it or not, it was objectively a good painting, and I pretty quickly got into a for Canada, top level gallery in town here, which is unheard of. Most people have to do a lot of work and a lot of years of going to crappy art shows and that kind of thing to get into a gallery like the one I got into. And so that was both good and bad, because I once had been this kindergartner who was like, Oh, I'm painting a flower or whatever it was. And now I had very quickly hit such a high level of excellence in my wildlife art before I even knew what I was doing, that I was now in a top level Gallery, and there's not a lot of room for error and that that kind of sucks, because now, instead of going through all the steps and playing around and figuring things out and failing that most people do, I just had success, and now I had to do it again.
Josh Lavine 9:59
Can you. Can you talk real quick about why grizzly bears became a sub your subject? What was it that tree then
Julie Lamoureux 10:07
grizzly bears? Yeah, grizzly bears the a one of the things that people are going to be most interested in, in coming to a mountain town, people come here from all over the world to see the wildlife. And the thing that this area has that other places don't, is grizzly bears. So that's that's one thing, they're an iconic species. Secondly, I was fortunate enough to connect with a very kind and good and generous wildlife photographer who allowed me to use some of his images. One thing that's very important to me as a wildlife artist, and this speaks to the ethics of one is that the pictures that I'm using as a reference are something that a I have permission to, that I'm not stealing them from someone, but also that they were ethically photographed. So grizzly bears in an area like this that is very heavily populated are at constant risk of being habituated to humans, from cars stopping to get out of their cars and take pictures. Wild Things happen, we know, feeding wildlife to get a good picture right Right, right, yeah, and the end consequence to that is a dead grizzly bear that has to be shot by fish and wildlife. So I want to make sure that the pictures that I'm using are not just something that I have the rights to, but that the animal in question was ethically photographed, so from a far distance, in a in a situation where the people, but more importantly, the wildlife, was kept safe. So this gentleman happened to have grizzly bear pictures. That's what I wanted to do. And then the last point is, grizzly bears are round and furry, so you don't have to you don't have to worry about accuracy so much. I hate cleaning wool. Is that short haired animals? No, if this, they're harder to draw. Whereas grizzly bear, I like long hair. They have all sorts of neat colors in their hair, browns, plums, oranges. They're just a very unique animal. And they're, they are a keystone species, right? They're important. Were you?
Josh Lavine 12:31
Was that like, kind of the birth of your professional life as an artist? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you, we talked, you know, before this, about your journey to becoming good at painting wildlife, and how that was sort of like a a competence journey, and how you just, you kind of understood what you needed to do to get really good, really fast, but that it became this joyless thing, yeah. Can you talk about that? Yeah,
Julie Lamoureux 13:03
so I know a fair amount about painting. I had been teaching art classes for a solid decade before I started painting these large mammals. I had painted a lot of pictures of my dog, so I did have experience. I knew I could paint animals. I and so when I needed to have some material for this art guild, I I knew what to do. I started, yeah, I just, I started setting up these, these five paintings, working on them. But I didn't have any experience painting that specific subject matter. Nor did I have any experience painting things on the scale. When you, when you change from painting a small nine by 12 painting to something that's five feet by five feet, it's, kind of the equivalent to being a home Baker and making a batch of cookies, to suddenly being a commercial Baker and making 10,000 cookies in a batch, or whatever, making something up. You don't just quadruple a recipe, because things will go disasterly. I fundamentally had to re learn a lot of technical skills to learn how to paint on a scale. So I would have spent a lot of time on the phone with some product specialists over the last couple of years finding out, okay, how do I make this painting more structurally stable? Because as a matter of integrity, to me, again, if I'm going to sell something that's several $1,000 I certainly cannot control every outcome, but I'm going to do my best to make sure that the painting that I am making for you is as structurally sound as possible, so that in 30 years it's not all going to crack and peel off. But I. The problem sometimes with one, I take issue with the idea that one is always a perfectionist, that's silly, that's inefficient, to be a perfection like I painted a bathroom about two weeks ago, and I was looking up at it. There's, I think there's seven corners in that bathroom. I hit the ceiling on six of them with with the wallpaper. I am cutting corners where it doesn't matter. I don't care. I'm like, Wow, I did a really shitty job. However, when I need to, I can focus on things and getting those initial paintings ready for the gallery was so slow and so tedious. And I am an introvert, but it's not good for me to always be by myself. So I was always by myself. I'm painting these things. It's very slow. Sometimes they don't work out, because, again, I don't actually know what I'm doing. I'm just, I'm just kind of based on this information that I do have, I'm pretty sure I can get here, but because I missed all of those stages in between that normal people would go through maybe over a 10 year period of trial and error and, oh, that was neat. Oh, look what happened there. I just kind of went, No, I'm going from here, and I'm going to getting into this top level gallery. So if you told me right now, Julie, you are never going to paint again, I'd be like, All right, I've already done it. It's I went from being that, that five year old kid who was, oh, the painting station is open. We're going over there and and just thinking, this is fun to Yeah, I never have to do that again. It kind of killed that one. So that is, that is something special, that one can What is it? So, what is it? One, one can suck the joy out of anything. Okay, yeah,
Josh Lavine 17:05
so, but what is it? What compelled you to want to do it in the first place, to to put those, get those paintings in that gallery, and to get that good?
Julie Lamoureux 17:16
Well, I moved here, and I was going to need to start doing something new. My My husband had suggested that, oh, yeah, I think you could, you could use a three he you could do this. And I had been painting my own dog quite a bit, and had gotten pretty well known for, for painting animals in general. So it was partly his encouragement, but it was also I needed to figure out something new to do, and I was going to be, on some level, going back and teaching art classes in my hometown. So this was going to be something I was going to do in my new town.
Josh Lavine 17:52
So this isn't the first time in your life that you have had something that was a passion or a hobby and then you did it and got good at it reached a threshold of excellence that after which you kind of were like, Okay, I don't know if this is fun for me anymore, and I'm thinking particularly of dog training. And I wonder if you could talk about that, or if there's another example you have in your
Julie Lamoureux 18:18
head. Yeah, a better example is music. Okay? So I am music is probably my greatest intuitive capacity, okay, and I know you're a musician as well. So I, I could harmonize intuitively from the point that I was four years old. I'm sure I just I could play by ear. I could do all these things. I enjoy music. I loved it. I did not have access to great instructors. That was a big piece of the puzzle that was missing. So they failed to recognize when Julie was completely playing by ear. I couldn't read music. I couldn't count where shit. I couldn't do any of the technical stuff. I was just like, oh, I can do this. I can play this fight year, and that got missed for a long time. I did end up doing a music degree. I did, in fact, win the gold medal for my degree program. I hate performing. Oh, my God. Do I hate performing. And it's it's a neat thing to I really enjoy music, but it's not fun, right? It's not fun. It's only fun if I'm just by myself, if nobody's watching me, yeah. And even though, because I'm I'm so I was accustomed to playing at a at a high level, university level, I don't know what standards you have in the states that my last point of practicing was, it was piano, was the arct level here in Canada. And. And so your associateship, and because I used to be able to do that, the stuff I do now, I'm kind of like, oh, this is kind of the bar has been lowered, because I just physically can't do that, and I certainly don't want to spend all that time practicing anymore. So mostly what I do now is improvising. It's all by myself, though, but it would be really nice if I could have, perhaps had better instruction that I could get together with a group of people and play together, but that's just one. One doesn't like the idea of playing with others. Yeah. I think
Josh Lavine 20:39
you know, I'm relating to some of what you're saying as a competence type, so you know. And actually, I also have a journey with piano and like right now in my life, I'm not really playing very much because I got so I started learning when I was 24 and then got good enough to play at piano bars, got hired at piano bars, and then was playing kind of four or five nights a week. There's a whole story behind that, which I won't go into, but just from a purely competent point of view, I just understood what I needed to do to get good at this instrument and to be able to do the gig, which was to learn a certain number of songs, to be able to activate the room and get people to sing along. And so I have that as a skill, but I feel very disconnected from music these days. I barely even listen to music these days, and I feel similarly intuitive musically, as you describe, like I whistle often, just sort of passively. But just to put it like this, like I don't have very easy access to the place of myself, where what I would play or what I would express musically is coming from a place that doesn't care about skillfulness. Like that is just from a real soulful place. It takes me a lot to get there, and I'm actually not even sure at this point, because my It feels like my relationship to the piano is so calcified around skillfulness that it would almost require me learning a new instrument or something, to to have that relationship with that instrument start From that real place, as opposed to just from the opposed to just from the competence place, at least that's how I've conceived of it. So I wonder if you relate to that, and if you have access to that place in you.
Julie Lamoureux 22:30
Yeah, that sounds more a little bit like how I feel about painting that for me to try to stop painting bears and to stop painting in the style that's pretty rigid that I'm doing. That would be really hard. I because I have so much more intuitive capacity with music, I can, I can get to that more my approach to the piano. There's a lot to do with one's rigidity in that. And I can also differentiate a couple of things between, I think one and three, okay, I can go through like a quick exercise. So of course, as a one and a three, we're both going to sit down and practice, because you have to. I was mostly doing classical stuff. I got away with practicing a lot less than I probably should have been doing at the level I was playing, just because I had some intuitive capacity. But this is interesting. When I got into my music degree, I had somehow got into and it wasn't an exceptional music degree program by any means, but I got into my music degree, and there were just fundamental things to do with technical things, counting that I actually couldn't do. I'm not a technical person. It's all intuitive. And I fortunately had this lovely concert pianist instructor who was also a very good teacher. And one of the problems that I had when when you play the piano, for those who don't play, you don't just move your fingers and push the keys down. You're supposed to be this is kind of awkward at this angle, but you drop your arm weight into the keys and then transfer it finger to finger, which I'm sure you know Josh as as a pianist, somehow, as a one, I was just using physical rigidity to push the keys down. And so I was 21 years old, maybe 20 at the time, and I would play for an hour. And I have a very fine bone structure. My forearms would be sore. I had been looking for help from this for a few years because, well, how are you supposed to do a music degree if you can't practice and nothing really helped me until my first semester in my music program with this new teacher, I literally had to relearn my approach. To the keyboard. It was all scales, one whole term, all of that technical stuff that I had not had access to as a teenager growing up learning to play the piano. So I had to relearn to play the piano, to get rid of that arm pain, and just fundamentally fix my approach to the keyboard, so you have to practice. There's the physical rigidity. But then the other part, I like practice, but the performance, I hated performing. And there was some I don't know what it was. I had a few teachers. I was noticeably a good musician, and they would think, okay, Julie, you're going to do really well at this. And sometimes I would, sometimes I would be able to perform fine, but more often than not, I would come in at least 10% under my capacity. And this is where I spoke to you prior to the interview, the writing, the lightning bolt analogy. When it's time to perform, I'm I'm sitting there, I'm in dread. I'm waiting for my turn to come, all right. And I get on the stage, it's like, All right, we're gonna do this. And I sit down, and I'm nervous, and it's just, okay, focus. And it's just the whole time. It's like, focus, focus, focus. Okay, land it. Land it, all right. And then either you land the lightning bolt and all of that energy to the performance, either it worked and you jump off and you land clear of the the lightning strike when it finally hits the ground and you're done, or sometimes you burn the pants off your ass. Doesn't work very well. So it's just that, that tension of, like, am I gonna be able to do this? Am I gonna be able to focus enough like, like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to look right up my camera and make it apparent how focused I would be trying to be. And there was nothing fun. About that? Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned dog training and and dog training, I have a little rescue dog. He's not, he wasn't bred to be a superstar agility dog. I was just doing this for fun. He was great dog for it. But the one or two times I actually tried to do a trial, it was it was not fun. My dog, it was fun. He's like, Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna go near the tunnel. You got it. He thought it was great. But I did not find it fun. And I would especially that because I so much wanted to do it. And the serious part of me at the time would take over that at the end of be like, Oh, fuck, that wasn't fun at all. And I would it would be just very it would be a very emotional experience to have put in a lot of effort to doing this thing with my dog, and I didn't actually care about whatever people get awards and things. I don't care about that stuff. My problem was more failing in front of other people, that was that was more the problem, and that's so much okay, less less than capable, and in front of other people, that was okay.
Josh Lavine 28:12
So there is an image consciousness thing going on, but it's Yeah, but,
Julie Lamoureux 28:17
but it's not it's weird, but it's not
Josh Lavine 28:19
three, it's not three. But I want to, like zero in on this distinction, because I think it's a really interesting one this. So I love your analogy that being a one is like riding a lightning bolt and the way you just that was a very evocative demonstration of it. I mean, even physically, with your hands, like the the the very your focus kind of narrows to an aperture where your whole world becomes just the execution of this thing. And and
Julie Lamoureux 28:47
there's physical rigidity in the Yes, exactly the physical
Josh Lavine 28:52
rigidity, yeah. I want to, I want to open up the topic of one as a frustration type, and how you experience that, yeah, and yeah, just with an open ended prompt about you being a frustration type. What comes up?
Julie Lamoureux 29:07
My first understanding of the Enneagram was just very basic. And so it was only maybe 2021 that I started realizing that there had been a back end to that blue book that stuff about frustration types. And I did immediately know what that meant on an intuitive level. So you mentioned earlier in our conversations that I, I've gone through a couple different career shifts, and there's, there's certainly several reasons for that, but, yeah, I've been self employed since I was 15. That that whole teaching piano lessons. I actually taught piano lessons for 20 years, or something like that. And then I when I was teaching art, that was also a self employed thing. And in between that I would occasionally, I would I would have a. Job here or there for maybe three years, and I would often even like the job. I would get along with my boss, I would get along with my coworkers. They would all like me. But after about three years, I would kind of be like, This is really annoying. And there was always something that led me to, okay, I got to get out of here. That was the same with school. I did try to do a nursing degree. And that wasn't really frustration that led me to abruptly and that, but I was certainly not thrilled if ever with the idea of being a nurse. I'm actually, I'm not a practical person. My interests and skills are more aligned with things that, unfortunately don't tend to make people a lot of money. So there's always kind of an ongoing frustration in especially career stuff, I might stay the same with relationships. I do have solid and some many enduring friendships, but if I think back to dating, yeah, it was. It was almost never me getting dumped. It was. It was just like, what's wrong with this person? That kind of, uh huh, right? So, so I would say work and relationships are the two main areas in my life where frustration has consistently been a theme.
Josh Lavine 31:40
So on the topic of being a one wing two and the inherent rightness of an action, can you just briefly talk about the story With your personal trainer? Oh, yeah, so
Julie Lamoureux 32:01
I'm not a athletic person at all, but I had the opportunity in my mid 30s to work with a professional trainer. I worked with this guy for probably two years on a one to one basis, always just him and me by myself, by ourselves. And about two years and I got a email from someone basically was telling me that this man that I had been with a lot was a convicted sex offender who had been to a federal jail. And this was, this was news to me, and pretty big news at that, like a federal jail, this was this was serious. And as a one a I recognized that I was sitting on some information that if it got out, this would have a huge impact on his business. I did know many of the other people who went to the gym, and I knew they didn't know this. So I had that. I had the fact that I knew, for instance, that this guy was working with, I don't know if she was a minor at the time, but it was younger people than me. Yeah. So there was number of ethical considerations. Do should other people know about this? And then there was the fact that, okay, well, if this person actually spent some time in federal jail, he was obviously released and deemed to be no further threat to the public. So there was that consideration. But I had to decide, because I had to go see him in about two days, what I was going to do about this. And in the end, I decided that I was just going to show up to my training session and I wasn't going to ask him about it, and and
Josh Lavine 33:57
you'd already worked for two years, so you you had your own personal sense of it.
Julie Lamoureux 34:01
It was a totally a professional relationship, but I knew him very well. When you're working out with someone and you're there for an hour, you talk a lot for him, and I did, for sure. And we weren't friends. This wasn't the sort of person that I would have hung around with on a regular basis outside of this professional relationship. But for one wing two, and there's more that I want to talk about there, but for one wing two, what I'm recognizing is happening two is picking up emotional data points everywhere. This is I grew up in a house where my parents are lovely people, but they're both very emotionally immature people. My dad was highly volatile, melancholy, six, wing seven. And my mom could be a pretty angry nine, wing eight. And so as a little kid, I was attuned to other people's big emotions, and so I knew a lot about this guy. I. I could give you a list of some of the things that made me trust him. One of them is I do have a pretty significant bilateral hearing loss, which people are almost universally horrible at dealing with. If I tell you I have a hearing loss. Your response is likely to be to speak louder for the next sentence and then go right back to mumbling. And that's that's pretty much what 90% 99% of people do. They're awful. As someone working out with this guy, you know, you're on your right side doing this. He's talking to you over here, and then I flip over. He would never forget. He always would switch sides. He was always speaking loudly. Now someone, perhaps a six, would say, well, that's not a very good reason to believe that someone isn't a dangerous, violent sex offender. But yes, that was one emotional data point. But there were, there were many other factual ones that I could probably make a list of. But ultimately, what it was is a felt sense of knowing that there it is, whatever. I knew that this guy had clearly done something that had landed him in federal jail, and I knew there was a story there. I had a pretty good idea of what exactly it was, because I knew him pretty well, but at the end of the day, I had never been treated with anything other than respect and consideration by this, this person, and it was just a felt sense of, okay, there's a story here. I don't know what it is, and I showed up at my next training session, I felt a little it could feel a little weird when you find out about this massive thing about someone that that you didn't know about formally, you look at them a little differently. But I didn't let on that I knew anything differently. And it was a few months before it finally came out that I knew about this, this past of his and it was this really interesting moment for this man who was a six wing, 7683, when he realized that I had been sitting on this, I hadn't done anything with it to harm him. I hadn't and most importantly, I hadn't doubted him for a minute.
Josh Lavine 37:31
He found out that you knew, and you had known for a long time, and so you didn't bring it. I didn't even
Julie Lamoureux 37:37
bring it up. And after that, we were never friends in we didn't have anything in common, but we we had this very deep connection with each other after that. Because, of course, like I was, yeah, of course, yeah, I was really bad at working on the gym, and I was quite vulnerable doing that in front of him, so that that part of me that, oh, I don't like to be bad at things in front of other people. I was willing to do that with him, and he knew he could trust me. And that's that's a thing with one and one ring two, maybe specifically is a person might meet me, then they might not like me, and they might not like me, especially when they meet, because ones are, I am not an overtly warm person, not always, but most people will like me more, the more they get to know me and and I guarantee they will. They will trust me after not very long. So
Josh Lavine 38:40
I love the story, just from the point of view of you kind of made your own felt sense judgment about this person. There was a momentary like question of, What do I do here? And then the choice not to bring anything up. I can imagine the impact on him, of that you know of hey, you found this out. You didn't say anything. Our relationship has continued. And then that's like a vote of confidence, you know, in a person that's very powerful, I would imagine, especially for someone like a six and so. But then my understanding is that the relationship opened up like the I understand you guys weren't friends outside of this kind of container of the personal training, but you kind of, in a certainly became, let's see, like a life coach, teacher of his. Like, not, right? Like, didn't you kind of call he was, like, my little brother, yeah, you sort of like were helping him to become more of an adult, or take more responsibility for himself, or just kind of do the right thing. Yeah. And my sense of your sense of him is that like this, this, this piece about him, always moving to your better ear to speak. Week. That is the kind of treatment that you would give to people. I imagine that's the kind of treatment that you would give to, like your elderly patients. And it's kind of that itself is sort of like honoring the essence of one wing two. It's like, I'm going to treat this person with dignity and respect and on their terms. And he was doing that with you, and you experienced that over the course of two years, and that kind of feels like enough, like that was enough of a body, like, okay, like this person has an integrity that I have experienced, and that becomes more important than whatever evidence I'm being presented, sort of of, I don't know, some past action he's gotten in trouble with
Julie Lamoureux 40:40
before. Yeah, let's see if I can untangle like things that came to mind I was as I was listening. This is not the first time I was I'm a 126, right? Yeah. This is not the first time, ironically, that I have. In fact, the other person was also a six, wing, 7683, when I was in my early 20s, I started dating a guy who, maybe after a few months, told me he had assault charges pending. I don't actually really hang out with that many ex cons and people with assault charges, but I remember him telling me this, and I think I was 23 years old, and I just looked at him and was like, Oh, okay. And he was a six wing seven, so that that inherent doubt and suspicion that that their world has, I just remember, he looked at me and he said, you don't even care, do you? And I was like, nope. And and again, it was, it was 100% a felt sense thing that I trusted this person with my life absolutely, yeah, and that was I had fewer data points with that person than with my personal trainer. I had known my trainer for a lot longer. I knew a lot more about them, but I will, I will always go with my felt sense of a person, and what I know, the data points that I'm picking up. It's like, it's like two is my radar out there in the world. I needed that to navigate my home environment, that as I was growing up, I had these pretty volatile parents, I needed to manage them. And so one takes back that data, assembles it into something. But one isn't necessarily making decisions based just on data. That's right, and I would be one versus Yeah, if you found more specific one wing, twos. I David Gray from the big hormone. Enneagram talks a lot about, what does he say? Ones know everything that God knows, or something like
Josh Lavine 42:50
that, the god fact Yeah, and,
Julie Lamoureux 42:54
and I am not claiming a divine connection here, but I'm not claiming, and there's just some things that I know, and as I've gotten older, it's a lot bigger, and I want to talk about that in a minute, but I also want to talk about ones and judgment. People talk a lot about ones and their finger pointing and their judgment of everything. Yes, now I actually had reason to connect with the the guy that I was just talking about that I dated 20 years ago last week, and I hadn't talked to him in 20 years, and he said he did refer to me in my in the time he knew me in my early 20s, as I kind of remember you being kind of judgmental. And so there certainly was something to that. I think when people are teenagers, they they, they kind of see things more in black and white, and that's just a typical phase of development. It's probably more pointed for one who tends to be more interested in ethical issues, so I don't doubt that he was correct. However, I would say, based on the other two stories that I just told you, that I'm also a lot less judgmental than many people, because I'm going to, for instance, in this situation with my personal trainer, I absolutely could have been like, Oh my God, look at this guy. He he went to federal jail, and he's a, he's a whatever, whatever he had done, like, I can't remember, convicted sex offender. That's the word. I could have judged that, but I didn't there's, there's actually, I think if a one is more mature, there is more of a lack of judgment.
Josh Lavine 44:51
Yeah, my sense of it is that that happens. My sense of it is that there's, you're not really benchmarking against external standards of character. Or integrity you're benchmarking against your own felt sense. And there's a let's see a willingness to I'm not actually sure if forgiveness is the word, but it's like a willingness to forgive or to overlook past mistakes, if what you're feeling from the person in in the present, or at least in your experience of them, resonates with what integrity feels like to
Julie Lamoureux 45:33
you. Yeah, I'm going to go a step further, Josh, and I'm going to I'm going to use my connection to the divine. And I'm going to say there's something greater than that. And I have two other one ring twos that I'm kind of drawing this from. It's maybe more prominent for me. Though, the last several years since I've been unpacking some pretty big health issues that have required me to do some big external and internal changes. One of the things that when I look back at some of these scenarios, and this sounds really weird, but it's almost an ability to see people's souls and with my personal trainer, I know I absolutely got to that point, and that was actually after him, and I just developed this very close relationship. And there was a time where like and six, eight, threes, they don't really break down too much, but there was, there was a point of breakdown or that I witnessed, and in that moment, I saw this person's soul, and I just I recognized him for exactly what he was, all his strengths and his weaknesses. But despite that, seeing the perfection that lay in the background of all of that, and especially in the last few years, I've been I've been doing a lot of work, a lot of unpacking things, and there's just something that about one and that limit that people want to say that, Oh, they're they're harsh, they judge other people. That's just not true. Because if maybe it is true for someone, just as it might be true of some sixes, that might be true of of any of the types, judgment is something that people do when they are not particularly healthy. But as I just I feel like, as I've grown in the last few years, I am a lot less judgmental than I ever was, and I I can look at a person who's telling me all sorts of things about themselves and see what's behind, behind that, you
Josh Lavine 47:58
know here, hearing you talk about, seeing people's souls. There is a way that I relate to that as a three with a two wing. I think there's, I think that seeing, seeing the other's soul is very much in two space. But the the fact that that sensibility, or that called a gift, or that vision you have for other people is enveloped in a kind of one package. It carries with it, this sense of grounded, I'll call it serenity, like the virtue of the one. It's this. It's the sense of, I can be listening to this person who's talking about their violent past, but sort of taking all of them in as a as an entity that has a kind of holistic dignity and integrity, um, despite their past, or inclusive of their past, or something like that. And there's something fundamentally good at the bottom of this person that is what I'm connecting to, despite what they're telling me, does that feel right to
Julie Lamoureux 49:07
you? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Josh Lavine 49:13
my experience of ones and judgment is less judgment and more, just more, just like, a willingness to be critical. And I'm curious if you relate to this, like a so, like, for example, you've mentioned how you are responded to in ways where people are like, sometimes you will say something sharply, and you'll notice that people around you will kind of like, oh, like, I have to take this seriously now. Or like, this is not, this is not the sort of easy, free flowing conversation that it was before I You said that thing. You know, like, when you say something, sometimes it's like an event in the conversation. And it kind of like. People into their spines in a certain sense. And I've experienced being on the receiving end of someone's, let's see, upholding a standard of integrity or excellence or something like that, and wanting to kind of crack the whip on me for not upholding that. And I wonder if you relate to that framing, or I don't know what it's like for you when you speak in this way that has a kind of sharpness or a bracing this.
Julie Lamoureux 50:33
Okay, so there's two separate things there, and you may have to help me track my thoughts once I start speaking. So the first that that sense of like, whoop, recoil, like I've seen it. I've seen that a lot. It's it's not that is not a response to criticality. That is a response to, let's say, a person who doesn't know me comes into a shop where I'm working, or I'm at a social event when they're talking to just an ordinary person, and then they realize I'm talking to a one. Of course, they don't realize it, because they don't really talk into a one. But I have seen that many, many times, where people are just engaging me in everyday conversation, and then there's just something, whether it's a quickness to what I do, or a solidness to what I do, or just saying something that is not attachment, that I'll see What's going on there, like, like, I remember years ago, I was in my early 20s, and for some reason, I was in a judo class, terrible at things like that, and the instructor was doing their, like, do your 10 push ups or, like, that's, you know, what's what sometimes happens in a martial arts class. And so I'm going to six, I seem to be very I'm just going to do what people are telling me to do. And I remember I was trying to do push ups, and this woman yelled at me, and I looked up, and I just fucking glared at her, and and I there was this guy, a few people, over for me, who was an actual like, this is actually what he meant to be doing. Is Judy was a martial arts guy. I remember I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He looked, he was looking at me, and when he saw that glare, it was just like, whoa. And there was just suddenly a lot more interest. Like, oh, she's a lot more interesting than what I thought. And that's the sort of thing we ended up dating. That's, that's the sort of thing that I, I mean, it's just when people realize there is something more to this person than what I thought, and they might not like it, or they might like it, but it's there's something different. So that's that, that that look that I get, it's not usually response to criticality. Criticality in and of itself, of course. So I found the Enneagram when I was maybe 15. I immediately recognized the fact that I was a one, and the Enneagram book, oh my god. Ones are so critical. They're so nasty to other people. And I was like, Oh, I don't want to be nasty to other people. And so I was really checking that quality in myself. And in my early 20s, I did an exercise with the people closest to me, and the exercise was they needed to give me two of my best qualities and at least one of my worst qualities, or something like that. And of course, people would end up giving you more. None of them mentioned criticality or judgment. And I, I was so concerned about this because, of course, nobody wants to be a person who's wandering around criticizing everybody, because that's really an asshole. I think ones actually get mistaken for assholes most of the time on the Enneagram and I would ask my friends, well, do you do you notice me as critical? And most of the time, actually all of the time, they paused, and they were. They were actually mystified that I would say that, because there I am not overtly critical of other people, although I am getting a divorce, perhaps the person I'm getting a divorce from might see me as more critical. It's not a universal thing about me, though, where criticality does come in is there is absolute truth to the ones drive to self improvement and improvement in general, and the. There's usually something that goes along with ones are critical. And there's the flip side of that, that ones can't take criticism. They have a particular problem with criticism. I call bullshit on that, because how can you possibly be a person who is bent on improvement in all things and then not also be a person that can accept criticism. I have worked with thinking of two high level music instructors. I'm thinking of a full one day, eight hour ski instructor, downhill ski lesson that I took last year. I'm thinking of the personal trainer that I worked with, and he would say, Julie, I like working with you, and it wasn't because I was good at what I was doing, but he said, You do what I say, and you don't complain. My ski instructor, person, I did a full one day ski at, something that I'm going to say was me at my most vulnerable, because I am not I am not good at gross motor movements, physical activities. And she was, she had been teaching for 15 years, and she said, Wow, I have a never had a student last the entire day. You stayed from nine till four. You didn't complain once you did what I said, and we didn't even take breaks other than a lunch break. So that's a requirement. If you're going to get better at something, you need to be able to take criticism. Now, of course, there are people who are assholes about how they deliver it, and people who are not, but you can't both be bent on self improvement and not being accepting of criticism. So there's that. And then now I'm looping back to being critical. Being critical is absolutely part of getting better at things. For me with painting, I don't just kind of go i That's pretty good. Yeah, it's good. I'll put it to the gallery. No, like you? You I do my drawing, I look at it the next day. I check my work is, Is this accurate? I might even do that a third time to make sure, you know, are the eyes in the right place. And it's a continuous process of refinement, which is inherently critical, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And for me, that's mostly me looking at my own stuff. I see So regarding
Josh Lavine 57:27
one as a frustration type, you recently got involved with a debate in your home, in your town, about proper development, and I understand that. I mean, this is a it's a really good story of oneness, and there are a couple dimensions of it that I want to track as you're talking about it. So one is the just the topic itself, and the way that you kind of summon yourself to participate in this town debate. Two is the health impact that it had on you. And the way that, you know, again, kind of that lightning bolt thing, like you kind of got so hyper focused into this, I don't know, political agenda, you could say that it overtook you, and then the consequences of that on the health front. And I'm curious if you have ways to tie that into tension and rigidity in the body and how that manifested, or what, or how do you make meaning of that as a body type? So that's the preamble prompt, and you take that wherever it feels right. Okay,
Julie Lamoureux 58:33
so you want the whole story briefly put again, I preface it with the fact that about two years before this happened, I ended up with autoimmune issues, and I radically, radically, radically altered my diet to fix this. Did some other things, but I did put that autoimmune issue into remission, and it had been in remission for a year until this situation happened. I live in a small mountain town that is beautiful. It is affluent. The people are educated, and there is a lot of development pressure here. It's been an ongoing debate for 30 years. Some very rich people, of course, want to build a extremely profitable development, and they want to do it on a chunk of land that has tremendous ecological value and is heavily undermined by a century of coal mining. So it's, it's, it's inherently unstable land to be building on, there's going to be consequences. And it was mostly the ecological consequences that got my attention. And even though I am not an expert on any of these things, and I don't know anything about Municipal Development Plans, and I typically don't get involved in. Politics. This made me take notice. And my town had a large public hearing, and I decided to speak at it. And it probably was a solid month where I stopped doing everything, I stopped painting, I stopped doing all the things I normally have a pretty good self preservation schedule where I go for a walk and I do all these things and I take good care of myself. I stopped doing all those things because I was so singularly obsessed with how was I going to do my presentation in a way that I personally could prevent this, this development, from being approved. But in this situation, this was really me going off the rails in in a pretty significant way that I just really wasn't I wasn't acting like myself. I wasn't being myself. I was just focused on this issue and doing my best to contribute meaningfully to it. And that concluded. And then there was a couple other political things that I got involved in as a result. And within the year, I developed a secondary, far more serious autoimmune condition called it's a rare version of a rare disease called uveitis, which affects your vision. And it was that was a huge wake up call for me to recognize that the way I had handled the situation had not, had not been in anyone's best interest. It hadn't, it hadn't changed. I'm still very glad that I participated, I took part, and I did my best to do something that mattered to me, that's all very important to me. I never want to not be that person. But it had affected my health and some of the subsequent political things that I got involved in after that, it affected my health and in a lasting and profound manner that is still ongoing. I'm still dealing with that. I'm still, I still have this uveitis. When I look at you, there's, there's black spots across my vision. I have cloudy eyesight. This is a significant thing for someone who has spent 15 years working as a visual artist, who also has a concomitant hearing loss, right? This, this is, this is big stuff. So ultimately, that's how I came back into finding the Enneagram and finding out a little more about it, because I had discerned some fundamental truths about just general type one descriptions in the past. And I thought, well, maybe there's, maybe there's something there to help me going forward
Josh Lavine 1:02:58
and what came what? What did you get from that? That's what
Julie Lamoureux 1:03:03
came from that. Actually, I think I had, I had somehow, of course, I had this, this book that everybody has. This was pretty much the book that was available, and somehow I had missed all the the key parts of the back of the book. I just knew the basic type description, so finding big hormone Enneagram and try fix, actually recognizing the reactive type in my type structure, the six. And that was interesting, because one's attitude to a problem was basically, all right, six, this reactivity, this is the problem. You're going to fix that. And so it was that that was kind of the, the most useful thing, broadly, that, that I can think of, that it was just realizing I have to get rid of reactivity. Yeah,
Josh Lavine 1:03:57
well, regarding the story, it's, it's it's classic one in the sense of it's, there's, there's an issue that's happening that hits some resident note for you, of something that's important, and you find yourself summoning yourself to literally give a speech at a town hall, and then I understand it had a really big impact, and people were emailing you afterwards and things like that. And so there's that sort of one, reformer, activist energy that's there. But what I'm really interested in, too, is the impact that it had on your health, and can you draw the connection? I mean, is it? Is it as simple as your life was consumed with trying to do a good job advocating for this thing, or is there something at the level of the body, like being a body type or kind of like, how do you how do you make the connection that this thing popped up in your eye?
Julie Lamoureux 1:04:51
Yeah, all right, so I've done a lot of work in the last three to five. Five years in terms of I discovered Michael singer be looking a little bit more at the Enneagram. Different, different things, yeah, and okay, this is actually really interesting from a one perspective, prior to maybe three years ago, I never would have thought that I have an issue with anxiety, because I feel pretty like I feel pretty calm actually most of the time. I don't know that I actually come across that way, but I feel that way. I never would have thought anxiety was an issue. You had asked me previously about frustration, and I remember being in my 20s, for instance, and doing something every day, like going to the grocery store and going to the parking lot with a card and just feeling like just angry about something. Now, if somebody had said something to me in the parking lot, or I was at a checkout, I would have immediately been, Oh, hello, how are you? And very like, it was never anything I took out on other people, but it was kind of this low level irritability that that was frequently present. Which irritability is that anger, or is that anxiety? Right? And, and, and I've recognized with the one being part of the the body types at the top of the Enneagram, and part of that anger triad, anger is a secondary emotion, and underneath all of that was this anxiety that I had, and so throughout this property development, it was just this, this bubbling cauldron that I was sitting in and I was creating for myself that was just me failing to cope properly with with reactivity of six, with how to how do you navigate a less than perfect situation? Now I'm good with living in I live in a fairly messy environment. I navigate in perfect situations all the time. But this was different. This was, this was this was a sacred thing. This was the environment. This was wildlife
Josh Lavine 1:07:32
and the let's see if you hadn't upheld it, if you hadn't gone to bat, what would that have meant? Um, meant?
Julie Lamoureux 1:07:48
That would certainly to be less of a person we there's always the ideal and the real and the ideal is always just that an ideal, but it's worth coming as close to that as possible. On the things that are the most meaningful. It doesn't have to be everything, but there's some things that just matter so much more,
Josh Lavine 1:08:17
right, right. Okay, that tracks. And I feel that that makes sense to me. Yeah, so we've talked about this one sense of the sacred, and I loved your phrase. I don't know if you use it in this in this video yet, but just primordial perfection, and in a sense, that's what you were fighting for. In addition to being as upright a person as or being being your full self, I guess, is a way to put it, by going to bat for for that. And so this is sort of what we think of when we think of one, often as the sense of the advocate for this kind of a thing, but something you're bringing forward that I want to explore is the one as the humor of one and the Absurdism of one. Yeah, and so maybe we'll explore that, and then we'll come to a
Julie Lamoureux 1:09:13
close. Okay, so I think this, I with this idea of many things being serious, many things being sacred, you can't have that without a balance of the funny and the absurd. And I can find the absurd in pretty much any situation. And if I think back 15 years ago, I had a good friend of mine who was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer, serious, all right, and I was going to be away during the time of her surgery, and so I prepared a series of I was actually, I drew a bunch of cartoons for her that was kind of the history of our. Relationship, things like that. And then I got this idea. I got this idea to create a cut out your own cancer exercise. It was once I got this idea, I couldn't let go of it. I'm like, that's a really bad idea. And so this my, my thing that I was going to do, she'd have a an envelope every day that she would open, and it would be a little story. And I had also provided her with a significant amount of practical support and help through her experience. But I got a, I got this idea to to draw a colon on a piece of paper with with a cancer tumor in it, and, and I provided some scissors, which were children's dull. They were dull. They were rusty, like there was nothing scary about them. I put them in there, and I put some vinyl gloves in there for surgical gloves, and like an alcohol swab. And, and I'm like, Yeah, I think this would be really funny for her to open the night before her surgery. And then I'm like, this could be a really bad idea, because it's the day before you might find out you're going to die, you're about to have major abdominal surgery. You don't know what they're gonna find. I'm like, but it's really funny. And, and so it was this, okay, Should I do it? Should I do it? And, and my friend is a 683, I'm like, I think she can handle it. And then, and then, really, I was like, I'm gonna be out of the country. Her boyfriend's gonna have to deal with the fallout if this goes badly. So I think she likes me well enough that I can get away with it. So I, I did give it to her. I think I put a disclaimer on it. It's
Josh Lavine 1:11:44
like, I just want to real quick say, just a rare moment of six inner deliberation there that that six fix coming through. Like, should I should I do it? Is this the right moment? Is it appropriate? Is it gonna have a bad effect?
Julie Lamoureux 1:12:00
Well, it's not a harm. Yeah, I just thought it was so funny, right? This idea of doing this. And once, once I, once I got this idea, I just, I had to run with it. And yes, I did give it to her, and and she, she did like it. She still has it. She still claims that she wasn't horribly offended. And then there's that other story I can tell you, if you prefer, and you can edit accordingly, the the one with my friend, the other one ring too within the painting class. Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead, yeah. So I was in a outdoor landscape class, and I met this woman on the first day. Was three days, and she was, she was 62 I was maybe 39 and she sat up right next to me. She was quite serious about painting, and she, she, she saw that I was a pretty good painter, and wanted to learn from me. And she was quite a serious librarian type person. She's a one wing two, and on the last day of class, for some reason, we're in a life drawing class, painting and so nude model, which most people, middle class, white people haven't done a lot of, and I didn't know this woman very well, and she's painting this view of a woman's back, and it's just a very ordinary woman's back. And I turned around and I looked at her painting, and whatever she had done with just a few very wrong brush strokes was she had given this woman huge lap muscles. And it was, it was so absurd that despite my 10 plus years of experience not laughing at people's paintings that much I can control myself, I just, I burst out laughing. And I was, I was like, bent over laughing, standing behind this woman and and I still remember she she turned and she looked at me, and she was kind of startled, because it's, yeah, you don't actually laugh at people's paintings in a painting class, especially when you just met them. I couldn't help it. It was her painting. Her painting was so wrong, it was so bad that it was just absurd. It was so wrong, and she was startled. And then she she stepped back from her painting, and she looked at it from my perspective, and then she saw what I saw. And then she started laughing. And we were we were laughing so hard, and we were both one wing twos sitting there laughing at her horrible disaster of a painting. And it was just very fun, right? So this, this idea, if ones really couldn't take criticism, she she would have been quite offended by me, but instead, she realized that, yeah, it was, it was pretty funny and,
Josh Lavine 1:14:59
and we've been. Friends ever since, and you and you, you still have been friends. That's weird, and we always
Julie Lamoureux 1:15:04
laugh at that, and we always wish that she, she then went and tried to fix it, and we really wish she hadn't, because I would, I would otherwise have framed it and I would have jumped on my wall so I can continue laughing at it. Yeah.
Josh Lavine 1:15:17
Um, okay. Well, I'm noticing a time, and I'm thinking, maybe we come to a close. And, yeah, I'm wondering what this has been like for you.
Julie Lamoureux 1:15:32
Good I wish, I wish there was more time to dispel some of the myths about one. I see a pretty big difference between one wing two and one wing nine, and I do find it frustrating when a whole personality type is distilled down to punctuality and cleanliness and critic criticality and things like that, because there's there's so much more about one and and all of it is so much more important than those peripheral details that tends to be the things that is focused on.
Josh Lavine 1:16:11
And you mentioned that a physically pretty messy person actually, just to mention that as another myth to dispel there,
Julie Lamoureux 1:16:17
yeah, yeah, yeah. It's bad. It's yeah, that's bad. So, yeah, yeah. I wish there was, of course, more time to go over and dispel some of those myths, but that's what, this is, what we get done in an interview. So
Josh Lavine 1:16:33
Well, thank you for doing this, and I really appreciate your candor and your willingness to share of yourself. And you have such remarkable stories of oneness. I was thinking that, if we, you know, maybe we explore doing another one at some point in the future where we go through some of those myths and some of the almost like more theoretical distinctions. It. I have a feeling, my gut feeling, is that one type, one has the most vagueness, kind of the most vague theoretical underpinning of what creates the one structure of all the types. And yeah, so I'm going to be really curious to watch this back and just see what I learned on second and third viewing of this. So thanks again for doing this. I really appreciate it.
Julie Lamoureux 1:17:27
Thanks for having me, Josh. Thanks
Josh Lavine 1:17:29
for tuning in to my conversation with Julie. If you liked this conversation, then please click the like button or hit subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, or if you're listening to this as a podcast, then you can leave up to a five star review and also leave some comments if you're listening on Spotify or Apple. Those are free and very effective ways of supporting me and my work and the work that we do at The Enneagram School. If you're curious about what we do at The Enneagram School, then I'd love for you to come check us out at the Enneagram school.com. We have a bunch of more interviews, just like this, categorized by type and also by instinctual stacking. You can browse them right on the website. And we also have an intro course that I recommend you check out that we plugged in the beginning of this episode. It's great for beginners or advanced students, and it really lays out, kind of all of the fundamental concepts about what makes the Enneagram, the Enneagram. We also have other content in our content universe. We have a great podcast on how Enneagram intersects with the unconscious and dreams called insomnia. And we also have a new podcast called House of Enneagram, which is kind of a collaborative endeavor with all of our Enneagram collaborators, about 10 of us in total. And it's a more kind of Enneagram and arts and culture and politics and TV shows and that kind of thing, free flowing podcast that explores both Enneagram specific themes as well as Enneagram application to all those kinds of worldly topics. Finally, if you think that you are a good candidate to be interviewed on the show, I'd love to hear from you, you can contact me right through the Enneagram Schools website. Go to the contact form and then shoot me a message. Preference very strongly goes to people who've been typed by the typing [email protected] enneagrammer is, in my view, the world's most accurate Enneagram typing team. They have been refining their methods for over years. And you can also go to their website, enneagrammer.com to check out their typing services, and also go to their members area to watch them type celebrities and make very fine distinctions in real time. Okay, that's it for me. Thank you very much, and I will see you next time
Unknown Speaker 1:19:22
you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
