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jerdle-typology · 8 years ago

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Enneagram 9

The Nine in Profile

Healthy: Deeply receptive, accepting, unselfconscious, emotionally stable and serene. Trusting of self and others, at ease with self and life, innocent and simple. Patient, unpretentious, good-natured, genuinely nice. / Imaginative and creative, attuned to nonverbal communication. Optimistic, reassuring, supportive: have a healing and calming influence—harmonizing groups, bringing people together. A good mediator, synthesizer, and communicator. At Their Best: Become self-possessed, feeling autonomous and fulfilled: have great equanimity and contentment because they are present to themselves. Paradoxically, at one with self, and thus able to form more profound relationships. More alive, awake, alert to self and others.

Average: Become self-effacing and agreeable, accommodating themselves, idealizing others and “going along” with things to avoid conflict. Have a “philosophy of life” that enables them to quiet their anxieties quickly. Submerge themselves in fulfilling functions for others. In their reactions, they are unresponsive and complacent, walking away from problems and “sweeping them under the rug.” Become passive, disengaged, unreflective, and inattentive. Thinking becomes hazy and ruminative, mostly about their fantasies, as they begin to “tune out” reality, becoming oblivious. Emotional indolence, unwillingness to exert self (and stay focused) on problems: passive-aggressive and indifferent. / Begin to minimize problems to appease others and to have “peace at any price.” Become fatalistic and resigned, but also stubborn and resistant to influence. Practice wishful thinking and wait for magical solutions. Inadvertently create conflicts with others by their denial and obstinance.

Unhealthy: Can be repressed, undeveloped, and ineffectual. Do not want to deal with problems: become depressed and listless, dissociating self from all conflicts. Neglectful and dangerously irresponsible. / Wanting to block out of awareness anything that could affect them, they dissociate so much that they eventually cannot function: become numb, depersonalized. / Becoming severely disoriented and catatonic, they abandon themselves, turning into shattered shells. Multiple personalities possible.

Key Motivations: To have serenity and peace of mind, to create harmony in their environment, to preserve things as they are, to avoid conflicts and tension, to escape upsetting problems and demands on them.

Examples: Abraham Lincoln, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Grace of Monaco, Walter Cronkite, Walt Disney, George Lucas, Garrison Keillor, Sophia Loren, Kevin Costner, Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Ron Howard, Ringo Starr, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Nancy Kerrigan, Linda Evans, Ingrid Bergman, Perry Como, Jim Henson, Marc Chagall, Norman Rockwell, “Edith Bunker,” and “Marge Simpson.”

AN OVERVIEW OF THE NINE

The inner landscape of the Nine resembles someone riding a bicycle on a beautiful day, enjoying everything about the flow of the experience. The whole picture, the entire situation, is what is pleasant and identified with rather than any particular part. The inner world of Nines is this experience of effortless oneness: their sense of self comes from being at one with their experience. Naturally, they would like to preserve the quality of oneness with the environment as much as possible.

Their receptive orientation to life gives Nines so much deep satisfaction that they see no reason to question it or to want to change anything essential about it. Because Nines develop psychologically this way, we should not fault them if their view of life is open and optimistic. But we may fault Nines when they refuse to see that life, while being sweet, also has difficulties which must be dealt with. Their refusal to fix the tire when it goes flat, so to speak, is symbolic of their problem. They would rather ignore whatever is wrong so that the tranquillity of their ride will not be disturbed.

In this personality type, we will see the personal cost of the philosophy of peace at any price. Refusing to deal with problems does not make them go away. Moreover, the peace Nines purchase is inevitably at the expense of others, and ultimately at the expense of their ability to relate to reality. With all the good will in the world, Nines still may do terrible harm to others while coasting along, turning a blind eye on what they do not want to deal with.

In the Instinctive Triad

The Nine is the primary personality type in the Instinctive Triad—the type most out of touch with their instinctual drives and their ability to relate to the environment. This occurs because Nines do not want to be affected by the environment. They have established within themselves a kind of equilibrium, a feeling of peace and contentment, and they do not want their interactions with the world or with others to disturb them. Similarly, they do not want to become unsettled by powerful feelings that their instincts would stir in them. Nines have sufficiently dissociated from the intensity of their passions, their drives, and their anger to allow them to remain tranquil and even-tempered.

Thus, when they are healthy, they work to create a peaceful, harmonious environment around themselves. They may do this directly by soothing others and healing conflicts and hurts, or indirectly through creativity and communication which appeals to the idealistic side of human nature, to innocence and gentleness. In this way, Nines contribute to their world, but also influence it so that it will support their inner peacefulness. When Nines are less healthy, they maintain peace for themselves by ignoring those aspects of the environment which they find disturbing or upsetting. Eventually, this can lead to a highly dissociated approach to life in which Nines do not relate to others or the environment as they really are, but instead relate to an inner, idealized image of others which is more pleasant and less threatening. At the same time, while they are “tuning out” many aspects of the world around them, they are also tuning out many aspects of themselves. As a result, unless they are very healthy, Nines do not develop an awareness of themselves as individuals or even a well-defined awareness of the world around them.

Basically, Nines are in search of autonomy and independence, just like the other two types of this Triad, the Eight and the One. They want the freedom and space to pursue their own objectives and to be the way they want to be. Unlike Eights and Ones, however, Nines are blocked to some degree in their ability to assert themselves and their need for independence. They are afraid that such demands would ruin the harmony and equilibrium they have in their relationships with others. So they repress their desires for independence and space and attempt to find their freedom by dissociating—by breaking contact with the other and “inhabiting” the safety of their imaginations and their dreams. They relate to the idealized impression of others rather than to actual people, and similarly keep their own self-image in “soft focus.” They put themselves and their own real development in the background so they can maintain the sense of harmony and stability they feel. This approach can give them a temporary sense of ease and freedom from the difficulties and challenges around them, but if it becomes ingrained as a way of life, Nines risk never becoming independent, fully functioning human beings with clear identities of their own.

As long as Nines are idealizing other people, they will also tend to devalue themselves. It is as though they project all of the qualities that they feel they cannot have onto the idealized other. Strength, self-assertion, poise, self-confidence, and many other positive qualities are perceived as present in the other and lacking in the self. Nines are not necessarily anxious about the qualities they believe they lack; in fact, they are not particularly focused on themselves at all. Their attention is drawn far more to what they see as the positive qualities of the other. Of course, the specific qualities will vary from Nine to Nine, but all will seek to identify with people who have or express the mental, emotional, or physical qualities which Nines feel they lack. Most Nines will not be aware of this dynamic, but they will be aware of their strong identifications with certain figures in their lives and their repeated attraction to persons with assertive, energetic qualities. Subconsciously, they desire to merge with someone else in order to incorporate through that person the qualities in themselves that they have repressed or rejected. However, by identifying with someone else, their sense of self eventually becomes ill-defined and incomplete, so they do not relate to the world as individuals. Moreover, by identifying with someone else, Nines do not develop their potentials. Preserving their inner peace becomes their all-important motivation.

Only healthy Nines achieve an awareness of themselves as distinct persons who actively choose what they need and want. Healthy Nines know how to take direct positive actions for themselves. By contrast, average Nines have a relatively passive orientation to life. They still have substantial vitality and willpower, but their willpower is used to deflect others, to resist, to fend off reality. Average Nines use most of their energy to maintain and defend two boundaries against the environment. One is against the outer environment: Nines do not want their inner stability to be affected or influenced by other people. The second is against aspects of their inner environment: this can include feelings, memories, thoughts, or sensations which would be jarring or upsetting, thus ruining their balance and harmony. These boundaries do protect the Nine’s inner world, but they do so at a high price. What average to unhealthy Nines do not see is that they cannot really contribute to others, or even love them, if they do not develop themselves as persons, and that real development requires risking discomfort, questioning or even jeopardizing one’s inner “balance,” and sometimes facing truths which are unpleasant and uncomfortable. Ironically, many Nines are attracted to personal-growth books, seminars, and practices, but often gravitate to disciplines or philosophies which comfort rather than challenge. In other cases, they may selectively “edit” the teaching to make it more palatable to them.

Problems with Repression and Aggression

Nines, like Eights and Ones, have a problem with the repression of some part of their psyches. All three of these personality types overcompensate in one area for an underdevelopment in another. The problem Nines have with instinct is that they have repressed the ability to assert the self so they can be more receptive to the other. Eventually, their sense of self can become so repressed that they are barely functional as individuals, so totally do they discount themselves and live through someone else, or, just as bad, so completely do they live in a world of hazy illusions. By repressing themselves, their awareness of themselves, of other people, and of the world gradually becomes leveled out so that nothing can bother them. They become disengaged—at peace, but unrelated to the reality.

While there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be at peace, the problem is that average to unhealthy Nines tend to go too far to avoid all exertion and conflict. They do not see that it is sometimes necessary to assert themselves, since Nines equate self-assertion with aggression, as if asserting themselves automatically threatens their relationship with others. In truth, they also are afraid of asserting themselves because to do so allows powerful feelings to surge through them, and powerful feelings are not helpful in maintaining a state of peacefulness. The result is that Nines repress their aggressive impulses so thoroughly that eventually they are not aware of having them. However, just because they are not aware of their aggressions does not mean that these feelings do not exist or that these impulses do not affect their behavior.

Nines typically “solve” the problem of having aggressions by ignoring them out of existence. When Nines inadvertently act aggressively, they simply deny that they have done so. To a certain degree, the peace of average to unhealthy Nines is therefore something of an illusion, a form of willful blindness, a kind of self-deception. They do not realize that to maintain their peace, they have dissociated themselves from themselves—and from reality. However, the irony is that their passivity and denials, their inattention to others, and their increasing disengagement from the environment are all negative forms of aggression—passive resistance—an aggressive withholding of themselves from reality. Nines are far more aggressive than they think they are, and the effects of their denied and repressed aggressions can be devastating to themselves and others.

Parental Orientation

Nines are connected with both parents, in the sense that they have powerfully identified with and incorporated into their psyches the agendas and issues of both their nurturing-figure and their protective-figure. Much of their mental and emotional energy must then be used to deal with keeping all of these identifications in some kind of inner harmony. Thus their inner world is largely a balancing act as they attempt to accommodate their identifications with their nurturing-figure, their identifications with their protective-figure, and hopefully a few of their own needs as well.

Healthy Nines are extraordinarily sensitive and open to their environment, and as children they absorbed a great deal from the people around them, primarily their parents. If they came from a peaceful, harmonious household, the messages and feelings they incorporated were relatively easy to manage, and Nines had sufficient attention available to deal effectively with their world. If their early childhood was torn by strife and dysfunction, holding all of the painful and conflicted feelings and messages inside them was almost intolerable, so average to unhealthy Nines learned to dissociate—to remove themselves from the immediacy of their feelings and thoughts so that the inner turmoil they absorbed did not overwhelm them. At the same time, they learned to tune out the conflicts and pain of the external environment, a strategy familiar to many children. This is like the young person who blocks out the sound of her parents fighting in another room by singing a song to herself or remembering happier times.

Connection with both parents gives at least healthy to average Nines a sense of support and identity because their identity is more or less “given.” However, in the process of psychological and spiritual development, Nines may come to see that the identity they have assumed is not who they really are (like Threes) and that they are often dependent on something outside themselves for support (like Sixes). Furthermore, if their psyches are accommodating the issues of both parents, what space is left for them? It is as if Nines have been crowded out of their own selves by the agendas first of their parents and later of other significant people in their lives.

Trying to find some independence and autonomy, claiming some part of their lives for themselves alone, becomes very important. What Nines choose to do as their own may seem trivial to others, but Nines will defend these activities fiercely. Once they understand the nature of their inner accommodations, Nines are able to let go of some of these habits or rituals because they feel safe to claim their own needs in more central areas of their lives.

Finally, we can see that this orientation compels Nines to maintain harmonious relationships with and between the people in their lives. As children who developed their sense of self by bonding and identifying with both parents, the prospect of discord or separation between the parents is terrifying. For young Nines it is the same as having discord and conflict within themselves. Discord or separation between the parents is deeply disturbing to the Nine’s inner stability. Basically, Nines feel whole and good as long as the people they have identified with are whole and good. When Nines are healthy, they use their many gifts to help maintain the wholeness and well-being of others. When they are less healthy, they imagine that others are well and whole, even if they are not. Once this occurs, Nines ironically have begun to lose the very people they want to stay connected with.

Problems with Awareness and Individuality

Whether or not they want to recognize it, Nines are individuals and they have an impact on others. They cannot ignore themselves and allow their potential to go undeveloped without paying a serious price: rather than find harmony with others, they will inevitably lose it while living in a dreamy half-awareness in which their relationships are little more than idealized illusions.

The personality type Nine corresponds to Jung’s introverted sensation type. Jung describes what we would regard as average to unhealthy Nines, people who maintain their peacefulness and connection with others not as they are, but through an idealization of them. The other person may feel “devalued,” as Jung says, for the following reasons:

He may be conspicuous for his calmness and passivity, or for his rational self-control [especially, for example, if the Nine has a One-wing). This peculiarity, which often leads a superficial judgment astray, is really due to his unrelatedness to objects. Normally the object is not consciously devalued in the least, but its stimulus is removed from it and immediately replaced by a subjective reaction no longer related to the reality of the object. This naturally has the same effect as devaluation. Such a type can easily make one question why one should exist at all….

Seen from the outside, it looks as though the effect of the object did not penetrate into the subject at all. This impression is correct inasmuch as a subjective content does, in fact, intervene from the unconscious and intercept the effect of the object. The intervention may be so abrupt that the individual appears to be shielding himself directly from all objective influences…. If the object is a person, he feels completely devalued, while the subject has an illusory conception of reality, which in pathological cases goes so far that he is no longer able to distinguish between the real object and the subjective perception…. Such action has an illusory character unrelated to objective reality and is extremely disconcerting. It instantly reveals the reality-alienating subjectivity of this type. But when the influence of the object does not break through completely, it is met with well-intentioned neutrality, disclosing little sympathy yet constantly striving to soothe and adjust. The too low is raised a little, the too high is lowered, enthusiasm is damped down, extravagance restrained, and anything out of the ordinary reduced to the right formula—all this in order to keep the influence of the object within the necessary bounds. In this way the type becomes a menace to his environment because his total innocuousness is not altogether above suspicion. In that case he easily becomes a victim of the aggressiveness and domineeringness of others. Such men allow themselves to be abused and then take their revenge on the most unsuitable occasions with redoubled obtuseness and stubbornness. (C. G. Jung,Psychological Types, 396–397.)

At the lower end of the continuum, Nines are a “menace to [their] environment” because, like everyone else, they have a characteristic form of selfishness, although it is more difficult to perceive in Nines than in other types since Nines are so apparently accommodating to others. The particular form which their selfishness takes is their willingness to sacrifice a great many values—in a sense, their willingness to sacrifice all of reality—so they can maintain their inner serenity. Being anxious or emotionally stimulated can be extraordinarily threatening for average to unhealthy Nines because they are unused to being aware of their feelings. Virtually any kind of emotional reaction disrupts the fullness of their repression, whether the reaction is caused by anxiety, aggression, or something else. The result is that average Nines seek peace at any price, although the price they unwittingly pay is that they lose contact with everyone and everything, including themselves.

As they cling desperately to peace by “burying their heads in the sand,” they eventually become unable to deal with anything. In their haste to get problems behind them, nothing is faced squarely and problems are never solved. They become disoriented, as if they were sleepwalking through life. They exercise poor judgment, sometimes with tragic results. Moreover, the consequences of their inattention and disengagement cannot be ignored forever, at least by others. Unhealthy Nines may be forced to come to grips with what they have done, although they will try to avoid doing so at all costs. They would rather turn their backs completely on reality than make what seems to them to be the impossible effort of putting their world right again.

Healthy Nines, however, can be the most contented and pleasant people imaginable. They are extraordinarily receptive, making people feel accepted as they are. Their peace is so mature that they are able to admit conflict and separation, growth and individuality into their lives. They are their own persons, yet they delight in giving themselves away. But once they begin to seek peace of mind inappropriately, average Nines become self-effacing, complacent, and fearful of change. They do not want to deal with reality—either the reality of themselves or of others. And unhealthy Nines totally resist anything which intrudes upon them. They live in a world of unreality, desperately clinging to illusions while their world falls apart.

ANALYZING THE HEALTHY NINE

Level 1: The Self-Possessed Guide

At their best, very healthy Nines allow themselves to become fully empowered, independent persons. Having overcome their fear of loss and separation from others, they become self-possessed and truly autonomous. They feel extraordinarily fulfilled and enjoy a profound contentment and an unshakable equanimity because they are in union with someone from whom they can never be separated: themselves. They achieve the peace they are always seeking because they are truly at one with themselves. This sort of wholeness and inner integrity is indeed rare in the world, and a source of great beauty, true creativity, and joyfulness when it occurs.

Although extraordinarily serene, they are also paradoxically vital and alive, in touch with their thoughts, feelings, and desires. Very healthy Nines are aware of even their aggressive feelings without being alarmed by them. They realize that having aggressions is not the same as acting aggressively or being destructive toward others. Thus, self-possession enables Nines to bring more of themselves to others than they ever could before, and so their relationships become more satisfying as they acquire new depth.

Self-respecting, they have enormous dignity because they are aware of their true worth without the faintest whiff of egocentricity or self-congratulation. They are fully present as individuals. And because they can see themselves as they really are, they are able to see others as they really are. People are no longer idealized, and so they become truly other to Nines—and for that reason they are loved much more realistically.

Very healthy Nines are firmly in their own center, dynamic, powerful, and enormously capable of dealing with problems because of the deep inner unity they have achieved. They feel fulfilled, if not as persons who have completely developed all their potentials, then as persons who are able to bring themselves to bear on the world, the moment, and the other. They actively inhabit their own consciousness, as it were, possessing themselves and taking control of their lives. This is an extremely private, almost spiritual event, difficult to observe directly or describe. But it is a real, decisive event nonetheless. Very healthy Nines are being born psychologically, as mature centers of awareness. A new force is entering the world—a new being, an ancient child, an indomitable spirit.

At their best, therefore, very healthy Nines are an example to all the personality types of what it means to be at one with the self and at one with the world. They are an example of the profound unity which is possible for human beings—the unity of the self as well as the unity of the self and the other. They teach us of a self-possession and self-surrender so profound as to have mystical overtones. They are so effortlessly themselves and so completely receptive that very healthy Nines must reflect what human beings were like before the Fall into self-consciousness and alienation. They are a living reminder that, when all is said and done, we are each a gift to the other, just as the other is a gift to us. To be completely ourselves and yet fully related to the other is a mystery to be surrendered to in silence.

Level 2: The Receptive Person

Unfortunately, even healthy Nines are not always so healthy. Self-possession is difficult to sustain, and the fear of losing the sense of balance and harmony they feel with the environment and with the people who are important to them always remains in the shadows of their minds. If they succumb to it, Nines desire to create peace of mind for themselves by becoming unselfconscious. Instead of bringing the fullness of their awareness to themselves, others, and the moment, they subtly begin to lose themselves in their impressions, to begin to forget that they are an active part of what they are experiencing. In the desire to merge harmoniously with the other, they begin to lose their center. Basically, to maintain a sense of peace, Nines begin to diffuse their own awareness, losing touch with the grounding of their sensations and instincts.

Because Nines developed their sense of self by identifying with both parents, they also are able to identify with others, giving positive attention to those who are central in their lives. They are extraordinarily receptive, capable of identifying with others so completely that they are not self-conscious, self-doubting, or self-centered. Not only are healthy Nines free to give their full attention to others, they positively want to do so. Because of their ability to identify with people, healthy Nines have a great capacity for loving and sustaining others.

Since they are so unselfconsciously accepting, there are few conflicts either in their emotional lives or in their relationships. Nines see themselves as peaceful, and as long as they are healthy, they really are at peace with the world. They have a high tolerance for stress and irritation; they are patient, imperturbable, relaxed, and tranquil. They do not fly off the handle over the little annoyances of life. There is also an unmistakable innocence and simplicity about healthy Nines. They are guileless, the kind of people to whom lying or trying to take advantage of others would never occur. (It is incomprehensible to them how others can be guilty of this sort of thing.)

Their receptivity allows healthy Nines to be the most trusting of the personality types. They trust others, they trust themselves, and they trust life. Because they communicate the feeling of nonjudgmental acceptance, Nines serve as emotional anchors for people; stable and solid, they are always there when others need them. Modest, gentle, and approachable, they are sanctuaries of peace to whom others come for solace, rest, and comfort. Uncritical and un-threatening, they do not have unattainable standards either for themselves or for anyone else. They are easy to please and make few demands on anyone. (Healthy Nines are not, however, totally uncritical and equally receptive to everyone. Some people repel them, of course, but healthy Nines are more gracious to those they dislike than is any other personality type.)

Although healthy Nines feel at ease among people, they also love to commune with nature. Sailing, hiking, camping, gardening, or taking care of animals makes them feel very much at peace. Nature—especially its mystical and mythological side—strikes a receptive chord in them because by identifying with nature, Nines feel at one with something larger than themselves. Moreover, since they are used to identifying with others, personalizing them in their minds, nature, animals, and even abstract ideas and symbols have a deep emotional resonance for them. For example, Nines do not think of their country as an abstraction but as a living thing; their pets are people to them; the countryside is populated by mythological creatures; mountains, trees, and rivers are archetypal forces; elves, ghosts, and leprechauns inhabit their living room or favorite shady spot.

The archetypal imagination we find in healthy Nines also has a deep appeal to other people, since it taps the desire for union with the cosmos which, at some level, everyone desires and needs. Healthy Nines supply the personality types with a vision of the magic of the world. They have a way of looking at the world through innocent eyes. Their mythological imagination recalls the consciousness of childhood in which everything seemed to glow with enchantment. Healthy Nines never lose the contemplative side of themselves or their sense of wonder.

Correspondingly, Nines have an affinity for nonverbal communication. They are at home in the world of pictures and symbols, and they often tend to think in colors and impressions rather than in words. Many Nines are also attuned to music, and derive great fulfillment from singing or playing an instrument. The quality of music is very supportive of their state of awareness: playing or listening to music is an experience in which one can lose one’s self in the process. Further, the sense of harmony, tone, and vibration all feed the Nine’s feeling of oneness and flow with their environment.

Finally, since Nines see themselves as part of nature, the physical processes of sex, birth, aging, and death itself seem natural to them, things which should be accepted as part of the way things are. Their acceptance of nature and nature’s ways is yet another source of their peacefulness, because they are not at odds with existence as many other personality types are. Nines are not defiant of the natural order, but happy to be part of it, yielding themselves to it.

Level 3: The Supportive Peacemaker

Because their peace of mind is threatened by any tension between them and others, healthy Nines want to ensure that peace reigns everywhere in their lives. Achieving and maintaining peace motivates them to become peacemakers, mediating disputes and conflicts between those they are close to. Nines want to reconcile people to each other so that everyone will be at peace, just as they are with themselves.

They are also good mediators because they take the complaints of others seriously. They understand real differences between people, why others are upset and concerned about whatever is on their minds. Healthy Nines also are able to see areas of common ground, and they work toward achieving reconciliation because they feel that there is much more to be gained by cooperation than by divisiveness.

The list of their positive qualities is a long one: healthy Nines have a healing touch and go out of their way to pour oil on troubled waters. They have a soothing effect on others because they are so calm themselves. Others find that they are mysteriously at peace simply for being in the Nine’s presence. Nines are also optimistic and reassuring, and whenever they can responsibly do so, they stress the positive, believing that looking on the bright side of things is preferable to dwelling on the negative. They are able to forgive and forget, to put conflicts completely behind them and get on with their relationships and their responsibilities. They are extremely affable, pleasant people, the kind others spontaneously (and rightly) call “nice” or the “salt of the earth.” They are jovial and have sunny dispositions, a natural, unaffected sense of humor, and a warm, easy laugh. They are unpretentious, treating everyone with the same honest directness no matter whether the person is royalty or a cab driver. They are easygoing and as comfortable as an old shoe. It must be the rarest of persons who does not like a healthy Nine.

Healthy Nines are not simply good-natured, however. They bring other qualities to society, particularly the support which they give others so that they can thrive. Whoever is significant to Nines—spouses, children, close friends—will be the beneficiaries of their unstinting love and generosity. And since healthy Nines possess a gut instinct about others (as a result of their identification with them), what they do for people is both appropriate and valuable for their development.

When Nines feel something important needs to be said, they can be extremely candid, perhaps saying more than other types would find it politic to say, although Nines do so without desiring to hurt anyone. Their candor can be very valuable, since they distinguish themselves by their uncommon common sense, a combination of simplicity and guilelessness so true as to be extraordinary. They have no ulterior motives, no pretensions, no large ego to protect or inflate, no concern for status or prestige, no desire to impress or condemn others. Hence, they speak with the honesty of children and the wisdom of adults.

Their serenity is certainly soothing to others, and a great help to them in negotiations of all sorts, but it also serves them very well in a crisis. Healthy Nines can maintain a levelheaded calm, even in highly stressful or dangerous circumstances. They often combine this composure with their healing touch in the medical professions or in related fields of health and nutrition. Of course, Nines can be found in a wide variety of professions, but even if they are not pursuing a career in the healing arts, many high-functioning Nines are interested in healing and holistic approaches to life.

In a similar vein, healthy Nines are often students of metaphysics and human development. They are at home with a global, transpersonal perspective and are frequent attendees of workshops on meditation, energy and body work, yoga, and relaxation techniques. Nines enjoy exploring the world of dreams, symbols, and images, and they are frequently attracted to the ways of indigenous peoples who emphasize life in harmony with nature. They also are adept at synthesizing different perspectives or traditions in a way that finds the common threads in them all but also produces new insights.

Nines can be wonderfully creative in more traditional ways as well, and delight in sharing their visions of an enchanted, Utopian world with others. When they are healthy, their unselfconsciousness allows them easy access to their creative process (although this changes in the average Levels of the continuum). Not surprisingly, much of the art they produce has qualities similar to their personal style: that is, positive, reassuring, and full of a sense of wonder about the world.

Last, even though healthy Nines are easygoing, they may become extremely successful in their professions because of their ability to bring out the best in others by creating a nurturing environment. But precisely because they are not competitive and rarely call attention to themselves, others tend to underestimate them. People take Nines for granted, until they realize how much they have contributed to everyone’s welfare.

ANALYZING THE AVERAGE NINE

Level 4: The Accommodating Role-Player

Outwardly, average Nines seem little different from healthy Nines, although a shift has taken place, not so much in their actions as in their attitudes. The difference between healthy Nines and average Nines is that healthy Nines are in touch with themselves and others, whereas average Nines begin to lose touch with themselves and others by subordinating themselves to roles and social conventions. They do not want to stand out too much, putting themselves in the background so as not to disturb their environment.

In the healthy Levels, Nines are dynamic individuals who work to create a positive, harmonious environment. But in so doing, they may begin to fear that asserting themselves or their desires will create conflicts with others, thus spoiling their peace. When they begin to fear getting into conflicts with people, Nines are being swept into the average Levels of the continuum. Ironically, this strategy is the genesis of many of the conflicts that Nines will have with others. People want attention and responses from Nines, but as they reflexively avoid possible conflicts and repress their opinions, their input is not forthcoming. (“Where would you like to go for dinner tonight?” “I don’t care. Wherever you want to go.”)

At this stage the basic pattern we see is that Nines lower their expectations of life and of themselves, and begin going along with other people’s wishes to avoid conflicts with them. In fact, the expectations of society and of their peers begin to create a role into which Nines can disappear. Everyone plays various roles in life, but in the case of average Nines, the role is created by others and exists to fulfill their expectations and needs. Average Nines want to blend in and to be unthreatening. Becoming too expressive or assertive feels to them like “making a scene.”

Self-effacement becomes the main way by which average Nines blend in with their peers and minimize the risk of conflicts. In contrast to Threes, who want to be outstanding in their social roles, average Nines do not want to stand out, lest they draw fire. The result is that they can become “generic” versions of their social role—the boy or girl next door, the nine-to-five worker, the journeyman musician, the pleasant doctor. As with average Threes, it becomes difficult to distinguish the person from the role they believe they are supposed to fulfill.

Self-effacement affects Nines in other ways as well. Average Nines willingly accommodate themselves to others because their sense of self depends on it. Average Nines begin to idealize the people they identify with, so that the more wonderful the qualities of the other, the better Nines feel about themselves. The more the other is idealized, the stronger the emotional bonds and the more at one with themselves Nines feel. In fact, this action creates the opposite effect. Nines feel better about themselves because of their connection with such wonderful people. But they are devaluing themselves to do this. Or more precisely, they are beginning to forget themselves and neglect their own development. They become like a mother who lives for her children or a wife for her husband. Of course, it is appropriate for a mother to accommodate herself to the needs of her children when they are infants and cannot do without her. But it becomes a problem if, as they get older, she continues the same pattern of self-effacement. The essential problem is that average Nines go too far in identifying with the other, losing too much of themselves in the process. Too readily do the wishes of others become their wishes, the thoughts of others their thoughts.

A reciprocal motion occurs: as they accommodate themselves, they idealize the other. If the other is a person, he or she can do no wrong; if it is a value or belief, it is never questioned. Thus, average Nines easily fall into conventional roles, defining themselves as persons whose place in life is to fulfill the functions—as husband, wife, breadwinner, parent, citizen—which have been assigned by someone else or by the culture in which they live. Getting married, having children, and holding down a job, among many other things, are expected of them—so they accommodate themselves. Their lifestyle, their religious and political beliefs, their expectations for themselves and their children are all defined by the conventions which they have accepted.

This is why average Nines are so aptly thought of as the archetypal common man. They are the glue of society, which by its very willingness to be molded into whatever niches are needed is valuable to society, although at a cost to the individuals involved. Without a thought about developing themselves, average Nines embrace the values and ways of thinking and living of the culture in which they find themselves. Even if they are part of an “alternative culture,” they will dress, behave, and live their life in the way they feel is “normal” for that culture. (Nines in a spiritual community will be conscientious about observing the practices and protocols of that community.) Respectability is therefore very important to them. Nines are not so much interested in keeping up with the Joneses as in being respectable members of their society, doing what is proper, and not doing what they imagine a person of their society would not do. In this sense, average Nines are also usually conservative, not necessarily politically conservative, but conservative in the sense of being resistant to significant changes in their world.

Because they are conservative, average Nines also tend to be past-oriented. The past is always more comfortable than the present or the future, since the past is a known quantity. It is less threatening because it has already been lived through. Moreover, average Nines can be nostalgic about the past, getting sentimental or idealizing it because doing so creates a source of good feelings for themselves and others. Further, happy memories from the past become a reliable source of positive feelings when conflicts and problems erupt in their world.

It is difficult to quibble with many of the particular values of average Nines. The problem is not so much with their values as with their not thinking them through. They simply adopt their way of life wholesale, naively accepting everything at face value.

Level 5: The Disengaged Participant

Because their emotional stability depends on maintaining their inner world of beliefs and idealizations, average Nines at this stage fear change. They do not want to do anything which would upset them, and therefore want to maintain the status quo as much as possible. Rather than exert themselves in any deep, essential way, they let everything simply work out on its own, without their intervention or response.

The irony is that average Nines must actually do something to do nothing: they must disengage themselves from anything in the environment which they perceive as a threat to their peace. Their healthy unselfconsciousness has become a certain unreflective disconnectedness, a lack of awareness of aspects of the world around them. They remain on friendly terms with reality, but not slavishly so. A sluggish complacency, intellectual laziness, and emotional indolence set in. (“Oh, well, we don’t have to worry about that…”) They become passive: life begins to happen to average Nines.

There is a distinctive vagueness about Nines at this stage because they maintain an uninvolved distance between themselves and their activities, an impassiveness, which does not allow anything to get to them or upset them. They are extremely easygoing, but they do not make real contact with the environment—or with those in it—becoming matter-of-fact, even about things which would ordinarily call for a more impassioned response. They slip into an indifferent “I can take it or leave it” attitude, which prevents them from getting too excited about or involved in anything. They move from one thing to another, equally content and neutral about it. In short, average Nines are mellow and “laid-back” to a fault, the classic phlegmatic temperament personified. Being “on cloud nine” takes on new meaning.

Because they do not allow themselves to feel anything very deeply, their highs are not high and their lows are not low, as Jung noted. Everything is kept on an even keel. Average Nines are not even aware that their feelings are dampened, since they have disconnected themselves from their feelings. At this stage, average Nines begin to be so vague and undefined that others cannot help but notice that something is missing in them, as if they were not all there. They are unfocused and spacy, a million miles away, as if grooving on some inner trip or secret thought—or on nothing at all.

Nothing seems particularly important or urgent to average Nines, and they put no particular mental energy into anything unless they absolutely have to. Details do not interest them, they forget things, and they do not concentrate on their work for more than a few minutes before mentally floating off. Their conversation rambles or they change the subject abruptly, revealing their lack of attention to what is being said. Average Nines are life’s dreamers, enjoying the contemplation of their inner vision of whomever or whatever they have idealized. But, unfortunately, because their attention is inward on their contemplation, they become inattentive to the real world. If they are intelligent and well-educated, they may enjoy talking about philosophy, theology, the arts, or science, although even so, much of their thinking is frankly little more than vague woolgathering, the purpose of which is to pass the time rather than actively engage themselves with anything requiring intense involvement or effort.

Increasingly, to convince themselves that they are doing something constructive with their time, average Nines engage in “busy work.” They involve themselves in all sorts of projects, errands, and activities which help maintain their world to some degree, but which have little real impact on them. Furthermore, Nines at Level’s begin to have difficulty galvanizing themselves to do things that would substantially improve their lives. They feel an enormous inner resistance to leaving the comfort of their routines, as if they were trying to swim through molasses. Everything seems like too much trouble, so average Nines soon switch on “autopilot” and disappear into their routines again.

Their healthy simplicity has deteriorated into obliviousness, a permanent absentmindedness, as if they were constantly daydreaming about nothing in particular, perceiving the world like someone who looks at a clock without seeing the time. Indeed, the way most people have trained themselves to ignore television commercials is how average Nines experience a lot of reality, disconnecting themselves from whatever they do not want to see or hear until inadvertence becomes habitual. They are like sleepwalkers, physically present but not aware of what is going on around them.

Their energy is spent maintaining their peace, ignoring anything which would excite or trouble them. Physical and emotional comfort is an important value, and average Nines do not push themselves too hard intellectually or physically lest they get either too stimulated or too exhausted. They pass the time in undemanding ways, puttering around the house, going on errands, collecting knickknacks, or mindlessly watching television. At this stage, they become accustomed to living in a state of semiawareness, like people who have been on tranquilizers so long that they forget what it is like to be off them.

It is important to understand, however, that psychological passivity is not the same thing as complete inactivity, although it is a precursor to it. Average Nines may be the heads of multimillion-dollar corporations, leading vast enterprises while still maintaining an inner disconnectedness from their activities. Nines are able to be uninvolved because one of their defense mechanisms is compartmentalization (isolation), which allows their subjective experiences to be broken into unrelated segments so that they can move from one thing to another without engaging themselves. As a result, reality has little impact on them. They can be relatively busy while remaining emotionally and intellectually detached from their activities.

Moreover, the social roles they have been fulfilling are now used to keep others from affecting them. They relate to others through their roles but without much investment in the interaction. Instead, their attention is disengaged from the immediacy of their experience, as they withdraw into a safe inner sanctum where the events of their lives will not strongly impact them.

Because they disconnect from their experiences, average Nines do not make the cause-and-effect connections one would normally expect: cause and effect simply do not seem to go together for them. They do not think of the consequences of their actions, or of the fact that their omissions will also have consequences. They do not think through anything, unquestioningly feeling that everything will work out for the best.

Their lack of self-awareness is at the root of what is going on here. Inattention arises because, unless they are healthy, Nines never learn to focus on anything, including themselves. Just the opposite: their entire orientation is to be unselfconscious and receptive to the other, as we have seen. Because they are unable to sense themselves as discrete individuals, they get used to perceiving all of reality vaguely. When practical problems arise, especially with other people, their inability to attend to reality only makes things worse. Average Nines increasingly become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The problem is that average Nines have made many accommodations to others to avoid conflicts and to be left in peace. But these accommodations are not without cost, and underneath the passivity, Nines are angry both at others for not seeing them and their needs (although they may be uncertain as to what they are or how to express them to others) and at themselves for their inability to assert their desires. They are convinced, however, that this anger would ruin their inner stability, their peace of mind, so they repress it, not realizing that it is the very energy that would enable them to assert themselves. To repress their anger and anxiety, they begin to disconnect from all of their feelings.

They also disconnect from interpersonal conflicts by compartmentalizing their relationships, splitting people into two major groups: those with whom they have identified and everyone else. The second group of people has little meaning to average Nines because they are essentially unreal, little more than an abstraction. Average Nines can be surprisingly callous and indifferent about this group of people. They may as well not exist.

Nor do average Nines put much energy into their relationships even with those in the first group, with whom they have identified. Nines idealize these people, and then shift their attention from the real people to their idealization of them. The result is that others sense a lack of attention to themselves or to their real needs. Ironically, others may also begin to lose interest in average Nines because there is so little energy or relating going on in the relationship. As Nines drift off, others drift away.

Level 6: The Resigned Fatalist

If doing nothing does not succeed and they must face their problems or conflicts with others, average Nines at this stage attempt to minimize their importance. They underestimate the seriousness of the consequences of their passivity and underestimate how difficult it will be for someone else to correct the problems they refuse to deal with. In fact, they underestimate the necessity of doing much of anything at all.

By this stage, it is likely that average Nines have a number of genuine problems in their lives, but they take pride in their ability to endure whatever happens: they know that they can get through problems by tuning them out. Thus, rather than exert themselves, they become fatalistic, feeling that nothing can be done to change things, and that in any event, whatever the problem is, it is not so much a problem after all. (“Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway.”) Their healthy receptivity has deteriorated into resignation, a giving up rather than a mature letting go. This is not optimism but selfishness. (“I don’t want to hear it—I just don’t want to be upset.”)

They begin to trudge through their lives as if life were something to “get through” rather than live. They will stay in a bad marriage or a poor work environment rather than risk upsetting their situation. Apathy has replaced compliance. At this Level, Nines are not even interested in going along with others’ wishes. They develop a profound indifference about themselves, their lives, and the people and events around them.

The problem is that Nines refuse to see the problem. As far as they are concerned, no matter what happens, they are resigned to their fate. They show little interest or understanding about what is at stake either for themselves or for anyone else. If others get angry at them because of their refusal to act, Nines quickly try to appease them. They want peace at any price, and will make whatever concessions are necessary to “get their problems behind them,” a typical phrase. Once they have appeased others, they feel the crisis has passed, and they can continue as before. But because Nines do not want to deal with anything upsetting, it is hard to resolve difficulties with them. They forget how problems were settled. The following week the problems still exist: nothing that was supposedly worked out has actually sunk into their heads or made a real, permanent difference.

At this stage, they are so eager to avoid conflicts that they water down conflicting positions, give a false sense of hope by minimizing issues, and tell people prematurely to “calm down—everything will be all right.” Others are frustrated with Nines because they are so disengaged that it is almost impossible to connect with them in any meaningful or emotionally satisfying way. Ironically, Nines who feared losing their sense of connection and harmony with others have withdrawn their attention from them. Moreover, when others attempt to make helpful suggestions or try to get some kind of a response from them, average Nines can be extremely stubborn and angry, not seeing what all the fuss is about. (“Why can’t you accept me as I am?”) They want to downplay problems so that everyone can get back to a more peaceful, harmonious existence and so that whatever threatens their tranquillity will go away.

But in doing so they can be penny wise and pound foolish. Their judgment becomes extremely poor. If they are forced to deal with a problem which they alone can solve, they will go only as far as they absolutely must and then drop it. They lack staying power; they simply do not see a problem through to the end. If forced to act, their every tendency is to think that they have done enough once they have made a little effort. Thus, they often undo the good they may have begun and disappoint others who may be counting on them.

Average Nines are often able to endure unpleasant situations for a long time because they live in a world of wishful thinking. They believe in magic: someone will come along and “fix” their problems or, if they are patient and long-suffering, their problems will be taken away. They dream of a better future without doing anything to bring it about. (“Someday my ship will come in”; “Someday my prince will come.”) In this state of disengagement, day after day goes by, and Nines find the possibility of actualizing their dreams and longings slowly fading away.

Furthermore, others realize that they will have to suffer the consequences of the fatalism and unwillingness of Nines to exert themselves. Even so, it is frustrating for others to confront fatalistic Nines. They are still so nice that few people are willing to press them or get them upset. People tend to leave Nines alone because Nines want to be left in peace.

The nature of their selfishness is now clear: without being aware of it, Nines are able to put their peace above the more serious needs of others, in effect, above reality and the harm they do by ignoring it. Their appeasement of others is a defense against changing anything essential about themselves or the idealization of their important relationships. By minimizing reality, average Nines, in a sense, sacrifice others to continue the illusion of union with them, so that they can maintain their identities and their tranquillity. In this way, they are able to sacrifice their spouses, their children—and themselves—to the god of peace.

There is much aggression in this, but it is so subtle that other people usually do not even notice it. However, others are no longer real to Nines. Their lives have been taken away—not literally but psychologically. Nines have created a relationship with a fantasy and have turned their backs on reality, particularly the reality of others. There can scarcely be a more pervasive kind of aggression.

Nines have been using all of their internal energy to block out of awareness their fears and anxieties, but now their anxieties are too great to ignore. They have become compliant with others to avoid conflicts, but now everyone seems to have a grievance with them, and they do not seem to be able to keep their easy relationships and peaceful feelings going.

ANALYZING THE UNHEALTHY NINE

Level 7: The Denying Doormat

Unhealthy Nines become adamant about not facing conflicts and problems. They actively resist seeing their problems (denial) so they can protect themselves from emotional pain and anxiety and maintain their relationship with their illusions. As a result, unhealthy Nines are obstinate and neglectful and absolutely impervious to pressure to change. Problems can even have the most obvious and relatively easy solution, yet unhealthy Nines do not do anything and do not want to.

All their energy goes toward maintaining their defenses against dealing with reality so that nothing will get to them. This defense, known as repression resistance, is extraordinarily frustrating to deal with and makes it almost impossible to get through to unhealthy Nines. It is as if they have bolted shut some inner door, preventing anyone from having access to them. Ironically, those who were once so open and receptive have become impenetrable. They are furious with others for trying to force them to do anything, and hence for arousing their anxiety. But the only way unhealthy Nines can express anger is to resist others and block them out all the more. Passive resistance is as aggressive as unhealthy Nines become, except perhaps for an occasional inadvertent eruption of rage when the repression momentarily fails.

More typically, however, unhealthy Nines tend to be victims and “doormats.” The self-effacement and accommodation we saw in the average Levels has deteriorated into allowing themselves to be exploited and abused. Unhealthy Nines are so fearful of conflict and of losing the other—and have such low self-esteem—that they will not defend themselves from either psychological or physical abuse. From another perspective, unhealthy Nines are, of course, profoundly outraged at being abused, but continue to repress their rage and even their self-preservation instincts because their tenuous emotional equilibrium and sense of self would be overwhelmed by such powerful feelings. The repression of their rage is extremely tiring, leaving Nines depressed, confused, and unable to function. As a result, they are more dependent than ever on their oppressors and less capable of taking constructive action for themselves.

Since they feel incapable of taking any decisive action, they become seriously neglectful not only of their responsibilities toward others but even toward themselves. They will not go to a doctor if they are ill, much less recognize the medical or emotional problems of their spouses or children. They cannot do their work at the office if it upsets them in the least. Those who depend on them realize very clearly that they are completely unreliable. Getting unhealthy Nines to do anything for themselves is like running into a stone wall.

Because repressed Nines obstinately resist contact with reality, they become inadequate and undeveloped as persons, virtually helpless about doing anything on their own. Ironically, for people who exert themselves so little, unhealthy Nines have little energy because of their repressed rage, as we have seen. They are often fatigued because their energy goes into warding off reality rather than dealing with it. The usual result of this is depression. They become listless and dependent, able to function in only minimal ways. Unhealthy Nines cannot cope with any tension or pressure whatsoever because everything upsets them (or rather, they think it will) or demands more attention and effort than they are able to muster. Others—sometimes those they have harmed by their neglect—must step in to save them from themselves, correcting the problems unhealthy Nines have refused to face.

Serious interpersonal conflicts are certain to arise at this point, if they have not already done so. When hostilities break out, unhealthy Nines are invariably mystified by the intensity of other people’s negative feelings toward them. They do not realize how much their inattention has cost others.

Having to face the fact that through their negligence they have harmed someone with whom they have identified would provoke extreme anxiety and guilt in unhealthy Nines. They would be plunged into despair and possibly driven toward suicide. However, repression spares them from being aware of their failures and inadequacies, although not from all realization. Moments of insight into the finality of their actions—or more properly, the consequences of their neglect—break in on them now and then. They realize that their omissions have had consequences which cannot be undone. It is too late to go back. The horror of this is like a beast pounding at the door of their unconscious. How to keep it out?

Level 8: The Dissociating Automaton

Pressure from reality and antagonism from others may get so strong that to protect themselves from having to face the awareness of what they have done, neurotic Nines cut themselves off entirely from everything. They blank out subjectively so that they do not make contact with reality and so that reality does not make contact with them. Their fear of anxiety is so intense that neurotic Nines dissociate themselves from reality, becoming depersonalized. They regress to an infantile state as if they desired to return to the womb. They block out so much that they withdraw into a numb, affectless condition as if in amnesia, completely dissociating from the self.

Neurotic Nines are like automatons: they do not feel or react to anything. It is as if the self had been removed from the body which functions on its own. The extent of their denial of reality can be astounding. They may have lost a limb, but either deny that it happened or think that the arm or leg will grow back. They may think that they were not really fired or that a divorce or death did not really happen. As pathetic as this state is, there is a poetic appropriateness to their condition, since Nines have been increasingly absent from themselves for some time. By now, however, their dissociation from themselves has become habitual, a way of life, or more precisely, a way of not living.

They are in the fog of dissociation, feeling that life is a bad dream, a sort of make-believe from which they must take flight so that reality will not really happen to them. Of course, in times of severe loss and trauma, other personality types also react by denying reality until they can begin to deal with what has happened. However, neurotic Nines dissociate because they feel that they cannot deal with reality ever again.

Nines at this level resemble trauma victims in shock in the aftermath of an accident. They seem lost, confused about their identities and sometimes even their whereabouts. Depressions which may have developed at Level 7 settled into a chronic condition. Unhealthy Nines are desolate and numb, yet their anguish and anger may continually and unexpectedly break through to the surface. They may be blank and depersonalized one moment, and sobbing hysterically the next. It is as though they are regressing to earlier and earlier memories in an attempt to escape the terrors of their current condition. Nines at this stage are also full of tremendous rage at others, although they are completely unaware of it. What glimmers of it do arise are extremely threatening. Neurotic Nines fear that releasing any of it would destroy whatever inner refuges they retain. Nonetheless, hysterical outbursts and temper tantrums can be part of the picture.

Indeed, there is a hysterical element in their flight from reality, although this is difficult to perceive since the hysteria is repressed out of consciousness. Nevertheless, their unconscious anxiety has reached such a pitch that neurotic Nines must stay in flight both from themselves and from reality. But this means that they have nowhere to go, either outward to the world to find refuge or inward to seek their own comfort and counsel. Life has become like a terrible nightmare from which Nines hope they will soon awaken, but at this point, their problems are often very real. The only way out is to push dissociation one final step in the direction of self-abandonment. In flight both from anxiety and reality, neurotic Nines dissociate themselves from themselves as completely as possible.

Level 9: The Self-Abandoning Ghost

If something pushes them over the edge (if, for example, reality puts pressures on them from which they cannot flee), neurotic Nines may well suffer a psychotic break with reality as well as schizoid breaks within their psyche. They disintegrate as persons into the most extreme state of dissociation from who they are. As we have seen, their receptive orientation to life has facilitated their flight from self-awareness. Now, they completely flee from themselves, retreating into a state that resembles autism.

If Nines suffered chronic and extreme abuse as children, they may be particularly prone to multiple personality disorder. This is not to say that all multiple personality cases are Nines or that all unhealthy Nines will develop multiple personalities, but there does seem to be some overlap of these two conditions. In such cases, we can see how multiple personalities can result from the individual’s attempting to accommodate highly conflicting emotional material and attempting to build an identity from it.

In most cases, neurotic Nines unconsciously abandon themselves as whole persons, reinvesting consciousness into various fragments of themselves, each of which may represent an aspect of the self which has been repressed and denied and undeveloped. Memories, dreamlike trances, and emotional reactions seem to come and go at random. It is as though the very structure of the personality has come “unglued” or broken apart, and only its constituents remain to interact with the environment.

To abandon themselves as persons, retreating into complete dissociation and fragmenting their personalities, is a “solution” of sorts, because then it is not really they who live but someone else through whom they can live. We have seen that average Nines tend to live through the other; now we see that they live through the other-self, the fragments of the self which are little more than the disconnected identifications and relationships with significant others from the Nine’s past. The core self has been so traumatized that it is as though in a dream without a dreamer. This can hardly be called living. Furthermore, because one of the subpersonalities can do harm to other people or to itself, this is neither a safe nor truly adaptive way to live.

Fragmenting into subpersonalities is, however, an ironically appropriate outcome for neurotic Nines because they have never shown much interest in themselves as individuals. Now they are truly not individuals: they are many different “people"—and no one. Moreover, Nines who so feared losing or separating from others have not only psychologically done so, they have also separated from and lost themselves.

THE DYNAMICS OF THE NINE

The Direction of Disintegration: The Nine Goes to Six

Beginning at Level 4, Nines under stress will begin to act out some of the characteristics of average to unhealthy Sixes. Average Nines are disengaging from the environment and from their anxiety in order to maintain a peaceful equilibrium within themselves. When events around them become too stressful for this defense to work, they begin to experience the full intensity of their anxiety and may become reactive and insecure, like average Sixes. Nines need to engage in constructive action on their own behalf, and they need to stay in touch with their feelings, but when they are further down the Levels of Development, they tend to do both of these things in erratic, imbalanced ways.

At Level 4, Nines are busy accommodating themselves to the wishes and expectations of others. They put their own agendas on the “back burner” and comply with other people’s demands in order to reduce the possibility of conflicts. When circumstances cause their anxieties to increase, they may well go to Six and engage in lots of “organizational activity.” Like average Sixes, they attempt to stabilize their environment and their relationships in order to make them safer. They may get into intensive periods of work, investing their time and energy in activities they believe will enhance their security, and thus their peace of mind. These actions are guided not by positive intention, however, but by anxiety. They also begin to identify more strongly with protectors, supporters, groups, or ideas that increase their self-confidence and give them a feeling of purpose and direction.

At Level 5, Nines are disengaging from the environment. They want to remain well within their “comfort zone” and stay with activities which will not disturb them. They may well be busy, but they will be busy doing tasks and routines that do not threaten to draw them out of their safe inner world. When their stress is such that this is not possible, they go to Six and become negative and defensive. Average Nines have been complying with others to avoid having conflicts with them—to keep the peace—but now the things that others expect of them may cause them to leave the emotional security of their disengagement. At this Level, the anger and anxiety of Nines are escalating, so their defenses against both must also become greater. They use passive-aggressive tactics to assert their own needs, but in ways which they hope will not alienate their supporters. They keep saying yes to people’s demands on their time, then doing what they want to do. They feel pressured, complain, and are evasive like average Sixes.

At Level 6, Nines are digging in their heels to resist the environment and hold on to what remains of their inner stability. They have a resigned, fatalistic attitude, and have entrenched themselves in comforting routines and habits that they hope will keep the world, others, and their own anxiety from bothering them. When others continue to disturb their “slumbers,” Nines develop a siege mentality and can react aggressively to people like average Sixes. They may blame others as the cause of their problems, or they may react defiantly to the people around them who have been trying to get through their self-defeating defenses. Displays of temper and angry outbursts are not uncommon, though they are often as much of a surprise to Nines as they are to the people who know them. Their belligerent reactions create more conflicts and escalate their anxiety.

At Level 7, Nines are likely to have serious problems in their lives. To maintain their peacefulness now requires a huge amount of energy, and a willful turning away from reality. Nines at this level feel that they simply cannot cope with the world, and so repress themselves to the point of numbness. Now their move to Six reflects a growing dependency on others, feelings of helplessness, and a desire to hand their lives over to someone else who will “fix everything.” However, the central problem is that Nines are too frightened, and too full of rage about the accommodations they have made, to risk confronting and dealing with their problems. But unless they do, their problems will only get more unmanageable, and it will become less likely that anyone else will want to untangle them, especially without some participation from the Nine.

At Level 8, Nines are starting to shut down. They are highly dissociated and detached from themselves and from their environment. Depression that may have developed at Level 7 becomes chronic at Level 8. But underneath the blank surface, Nines are terrified and enraged. Their feelings of aggression are enormous, but to entertain them even for a moment feels like the destruction of whatever shreds of peacefulness they retain. When they can no longer remain numb, however, their anxiety and rage can explode hysterically in irrational rants, random acts of violence, or paranoid delusions about the people around them, in the manner of unhealthy Sixes. They may suddenly throw dishes, wreck furniture, or physically attack people. They simply cannot repress their anger and frustration any longer.

At Level 9, when unhealthy dissociated Nines go to Six, anxiety finally and completely breaks through their massive repression. All the feelings and realizations they have been warding off come crashing down upon them. The person who was once so easygoing becomes an overreacting hysteric, anxiety ridden, fearful, agitated, apprehensive, tearful, panicked. More then ever, deteriorated Nines need someone else to take care of them and to save them from whatever threatening situation they have gotten into. To elicit help from others, they may become abjectly self-abasing (“morbidly dependent” in Homey’s phrase) and masochistically self-destructive so that others will have to care for them.

Deteriorated Nines at Six may also do something self-defeating and humiliating, putting themselves in worse positions than ever before. The motive behind this is twofold: self-punishment to expiate the intense guilt they feel for letting others down and making them suffer; and self-abasement to repair the separation from others by drawing people back to them.

These psychological tactics do not work, however, because besides anxiety, deteriorated Nines have also unwittingly let loose aggression toward themselves and others from the Pandora’s box of the unconscious. No longer able to repress aggressive feelings, they become self-punishing and full of self-hatred. They also become intensely hostile toward others, lashing out at anyone who increases their anxiety rather than immediately relieving it. If others do not magically restore peace, they become the enemy.

Unfortunately, deteriorated Nines have no defenses with which to handle anxiety or aggression. They can no longer repress the particularly acute anxiety of being rejected by those who have been significant to them. They will likely turn to alcohol and drugs to control their hysteria or will resort to suicide if they cannot find some kind of peace again.

The Direction of Integration: The Nine Goes to Three

When healthy Nines integrate to Three, they become self-assured and interested in developing themselves and their talents to the fullest extent possible. They move from self-possession to making something more of themselves, from a just-being-born presence in the world to an active, inner-directed force. Because they are already healthy and extremely balanced, they no longer live through someone else, nor do they need to conform to conventional roles as sources of self-esteem and identity. Instead, integrating Nines create themselves by asserting themselves properly. They no longer fear change, becoming more flexible and adaptable, entirely capable of dealing with reality as persons in their own right.

Integrating Nines have connected with their vitality. In Freudian terms, they have gotten in touch with their id, the aggressive and instinctual side of themselves. Nines have always feared their aggressive impulses, and now they realize that they no longer have to, since these impulses are not necessarily destructive, but rather can lead to self-development.

Their peace becomes less fragile because Nines discover that they can assert themselves without being aggressive toward others, and hence without jeopardizing their relationships. As their self-esteem increases, their relationships become more mature and satisfying. Integrating Nines find that they no longer have to be self-effacing to find someone with whom they can have a relationship. By being (and becoming) themselves, they attract others who find integrating Nines more interesting and desirable than ever before. It may surprise them, but others may even begin to identify with them, to seek them out, to accommodate themselves to them. While integrating Nines will likely discourage others from being dependent upon them, it will please them nonetheless, as well it should.

THE MAJOR SUBTYPES OF THE NINE

The Nine with an Eight-Wing: “The Comfort Seeker”

The traits of the Nine and those of the Eight conflict with each other: Nines are passive and desire harmony with others, while Eights are aggressive, asserting themselves and following their self-interest. Since Nine is the basic personality type, people of this subtype tend to be fundamentally oriented to others, receptive, unselfconscious, agreeable, and so forth, while some part of them asserts itself strongly, at least at times. There is a “mellow,” outgoing quality about them. They are sociable, like to tell jokes and stories, and spend time with their friends. Nines with an Eight-wing are more sensual and instinctive than the Nines with a One-wing, and tend to operate more on feelings and hunches. They tend to embody more the easygoing demeanor associated with Nines, but also give the impression of being more “physical,” more grounded. This is one of the most difficult subtypes to understand because the component types are in such diametrical opposition to each other. Noteworthy examples of this subtype include Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Kevin Costner, Gary Cooper, Woody Harrelson, Keanu Reeves, Ingrid Bergman, Geena Davis, Sophia Loren, Ringo Starr, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Walter Cronkite, Hugh Downs, Lady Bird Johnson, and Marc Chagall.

In healthy persons of this subtype, the Eight-wing adds an element of inner strength and willpower, as well as an expansive, passionate quality to the overall style of the personality. Healthy Nines with an Eight-wing combine the comforting, positive qualities of the Nine with the endurance and strength of the Eight, resulting in a subtype at once powerful and gentle. Despite their unselfconsciousness, healthy people of this subtype are able to assert themselves effectively; despite their graciousness and concern for others, they can be quite strong and forceful; despite their ability to subordinate themselves to others and to common goals, they can be courageously independent; despite an easygoing manner, they can have formidable tempers, although these are rarely resorted to. Thus, healthy persons of this subtype give the impression of strength and good nature, sensuality, and power. The Nine with an Eight-wing wants to engage with people and things in the world more than the other subtype. They enjoy socializing, have a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and may have numerous skills, although they tend not to promote themselves. They are concerned with their immediate needs and circumstances, and more accepting of people as they are. Nines with an Eight-wing often enjoy the helping professions, consulting, sales, and services, and can be very effective in business, especially in negotiations or working in human resource capacities.

Average people of this subtype compartmentalize their emotions completely. While their self-image is one of peacefulness, they may occasionally be quite aggressive without realizing the extent of it. Unfortunately, the Nine with an Eight-wing is more likely than the other subtype to get caught up in a kind of sensual indolence which can interfere with their ability to stay directed. They can be complacent, even lazy, about achieving success in some areas of their lives, while being extremely competitive in others. If they are not intellectually gifted, they may seem slightly slow-witted—good-natured but thickheaded—because neither the Nine nor the Eight is a particularly intellectual or thinking component. These people have strong elemental drives for psychological and sexual union with the other. Their self-interest is bound up with material comfort. They can be more stubborn and defensive than Nines with a One-wing, and although usually easygoing and pleasant, people of this subtype can have bad tempers. Others cannot predict what will set them off, but usually can see their anger building. Typically, people of this subtype lose their tempers when others interfere or interrupt their sense of well-being and peace of mind. They can be blunt and explosive, but just as suddenly, they return to their “normal,” placid self. When their protective instincts are aroused, they do not wish to hurt others so much as protect themselves and their property. Average persons of this subtype can become belligerent and confrontational toward others, but with little long-lasting personal animosity. Their greatest ire is aroused against those who attack their families, their beliefs, or their way of life. But once the crisis has passed, they are apt to sue for peace, making allies of their former enemies. As they deteriorate, Nines with an Eight-wing tend to dig in their heads, refusing to listen to or cooperate with anyone threatening to disturb their safe routines.

Unhealthy Nines with an Eight-wing often resemble unhealthy Fours: they are usually depressed and have very little energy. Unlike the Four, there is a general flatness and lack of emotional affect, with occasional tremors of tearfulness and anxiety. The fear of control in the Eight-wing adds to the Nine’s resistance to help. Unhealthy Nines with an Eight-wing are capable of violence with little concern about the consequences of their actions. Aggressions and id impulses are strong in people of this subtype, and when they are emotionally unstable, there is little ego strength left to regulate these forces. Their aggressions may be particularly aroused by sexual jealousy of their spouses. Separation from a loved one through the alienation of affections is devastating to the Nine’s sense of self, and inflames the Eight’s rage out of wounded pride. As a result, Nines with an Eight-wing can be physically dangerous, striking out impulsively. They may retaliate against those with whom they have come into conflict while dissociating themselves emotionally from the harm they do. Chronic depression, extreme dissociation, and addiction are also possible.

The Nine with a One-Wing: “The Dreamer”

The traits of the Nine and those of the One tend to reinforce each other. Nines repress their emotions to maintain their peace, while Ones repress their emotions to maintain self-control. Thus, this subtype tends to be more cerebral than the Nine with an Eight-wing—more interested in ideas, symbols, and concepts. In this subtype we see people who are more emotionally controlled and cooler than those in the other subtype, although they may well display moments of anger and moral indignation. Out of the blue, the complacent, agreeable Nine becomes critical and sarcastic. Both subtypes of the Nine are attracted to questions of philosophy and spirituality, but in the Nine with a One-wing there is a distinctive idealistic quality to their beliefs. Noteworthy examples of this subtype include Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth n, Rosalynn Carter, Cyrus Vance, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Garrison Keillor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Rose Kennedy, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, George Lucas, Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell, Dame Joan Sutherland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Desdemona,” “Edith Bunker,” and “Marge Simpson.”

Healthy persons of this subtype possess enormous integrity and are extremely principled. Their great common sense helps them to be wise in their judgments, particularly about others. They are alert to issues of fairness and objectivity when they are called on to act or to judge situations. Healthy Nines with a One-wing are wonderful at synthesizing different schools of thought and sorting out the common threads between them. They can be highly imaginative and creative, seeking to express and share their visions of an ideal world. Healthy people here are interested in sharing what they know, and appreciate the ideas and discoveries of others. They tend to be sunny, friendly, and reassuring, but with a certain seriousness about their ideals. They enjoy teaching, and may be moral leaders, teaching most effectively by their example. The Nine’s openness is combined with the One’s objectivity; the result is simplicity and guilelessness toward others, peacefulness and moderation toward themselves. This subtype makes a good friend (or therapist), balancing the Nine’s nonjudgmental listening with the One’s wisdom and desire to give helpful advice.

Average persons of this subtype may be crusaders of some sort, because they have an idealistic streak which makes them want to improve the world in whatever ways they can. They are sure of their opinions and usually have fixed ideas about everything that touches on their basic beliefs. People of this subtype tend to be orderly and self-controlled, particularly more emotionally controlled and less openly passionate than Nines with an Eight-wing. At the same time, however, average Nines with a One-wing tend to get caught up in nonessential activities. They remain active and even energetic, but with a degree of detachment and uninvolvement that derails their ability to stay on track with their long-range goals. They can be quite busy within their sphere, although many of their activities are geared toward maintaining order and the status quo in their environment. They are less adventurous, but are perhaps more thoughtful and reserved than Nines with an Eight-wing. Complacent and disengaged, they want to avoid all personal conflicts and antagonisms, but may be easily moved to anger since there is a testiness and edginess in this subtype. They often restrain the expression of their anger more Nines with an Eight-wing, and are more likely to become indignant and to smolder through clenched teeth rather than to raise their voice or cause a scene, especially in public. In such cases, they can be indirect, sarcastic, and scolding. Average Nines with a One-wing are concerned with propriety and respectability, and often feel morally superior to others (of different classes, cultures, lifestyles, and so forth). There is a puritanical streak to them, and in some, a “prim and proper” quality. They may rationalize, moralize, or appeal to political or religious ideologies to bolster their arguments. Individuals of this subtype tend to be perfectionistic, at least in some areas, although more important aspects of their lives may be severely neglected. They can also be surprisingly impersonal and callous in their disregard for others, since average persons of this subtype abstract from the real world a great deal in favor of their idealistic notions.

Unhealthy Nines with a One-wing are often extremely withdrawn and can resemble unhealthy Fives. There is a detached, schizoid quality to them, with little affect. They can become extremely angry, although in a highly compartmentalized way, acting impulsively, as if out of the blue. They are more resentful than Nines with an Eight-wing, stewing over wrongs and injustices, and may feel that it is their duty to punish or condemn others’ wrongdoings. If they act, unhealthy Nines with a One-wing can become quite arbitrary, contradicting their more ordinary behavior. Obsessive-compulsive tendencies are among their neurotic traits, and unhealthy persons of this subtype may become obsessive about their apparent troubles while dissociating themselves from either their compulsive actions or their real problems. They may, for example, decide to forget what has just been the focus of their obsession as if nothing had happened. Because defense mechanisms are less global than in the other subtype, neurotics here will tend to feel their conflicts more, and therefore be more likely to have more severe emotional problems or breakdowns if they become very unhealthy. If left untreated, they tend to retreat into highly dissociated states that resemble autism. They feel helpless and despairing but may suddenly respond to others with bursts of frustration and rage.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

Looking back at the deterioration of Nines, we can see that average to unhealthy Nines have brought about the very thing they most fear, the fear of loss and separation. Now that they are fragmented personalities, they are not only separated from others, they are separated from themselves. They are profoundly alienated from and terrified of their own lives. Only with the greatest difficulty will the core personality which remains be able to begin to reconstruct itself.

It seems that relatively few Nines deteriorate to this state of neurosis. Probably what happens in most cases is that they deteriorate into unhealthy states (denial, dissociation) after a crisis, but are able to bounce back to some degree of normal functioning. Their defenses are very powerful because they are so all-encompassing, and for better or worse, Nines are able to repress most traumas and go on living. Nevertheless, their ability to endure is always purchased at the price of leading an emotionally and personally impoverished life.

From this perspective, we can also see that their central problem has been how to awaken to themselves and how to maintain self-possession once they have attained it. The answer is that Nines must learn to accept suffering, especially the suffering involved with anxiety. Suffering, consciously accepted, has the ability to catalyze people, shocking them into awareness. Suffering also compels us to choose what meaning it has for us. When we choose a meaning for our experiences, we create ourselves. When Nines actively use suffering as a positive force in their lives, they not only give meaning to their lives, they sustain their awareness of themselves. The person who is able to give meaning to his or her suffering is both the self who suffers and the self who transcends suffering. In that moment, the self is aware and unified.

#enneagram #enneagram 9 #9w1 #9w8 #rh

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mrdavisdnerd · 7 years ago

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Marvel’s Moon Knight on Netflix: a fan pitch

A couple months ago, on Facebook, I started a discussion about the possibility of Moon Knight finally being adapted on Netflix alongside the likes of Daredevil, Luke Cage, etc, asking others what they’d like to see. I came up with my own pitch just like Max Landis likes to do sometimes. Some of you may have seen my pitches before as I did one for Arrow involving The Twelve Brothers in Silk and the White Canary. The original comic version that is. Currently working on two more Arrow story pitches and Ultimate Green Arrow. I even have other ideas I like to share. But for now, going to show you my Moon Knight pitch. Hope you like it.

Ok picture this:

3 seasons at least.

Season 1

Big Bads are The Profile and Bushman. Two other prominent villains appearing will be Stained Glass Scarlet and Morpheus. The setting is in a mental institution, where the majority of the season would take place. Marc Spector will be receiving treatment there and has been for some time. Problem is he's having trouble with his memory. Also he believes he is being haunted by a mysterious figure that would pop up when he's alone and often at night. We can never make the figure out as he is often in the distance or seen in shadow, but you can see his eyes and they glow. Marc often flees in terror or cowers from this being. Also he is there under the name Jake Lockley. If that wasn't all, Marc's been having nightmares about a monstrous looking man preying on him. It's Morpheus and in the nightmares, he looks like his comic counterpart but in the real world, he is just Robert Markam, but is also a patient at the institution. Stained Glass Scarlet is also there, with a violent past and a former nun. She often plays a game of seduction with Marc. The Profile will be posing as a doctor. In fact, he is Marc's therapist. By now you figured out that this is a big conspiracy to keep Marc there. Question is, how did he get there? Also Marlene would be trying to visit him, unsuccessfully so. A lot of the story will also be told through flashback. That's the key. His origin will remain the same as the comic, but one twist to his background is that he always suffered from having multiple personalities. They were pretty bad when he was a kid but as he got older, he learned to deal with them... that is until Khonshu came along. In flashbacks, you see Moon Knight, fighting crime and brutally beating down criminals. You get to see what his life with Marlene is like and how much of a struggle it has been with his mental illness. In fact imagine if.. first half there will be an episode dedicated to each personality, showing us their purpose and why they exist. At a certain point, there will be a tense chase as the mysterious being haunting Marc chases him, to the point he makes it to the rooftop and spots the moon... and then everything comes back to him. He remembers that he is Marc Spector and Jake Lockley is a new personality made for this. Khonshu actually created Jake to protect Marc. Speaking of, Khonshu was the mystery being haunting him, he was trying to help him remember. The reason for this was because Khonshu sensed Marc was in danger by forces after him. Who was after him? The Committee. They are bankrolling the institution and planted The Profile there as they seek to get their hands on Moon Knight for their own nefarious purposes. They think through him, they could also gain access to Khonshu and his power. With Khonshu helping him, he develops the Mr. Knight personality as he uses him to figure out the place, find a way out, and stop The Committee. Then when all is said and done, he has a score to settle with Bushman, who he's been chasing in the flashbacks and played a key role in his capture to begin with. He was hired by The Committee and is still under their employ. So of course as things come to a head. Khonshu scares the bejeebus out of Morhpeus during another of his nightmare attacks. Marc overcomes Scarlet and when confronting Profile as Moon Knight, poor guy doesn't know what to do. Profile can read people like a book just by looking at them, but Moon Knight was unreadable. He gets dealt with, with ease. And yes the escape from the institution is violent and bloody. He confronts Bushman, who capture Marlene and the two have a final, one on one standoff in which Bushman meets his end. Marc has escapes, is reunited with Marlene and Profile actually managed to survive.. but The Committee is not happy. End of season 1.

Season 2

Big Bads are Black Spectre and Jack Russell. Yup, Werewolf by Night. Profile makes a return and Crossfire is also a recurring villain. Also Randall Spector makes his appearance as well. Jack is not really a villain, but will be an antagonist of sorts as he will cross Marc's path and the two will have an epic throwdown. If anything, both will think the other is a criminal as someone has been pretending to be Moon Knight and murdering innocent people, meanwhile Marc has been hearing of rumored werewolf attacks, but it's also been treated as an urban legend. Marc thinks the two things might be linked and chases that lead, which leads to his confrontation with Jack. Both Marc and Jack are being hunted by Black Spectre and his team of Crossfire and Randal!! Black Spectre is assigned to Profile, who is being given a second chance at trying to apprehend Moon Knight. Black Spectre has history with Moon Knight, as he is revealed as Carson Knowles, who was the first criminal Marc ever took down as Moon Knight and he's wanted payback ever since. He spent his time studying up, obsessing, learning and now is his chance.

Randall's and Marc's relationship is a pretty tense one. Randall was part of the same group of mercenaries with Marc and Bushman, so you got that connection, but deep down, Randall hid a hatred for his brother and it was coming out. Crossfire is more of a hired gun, having a bullet with Jack's name on it. All the same, Randall, Profile, and Carson is a team more than capable of bringing some psychological warfare to Marc. The Mr. Knight personality returns (also because I love the Mr. Knight persona) to help him solve the mystery of his framing, but also there will be an epic fight of the season. An entire episode based on Moon Knight issue 5 in 2014. Seriously that issue is so badass. This episode will basically be like The Raid as that issue was so from start to finish, Mr. Knight will be kicking tons of ass as Black Spectre tried to lead him into a trap. Crossfire eventually gets dealt with by Jack. Marc and Randall have an epic, emotionally charged showdown that appears to lead to Randall's death. This comes after an attack by Randall that results in Marlene having a miscarriage, which the stress of Marc's life as Moon Knight and his personalities were already putting a strain on their relationship. And of course, the final fight, an epic, knockdown, drag out battle between Moon Knight and Black Spectre. Moon Knight triumphs in the end. Marc returns home to be with Marlene in their darkest hour. They may survive this. They may not. She's been his rock through all the craziness but she may reach her breaking point. The Committee is pissed off and so done with Profile after this failure, so that means that they want his head so he goes into hiding, but not before grabbing the body of Randall Spector. Where are they headed? And of course, Marc finds a new friend in Jack Russell, whose off on his own adventures now and like Marc, also seeks to takedown The Committee, in which among their members is Madame Gao and also a head of the Roxxon Energy Corporation.

Season 3

Big Bad is Shadow Knight and the Cult of Khonshu as well as the Committee themselves! Profile is back and bringing war to The Committee. Marc and Khonshu are having problems and seem to be on the outs. Marlene has left Marc, needing time for herself, but still willing to help him if he needs it. Profile has been obsessed with figuring out Moon Knight since season 1 as he's been unable to read him as he does others and this bothers him so much. Through his research and efforts, he has actually discovered the Cult of Khonshu actually around S2 and that is where he took Randall Spector, who is chosen as a potential new avatar of Khonshu, who has grown to be disappointed in Marc and thinks that through Randall, he can finally be rid of The Committee.

Also Marc is working more with his personas, using the strengths of each to help him. You got Steven Grant, the little redheaded girl (ultimate reference), Jake Lockley, Mr. Knight, and of course Moon Knight himself. This is a big test for Marc as this becomes a three way war. You finally get to see who the members of the Committee are in full. An episode or two will feature Moon Knight dealing with The Hand and investigating Roxxon as Mr. Knight. Epic battles between him and the Khonshu Cult, also Marc finally facing off with members of the Committee. You discover more about the Committee as they are a criminal organization seeking power and possessing knowledge of the occult and supernatural world. Things get incredibly violent and innocent lives will suffer in this war. Profile is finally dealt with for good. The Committee seems to be taken out, but are regrouping... so that leaves the ultimate battle. Shadow Knight vs Moon Knight. Marc Spector vs Randall Spector. Khonshu watches the fight, judging. Moon Knight has truly met his match and perhaps his better in Shadow Knight as the fight is brutal, it's bloody, smash mouth non hand holding action. In the end, Marc proves superior but barely survives. Khonshu chooses him, but not before Marc gives him a piece of his mind, being over his bullshit. Of course, gotta have the happy ending as there seems to be a promising new beginning for Marc and Marlene, not to mention him having a better handle on his personalities. The End. For now. Onto the next phase.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, basically the deal is that while it focuses on his heroic adventures, it also draws attention to his mental illness. From his childhood to adulthood and even how it plays into his becoming a hero, regardless of Khonshu, who is sometimes a dick. Of course, there's action but also elements of horror, even some psychological horror (more so an element in my ideal S1). Ultimately, I want him to be represented in a way to show that.. someone like him can be good. Can be a hero. An opposite of when you have a character with a mental illness being a villain. I like to think of this like... United States of Tara if it was a superhero show. Also I really liked United States of Tara too. So I didn't bring it up in the other stuff, but ideally the other personalities will get their moments, sometimes they may clash, and others work together. Similar to Ultimate Spider-Man, you may get moments where all personalities get together and have a meeting. As the series goes on, yes it'll be dark, he'll struggle but by the end, want him to find that peace, that balance and overall show that... it's gonna be all ok. I really want MK to be the kind of hero that those like him can admire and look up to. Have that representation and not in a negative way.

Well I know this was long but what else is new when it comes to me? lol Still I hope you all enjoyed it. Feel free to share your own ideas and hey, if you like my ideas, tell me. If you have a request for a pitch, let me know.

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ageloire · 6 years ago

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15 of the Best 'About Us' & 'About Me' Pages and How to Make Your Own

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

It's that compelling content that's crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business.

So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the "About Us" page.

For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company's unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course not. Your "About Us" page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it needs to be well crafted. This profile also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out.

The good news? It can be done. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable "About Us" pages, the elements of which you can emulate on your own website.

By the end of this post, you'll know what makes some of today's best "About Us" and "About Me" pages so great, and how to make your own about page that shares your company's greatness.

Best About Us Page Examples

Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Eight Hour Day

Joe Payton

Apptopia

Moz

Aja Frost

Cultivated Wit

Kero One

Nike

Refinery29

Sara Dietschy

Marie Catribs

Marc Ensign

Bulldog Skincare

Doomtree

1. Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells us a story.

When you have a great story about how your product or service was built to change lives, share it. The "About Us" page is a great place for it to live, too. Good stories humanize your brand, providing context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky -- which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on.

Yellow Leaf Hammocks tells users about its product by describing how the hammocks empower artisan weavers and their families. The company breaks down different pieces of the story into sections that combine words and easily digestible graphics, painting a picture instead of big chunks of text. They're clear about why they're different: "Not a Charity," the page reads. And then: "This is the basis for a brighter future, built on a hand up, not a handout."

Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your "About Us" page. Using descriptive and emotive copy and gorgeous graphics, an "About Us" page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.

2. Eight Hour Day

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's human.

People tend to think that "About Us" pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. But most people find it easier to trust real human beings, rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound too professional on your "About Us" page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design -- the perfect way to make sure your company blends in with the masses.

Instead, Eight Hour Day showcases the people behind the company and humanizes its brand. Introducing the founders by name and featuring the photos of them on the "About Us" page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are -- as they so astutely put it -- "two individuals with a passion for creativity -- creativity makes us happy."

When you’re designing your "About Us" page,avoid industry jargon and replace it with an authentic voice -- yours -- to describe your product or service. Sure, it needs to be polished and free of errors, but it should always sound friendly and real.

3. Joe Payton

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's confident, creative, and easy to skim.

"About Us" pages might encompass the values of more than one person or entity, but they're no more important to the image of a business than your personal about page. Take Joe Payton's "About Me" page, below.

Not only does Joe's illustrative self-portrait give him a personal brand that customers will remember, but it also demonstrates his expertise as a designer and animator. His website visitors can learn not just what he does, but why he does it, in an easily digestible way. Being able to express his values as a creative professional in such a well-organized page is something to be desired by anyone creating their own about page.

4. Apptopia

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It skips the business babble.

We know -- no industry jargon. If you think it makes you sound super smart on your "About Us" page, think again. People want and appreciate straight talk about what your business does. After all, if people can't figure out what you do, how will they know they need your product or service?

So, skip the industry lingo -- that's what Apptopia does on its "About Us" page. The startup's simple but polished language effectively communicates the company's offering while still allowing the Average Joe to understand it.

The moral of the story: Try to get rid of jargon on your "About Us" page whenever possible. Use short and punchy sentences to explain complex products and ideas in a way that isn't patronizing, but rather, is empathetic.

5. Moz

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's humble.

Instead of following the classic "About Us" script and writing a few paragraphs about the company's mission and origins, try something different -- there are plenty of ways to make your brand more compelling to someone who doesn't know about you.

Take Moz, for example. A lot has happened since it was founded in 2004, so the company chose to share those milestones using a fun and clean design that incorporates clear headers, concise blurbs, and little graphics to break up the text.

We especially love the humble references to how Moz received funding, how it switched its brand positioning -- and most importantly, how it switched back to its original model. This speaks volumes to the value honesty and humbleness can play to your customers. Don't be afraid to talk about your ups and downs; your customers will trust what you say that much more.

6. Aja Frost

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's data-driven.

Alright, we might be biased in highlighting this professional, as Aja is our very own SEO strategist at HubSpot. Nonetheless, the ingenuity she brings to the company isn't lost on her website's "About Me" page.

Being a data-driven professional, Aja knows her own clients as a freelance writer and strategist don't just want to see what she's written -- they want to see how her content has performed. With that in mind, her "About Me" page tells a story of her career growth, which peaks -- no pun intended -- at an impressive line graph showing the result of an SEO strategy she implemented for the HubSpot Blog. (The graph's sharp decline at September simply indicates when she stopped collecting data.)

Following the impressive chart, Aja closes out her about page with a personal note on what she does in her spare time -- always a good way to humanize yourself in the eyes of your potential customers.

7. Cultivated Wit

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It breaks the mold.

Yes, this post is about, well, "About Us" pages. But sometimes, you don't always need to wait for users to get there in order to make a statement. That's part of breaking the mold to showcase your company's personality.

That's exactly what Cultivated Wit -- a creative agency and media company -- does, with both an edgy name and an incredibly fun story told through video and parallax scrolling ... right on its homepage.

Below is the actual "About Us" page, which is a gem once you get there. But it's great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

Even if you have a dedicated "About Us" page, there are plenty of ways to creatively showcase your company's personality throughout your entire website. And yeah, that's harder than filling a stock "About Us" template -- but it can have a significant payoff for your brand.

8. Kero One

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's multilingual.

Kero One is a hip-hop artist and DJ from San Francisco, and his "About Me" page carries a valuable lesson to personal brands who cater to more than one audience -- especially if those audiences speak different languages.

Kero One's story starts at his childhood, when he was six years old and first discovered a passion for hip-hop. Knowing how old and genuine his love for the genre is adds tremendous value to his own music in the eyes of his listeners.

While this entrepreneur's childhood interests help to deepen his audience, the second screenshot below helps Kero One widen it. His "About Me" page first tells his story in English, then in Japanese, then in Korean, then in Chinese. Accommodating these Southeast Asian audiences makes his brand more inclusive of all the audiences he identifies with.

...

9. Nike

Why the About Us Page Rocks: It knows its audience.

Nike might seem like a company that's too big to inspire smaller businesses. You might even wonder if Nike even still has an "About Us" page. As a matter of fact, it does, and it hasn't forgotten the company's roots.

Nike began on the campus of the University of Oregon by the hand of the college's track coach, Bill Bowerman. And even though he no longer works at the company, one of his beloved quotes still brands the bottom of Nike's "About Us" page below: "If you have a body, you are an athlete."

This bold sentence, referenced by the asterisked "Athlete" in the words right above it, sheds important light on Nike's audience. The brand may be big today, but Nike is all about the rising stars -- who Nike depends on to, according to the rest of its "About Us" page, "expand human potential."

The takeaway for marketers? Know your audience, and make it obvious to that audience the instant they read about you on your website.

10. Refinery29

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells you what's most important.

Here's another instance where any area of your website -- not just the "About Us" page -- is an opportunity to break the mold.

Many companies add just a simple mission statement or company profile, but people often don't want to ready a wall of text explaining what you do. So, Refinery29 broke it down to convey the intangible qualities that are tough to include in a basic "About Us" page.

Although Refinery29 does introduce its page with a description of its business, its goes out on a bang -- four bangs, to be exact. The organization is on a "mission," sure, but there's also an "essence" of Refinery29, a "promise" it keeps, and a "vibe" it gives off.

These aren't company traits you'd think to include when starting out, but they're what your customers often make gut decisions on when buying.

11. Sara Dietschy

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It has variety but still aligns with her personal brand.

This professional YouTube content creator has an eclectic collection of videos related to technology and culture, and expresses that diversity all over her "About Me" page.

In addition to the vibrant self-portrait at the top of the page, Sara's first sentence tells you just how many people subscribe to her channel: 350,000. This is an important number to know for her potential video advertisers and collaborators who want to know how much exposure they'd get by working with her or advertising on her channel.

The colored tiles lining the page -- starting with the red one, as shown below -- also do a terrific job segmenting her work by the types of projects she takes up and for whom she's done them. That Intel logo in the second photo of Sara, below, is sure to turn some visitors' heads as they're perusing her website.

12. Marie Catribs

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's unexpected.

There's a reason why these examples are exceptional -- "About Us" pages aren't always the most riveting parts of a company's website. In fact, they often look like an afterthought. But even if you don't have budget for juicy graphics, video, or parallax scrolling, there are other ways to make your "About Us" page unexpected with the copy alone.

Marie Catrib's is a restaurant, so you might think their "About Us" page would be your typical "here's how we started, here's what we believe in, and here's our food" story. Marie Catrib's "About Us" page does tells us that -- but it does so in an unconventional way. Immediately, the user's eyes are drawn to a header that says, "It's okay to make a mess, experiments can lead to beautiful things." Quite philosophical, for a place to have dinner.

But next comes the story about the owner, which starts in an unexpected way -- "It's hard to imagine, but at one time Marie was banned from the family kitchen." A line like that draws in the audience, because we know it's not going to be typical.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It's amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone.

13. Marc Ensign

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's funny but professional.

This branding expert does two things super well on his about page: He takes his work seriously, but doesn't take himself too seriously. Marketers know there's value to keeping a casual tone in the content they create, but in order to attract customers, you need to prove you have discipline and integrity. That's a tough balance to get right.

Marc Ensign nails that balance between friendly and formal with a confident opening statement, followed by an amusing smiley photo of himself to set an inviting tone.

14. Bulldog Skincare

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's lovable and memorable.

What's the difference between "average" marketing and lovable marketing? It's the difference between creating generic webpages that provide great information, but in a straightforward, black-and-white kind of way -- versus creating webpages that provide great information and are infused with color, personality, and stay true to a company's unique brand voice. When you create lovable marketing, you can start a movement of brand evangelists and advocates who will help you grow.

Where does this fit into a company's "About Us" page? The folks at Bulldog, a men's skincare company that was named for the colloquial "man's best friend" -- a dog -- could have typed up a few paragraphs about where the brand came from and how they were one of the first in the space to redefine and eliminate stereotypes around men's grooming. But that text alone would have been a bit, well, average.

Instead, the "About Us" page is pithy, colorful, and leads with the lovable mug of an adorable bulldog -- fitting the name and the brand. And it states the purpose of the products -- to help customers from waking up with the (admittedly adorable) wrinkly face you see when you visit Bulldog's website.

Play on your own words -- it's okay to have fun and pun with your brand, as it helps to inject personality and humor into your "About Us" page. It primes visitors for a story in a way that makes them immediately feel something. That's how you create memorable, lovable marketing.

15. Doomtree

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack.

One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research's Dr. James McQuivey. But what about audio and visual, too, all combined with a really cool story? Well, that's one way to tell your story in an engaging way -- through multimedia.

Doomtree is built on a bit of an innovative concept: That a group of talented artists can each have thriving solo careers, but can still come together on a regular basis to create great music. It's not a band -- it's a crew. It's an unconventional concept with an equally interesting backstory that "started as a mess of friends in Minneapolis, fooling around after school, trying to make music without reading the manual." And as soon as you arrive on Doomtree's 'About Us' page, you're greeted with big, bold photos of those friends.

As you scroll down, users are treated to even more interaction with the crew's tracks and music videos. That makes sense, because it gives visitors an instant sample of Doomtree's product. What's more, the entire "About Us" page is responsive, including the video. That's important -- not only because it offers site visitors a great mobile experience, but also for Google search ranking -- especially now that such mobile usage has surpassed desktop.

How to Write an About Page

Establish a mission statement.

Outline our company story.

Reveal how you've evolved.

State your "aha!" moment.

Explain who you serve.

Explain what you're offering them.

Cite examples of who you've served.

Describe your values.

It's tough to establish one all-encompassing template for your "About Us" page -- there are just so many ways you can go about telling your company story. But, per the real "About Us" pages we've just highlighted, there are some steps you should keep in mind when getting started.

Here are five steps to writing an "About Us" page based on some of the things that impressed us about the examples above.

1. Establish a mission statement.

Your "About Us" page can and will be much longer than a single mission statement, but in order to draw people in, you need to succinctly state your goal in the industry up front. What are you here to do? Why should your website visitors care?

2. Outline your company story.

You might not have a long history of changes and growth your company has endured (yet), but it's a nice touch to talk about where you came from in your "About Us" page. So, isolate the milestones prior your company's founding, and use them to give readers some backstory on your current venture.

3. Reveal how you've evolved.

Even if you're a young company, there's no shame in admitting your business strategy -- or even personal way of thinking -- has changed since you began. In fact, in about pages, these evolutions can improve the story you tell to website visitors.

About pages are perfect spaces to talk about where you started, how you've grown, and the ideals that have helped your organization mature. Use these moments to further your company story and show people that you're always ready to change and adapt to the needs of your industry.

4. State your "aha!" moment.

Every good company was founded on an idea -- something the current marketplace might not yet offer. What was your idea? Use this "Aha!" moment as a pivot point when telling your company story. What was a challenge you faced while developing your company? How did this challenge or discovery shape what you are today?

5. Explain who you serve.

As much as you want as many eyeballs on your "About Us" page as possible, you won't do business with every single one of them. That's why it's crucial that you identify and mention your core customer. Who should care you exist? Which eyeballs are you here to serve?

6. Explain what you're offering them.

As you're explaining who you serve, make it clear what it is you're offering. Too often companies generalize their product or service in the language of their website, making it hard to understand what it is the customer is actually paying for. They're afraid literal explanations of their products aren't interesting enough, or will sound unappealing in writing. And that's a fair concern.

However, by investing just a sentence or two into telling your potential customers exactly what they'll receive can keep them on your website for longer and interested in learning more.

7. Cite examples of who you've served.

Got some loyal customers in your portfolio? Use your about page to let the world know who already trusts and benefits from your work.

Knowing about your company's past successes can influence the purchasing decision of up to 90% of today's B2B customers, according to Dimensional Research. Even if you don't yet have case studies to expand on the problems you've helped buyers solve, it's in your interest to briefly mention who you've done this for. And your about page is the perfect platform for it.

8. Describe your values.

Customers want to be treated like human beings. For that to happen, they need to feel that they're being treated by human beings. When finishing your "About Us" page, describe who you are as a person or a team, and what your personal values are. What's your company culture like? What bigger picture in life drives your business?

An LED lightbulb maker might sell 10 different lamp styles, for example, but that might not be the most important characteristic to its primary audience. Maybe this lightbulb developer was founded on a commitment to environmental protection, and every bulb the company makes was built by people who are dedicated to making the world more energy-efficient.

Keep in mind a secondary audience of your company's "About Us" page consists of your future employees. This is another reason describing your personal values is a good idea -- the key to your job candidates' hearts is to show them you have one too.

At this point, we hope that creating an "About Us" page doesn't seem like a daunting task -- rather, we hope you're ready to have some fun with it. With a good story to tell, creative copy, humility, and digestible visuals, you're on your way to an eye-catching user experience.

Even better? You're becoming part of the exception -- and standing out from a sea of "About Us" pages. What makes you different? We're eager to learn more ... about you.

Want more inspiration? Check out 16 inspiring examples of beautiful blog design.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/remarkable-about-us-page-examples

#Marketing

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kadobeclothing · 5 years ago

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15 of the Best ‘About Us’ & ‘About Me’ Pages and How to Make Your Own

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

It’s that compelling content that’s crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business. So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the “About Us” page. For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company’s unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course not. Your “About Us” page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it needs to be well crafted. This profile also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out. The good news? It can be done. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable “About Us” pages, the elements of which you can emulate on your own website. By the end of this post, you’ll know what makes some of today’s best “About Us” and “About Me” pages so great, and how to make your own about page that shares your company’s greatness.

Best About Us Page Examples Yellow Leaf Hammocks Eight Hour Day Joe Payton Apptopia Moz Aja Frost Cultivated Wit Kero One Nike Refinery29 Sara Dietschy Marie Catribs Marc Ensign Bulldog Skincare Doomtree

1. Yellow Leaf Hammocks Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It tells us a story. When you have a great story about how your product or service was built to change lives, share it. The “About Us” page is a great place for it to live, too. Good stories humanize your brand, providing context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky — which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on. Yellow Leaf Hammocks tells users about its product by describing how the hammocks empower artisan weavers and their families. The company breaks down different pieces of the story into sections that combine words and easily digestible graphics, painting a picture instead of big chunks of text. They’re clear about why they’re different: “Not a Charity,” the page reads. And then: “This is the basis for a brighter future, built on a hand up, not a handout.” Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your “About Us” page. Using descriptive and emotive copy and gorgeous graphics, an “About Us” page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.

2. Eight Hour Day Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s human. People tend to think that “About Us” pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. But most people find it easier to trust real human beings, rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound too professional on your “About Us” page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design — the perfect way to make sure your company blends in with the masses. Instead, Eight Hour Day showcases the people behind the company and humanizes its brand. Introducing the founders by name and featuring the photos of them on the “About Us” page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are — as they so astutely put it — “two individuals with a passion for creativity — creativity makes us happy.” When you’re designing your “About Us” page,avoid industry jargon and replace it with an authentic voice — yours — to describe your product or service. Sure, it needs to be polished and free of errors, but it should always sound friendly and real.

3. Joe Payton Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s confident, creative, and easy to skim. “About Us” pages might encompass the values of more than one person or entity, but they’re no more important to the image of a business than your personal about page. Take Joe Payton’s “About Me” page, below. Not only does Joe’s illustrative self-portrait give him a personal brand that customers will remember, but it also demonstrates his expertise as a designer and animator. His website visitors can learn not just what he does, but why he does it, in an easily digestible way. Being able to express his values as a creative professional in such a well-organized page is something to be desired by anyone creating their own about page.

4. Apptopia Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It skips the business babble. We know — no industry jargon. If you think it makes you sound super smart on your “About Us” page, think again. People want and appreciate straight talk about what your business does. After all, if people can’t figure out what you do, how will they know they need your product or service? So, skip the industry lingo — that’s what Apptopia does on its “About Us” page. The startup’s simple but polished language effectively communicates the company’s offering while still allowing the Average Joe to understand it. The moral of the story: Try to get rid of jargon on your “About Us” page whenever possible. Use short and punchy sentences to explain complex products and ideas in a way that isn’t patronizing, but rather, is empathetic. 5. Moz Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s humble. Instead of following the classic “About Us” script and writing a few paragraphs about the company’s mission and origins, try something different — there are plenty of ways to make your brand more compelling to someone who doesn’t know about you. Take Moz, for example. A lot has happened since it was founded in 2004, so the company chose to share those milestones using a fun and clean design that incorporates clear headers, concise blurbs, and little graphics to break up the text. We especially love the humble references to how Moz received funding, how it switched its brand positioning — and most importantly, how it switched back to its original model. This speaks volumes to the value honesty and humbleness can play to your customers. Don’t be afraid to talk about your ups and downs; your customers will trust what you say that much more.

6. Aja Frost Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s data-driven. Alright, we might be biased in highlighting this professional, as Aja is our very own SEO strategist at HubSpot. Nonetheless, the ingenuity she brings to the company isn’t lost on her website’s “About Me” page. Being a data-driven professional, Aja knows her own clients as a freelance writer and strategist don’t just want to see what she’s written — they want to see how her content has performed. With that in mind, her “About Me” page tells a story of her career growth, which peaks — no pun intended — at an impressive line graph showing the result of an SEO strategy she implemented for the HubSpot Blog. (The graph’s sharp decline at September simply indicates when she stopped collecting data.) Following the impressive chart, Aja closes out her about page with a personal note on what she does in her spare time — always a good way to humanize yourself in the eyes of your potential customers.

7. Cultivated Wit Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It breaks the mold. Yes, this post is about, well, “About Us” pages. But sometimes, you don’t always need to wait for users to get there in order to make a statement. That’s part of breaking the mold to showcase your company’s personality. That’s exactly what Cultivated Wit — a creative agency and media company — does, with both an edgy name and an incredibly fun story told through video and parallax scrolling … right on its homepage.

Below is the actual “About Us” page, which is a gem once you get there. But it’s great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

Even if you have a dedicated “About Us” page, there are plenty of ways to creatively showcase your company’s personality throughout your entire website. And yeah, that’s harder than filling a stock “About Us” template — but it can have a significant payoff for your brand. 8. Kero One Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s multilingual. Kero One is a hip-hop artist and DJ from San Francisco, and his “About Me” page carries a valuable lesson to personal brands who cater to more than one audience — especially if those audiences speak different languages. Kero One’s story starts at his childhood, when he was six years old and first discovered a passion for hip-hop. Knowing how old and genuine his love for the genre is adds tremendous value to his own music in the eyes of his listeners. While this entrepreneur’s childhood interests help to deepen his audience, the second screenshot below helps Kero One widen it. His “About Me” page first tells his story in English, then in Japanese, then in Korean, then in Chinese. Accommodating these Southeast Asian audiences makes his brand more inclusive of all the audiences he identifies with.

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9. Nike Why the About Us Page Rocks: It knows its audience. Nike might seem like a company that’s too big to inspire smaller businesses. You might even wonder if Nike even still has an “About Us” page. As a matter of fact, it does, and it hasn’t forgotten the company’s roots. Nike began on the campus of the University of Oregon by the hand of the college’s track coach, Bill Bowerman. And even though he no longer works at the company, one of his beloved quotes still brands the bottom of Nike’s “About Us” page below: “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” This bold sentence, referenced by the asterisked “Athlete” in the words right above it, sheds important light on Nike’s audience. The brand may be big today, but Nike is all about the rising stars — who Nike depends on to, according to the rest of its “About Us” page, “expand human potential.” The takeaway for marketers? Know your audience, and make it obvious to that audience the instant they read about you on your website.

10. Refinery29 Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It tells you what’s most important. Here’s another instance where any area of your website — not just the “About Us” page — is an opportunity to break the mold. Many companies add just a simple mission statement or company profile, but people often don’t want to ready a wall of text explaining what you do. So, Refinery29 broke it down to convey the intangible qualities that are tough to include in a basic “About Us” page. Although Refinery29 does introduce its page with a description of its business, its goes out on a bang — four bangs, to be exact. The organization is on a “mission,” sure, but there’s also an “essence” of Refinery29, a “promise” it keeps, and a “vibe” it gives off. These aren’t company traits you’d think to include when starting out, but they’re what your customers often make gut decisions on when buying.

11. Sara Dietschy Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It has variety but still aligns with her personal brand. This professional YouTube content creator has an eclectic collection of videos related to technology and culture, and expresses that diversity all over her “About Me” page. In addition to the vibrant self-portrait at the top of the page, Sara’s first sentence tells you just how many people subscribe to her channel: 350,000. This is an important number to know for her potential video advertisers and collaborators who want to know how much exposure they’d get by working with her or advertising on her channel. The colored tiles lining the page — starting with the red one, as shown below — also do a terrific job segmenting her work by the types of projects she takes up and for whom she’s done them. That Intel logo in the second photo of Sara, below, is sure to turn some visitors’ heads as they’re perusing her website.

12. Marie Catribs Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s unexpected. There’s a reason why these examples are exceptional — “About Us” pages aren’t always the most riveting parts of a company’s website. In fact, they often look like an afterthought. But even if you don’t have budget for juicy graphics, video, or parallax scrolling, there are other ways to make your “About Us” page unexpected with the copy alone. Marie Catrib’s is a restaurant, so you might think their “About Us” page would be your typical “here’s how we started, here’s what we believe in, and here’s our food” story. Marie Catrib’s “About Us” page does tells us that — but it does so in an unconventional way. Immediately, the user’s eyes are drawn to a header that says, “It’s okay to make a mess, experiments can lead to beautiful things.” Quite philosophical, for a place to have dinner. But next comes the story about the owner, which starts in an unexpected way — “It’s hard to imagine, but at one time Marie was banned from the family kitchen.” A line like that draws in the audience, because we know it’s not going to be typical.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It’s amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone. 13. Marc Ensign Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s funny but professional. This branding expert does two things super well on his about page: He takes his work seriously, but doesn’t take himself too seriously. Marketers know there’s value to keeping a casual tone in the content they create, but in order to attract customers, you need to prove you have discipline and integrity. That’s a tough balance to get right. Marc Ensign nails that balance between friendly and formal with a confident opening statement, followed by an amusing smiley photo of himself to set an inviting tone.

14. Bulldog Skincare Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s lovable and memorable. What’s the difference between “average” marketing and lovable marketing? It’s the difference between creating generic webpages that provide great information, but in a straightforward, black-and-white kind of way — versus creating webpages that provide great information and are infused with color, personality, and stay true to a company’s unique brand voice. When you create lovable marketing, you can start a movement of brand evangelists and advocates who will help you grow. Where does this fit into a company’s “About Us” page? The folks at Bulldog, a men’s skincare company that was named for the colloquial “man’s best friend” — a dog — could have typed up a few paragraphs about where the brand came from and how they were one of the first in the space to redefine and eliminate stereotypes around men’s grooming. But that text alone would have been a bit, well, average. Instead, the “About Us” page is pithy, colorful, and leads with the lovable mug of an adorable bulldog — fitting the name and the brand. And it states the purpose of the products — to help customers from waking up with the (admittedly adorable) wrinkly face you see when you visit Bulldog’s website.

Play on your own words — it’s okay to have fun and pun with your brand, as it helps to inject personality and humor into your “About Us” page. It primes visitors for a story in a way that makes them immediately feel something. That’s how you create memorable, lovable marketing. 15. Doomtree Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack. One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research’s Dr. James McQuivey. But what about audio and visual, too, all combined with a really cool story? Well, that’s one way to tell your story in an engaging way — through multimedia. Doomtree is built on a bit of an innovative concept: That a group of talented artists can each have thriving solo careers, but can still come together on a regular basis to create great music. It’s not a band — it’s a crew. It’s an unconventional concept with an equally interesting backstory that “started as a mess of friends in Minneapolis, fooling around after school, trying to make music without reading the manual.” And as soon as you arrive on Doomtree’s ‘About Us’ page, you’re greeted with big, bold photos of those friends.

As you scroll down, users are treated to even more interaction with the crew’s tracks and music videos. That makes sense, because it gives visitors an instant sample of Doomtree’s product. What’s more, the entire “About Us” page is responsive, including the video. That’s important — not only because it offers site visitors a great mobile experience, but also for Google search ranking — especially now that such mobile usage has surpassed desktop.

How to Write an About Page Establish a mission statement. Outline our company story. Reveal how you’ve evolved. State your “aha!” moment. Explain who you serve. Explain what you’re offering them. Cite examples of who you’ve served. Describe your values.

It’s tough to establish one all-encompassing template for your “About Us” page — there are just so many ways you can go about telling your company story. But, per the real “About Us” pages we’ve just highlighted, there are some steps you should keep in mind when getting started. Here are five steps to writing an “About Us” page based on some of the things that impressed us about the examples above. 1. Establish a mission statement. Your “About Us” page can and will be much longer than a single mission statement, but in order to draw people in, you need to succinctly state your goal in the industry up front. What are you here to do? Why should your website visitors care? 2. Outline your company story. You might not have a long history of changes and growth your company has endured (yet), but it’s a nice touch to talk about where you came from in your “About Us” page. So, isolate the milestones prior your company’s founding, and use them to give readers some backstory on your current venture. 3. Reveal how you’ve evolved. Even if you’re a young company, there’s no shame in admitting your business strategy — or even personal way of thinking — has changed since you began. In fact, in about pages, these evolutions can improve the story you tell to website visitors. About pages are perfect spaces to talk about where you started, how you’ve grown, and the ideals that have helped your organization mature. Use these moments to further your company story and show people that you’re always ready to change and adapt to the needs of your industry. 4. State your “aha!” moment. Every good company was founded on an idea — something the current marketplace might not yet offer. What was your idea? Use this “Aha!” moment as a pivot point when telling your company story. What was a challenge you faced while developing your company? How did this challenge or discovery shape what you are today? 5. Explain who you serve. As much as you want as many eyeballs on your “About Us” page as possible, you won’t do business with every single one of them. That’s why it’s crucial that you identify and mention your core customer. Who should care you exist? Which eyeballs are you here to serve? 6. Explain what you’re offering them. As you’re explaining who you serve, make it clear what it is you’re offering. Too often companies generalize their product or service in the language of their website, making it hard to understand what it is the customer is actually paying for. They’re afraid literal explanations of their products aren’t interesting enough, or will sound unappealing in writing. And that’s a fair concern. However, by investing just a sentence or two into telling your potential customers exactly what they’ll receive can keep them on your website for longer and interested in learning more. 7. Cite examples of who you’ve served. Got some loyal customers in your portfolio? Use your about page to let the world know who already trusts and benefits from your work. Knowing about your company’s past successes can influence the purchasing decision of up to 90% of today’s B2B customers, according to Dimensional Research. Even if you don’t yet have case studies to expand on the problems you’ve helped buyers solve, it’s in your interest to briefly mention who you’ve done this for. And your about page is the perfect platform for it. 8. Describe your values. Customers want to be treated like human beings. For that to happen, they need to feel that they’re being treated by human beings. When finishing your “About Us” page, describe who you are as a person or a team, and what your personal values are. What’s your company culture like? What bigger picture in life drives your business? An LED lightbulb maker might sell 10 different lamp styles, for example, but that might not be the most important characteristic to its primary audience. Maybe this lightbulb developer was founded on a commitment to environmental protection, and every bulb the company makes was built by people who are dedicated to making the world more energy-efficient. Keep in mind a secondary audience of your company’s “About Us” page consists of your future employees. This is another reason describing your personal values is a good idea — the key to your job candidates’ hearts is to show them you have one too. At this point, we hope that creating an “About Us” page doesn’t seem like a daunting task — rather, we hope you’re ready to have some fun with it. With a good story to tell, creative copy, humility, and digestible visuals, you’re on your way to an eye-catching user experience. Even better? You’re becoming part of the exception — and standing out from a sea of “About Us” pages. What makes you different? We’re eager to learn more … about you. Want more inspiration? Check out 16 inspiring examples of beautiful blog design.

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sheminecrafts · 6 years ago

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The case against behavioral advertising is stacking up

No one likes being stalked around the Internet by adverts. It’s the uneasy joke you can’t enjoy laughing at. Yet vast people-profiling ad businesses have made pots of money off of an unregulated Internet by putting surveillance at their core.

But what if creepy ads don’t work as claimed? What if all the filthy lucre that’s currently being sunk into the coffers of ad tech giants — and far less visible but no less privacy-trampling data brokers — is literally being sunk, and could both be more honestly and far better spent?

Case in point: This week Digiday reported that the New York Times managed to grow its ad revenue after it cut off ad exchanges in Europe. The newspaper did this in order to comply with the region’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, which includes a regime of supersized maximum fines.

The newspaper business decided it simply didn’t want to take the risk, so first blocked all open-exchange ad buying on its European pages and then nixed behavioral targeting. The result? A significant uptick in ad revenue, according to Digiday’s report.

“NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result, according to Jean-Christophe Demarta, SVP for global advertising at New York Times International,” it writes.

“Currently, all the ads running on European pages are direct-sold. Although the publisher doesn’t break out exact revenues for Europe, Demarta said that digital advertising revenue has increased significantly since last May and that has continued into early 2019.”

It also quotes Demarta summing up the learnings: “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”

So while (of course) not every publisher is the NYT, publishers that have or can build brand cachet, and pull in a community of engaged readers, must and should pause for thought — and ask who is the real winner from the notion that digitally served ads must creep on consumers to work?

The NYT’s experience puts fresh taint on long-running efforts by tech giants like Facebook to press publishers to give up more control and ownership of their audiences by serving and even producing content directly for the third party platforms. (Pivot to video anyone?)

Such efforts benefit platforms because they get to make media businesses dance to their tune. But the self-serving nature of pulling publishers away from their own distribution channels (and content convictions) looks to have an even more bass string to its bow — as a cynical means of weakening the link between publishers and their audiences, thereby risking making them falsely reliant on adtech intermediaries squatting in the middle of the value chain.

There are other signs behavioural advertising might be a gigantically self-serving con too.

Look at non-tracking search engine DuckDuckGo, for instance, which has been making a profit by serving keyword-based ads and not profiling users since 2014, all the while continuing to grow usage — and doing so in a market that’s dominated by search giant Google.

DDG recently took in $10M in VC funding from a pension fund that believes there’s an inflection point in the online privacy story. These investors are also displaying strong conviction in the soundness of the underlying (non-creepy) ad business, again despite the overbearing presence of Google.

Meanwhile, Internet users continue to express widespread fear and loathing of the ad tech industry’s bandwidth- and data-sucking practices by running into the arms of ad blockers. Figures for usage of ad blocking tools step up each year, with between a quarter and a third of U.S. connected device users’ estimated to be blocking ads as of 2018 (rates are higher among younger users).

Ad blocking firm Eyeo, maker of the popular AdBlock Plus product, has achieved such a position of leverage that it gets Google et al to pay it to have their ads whitelisted by default — under its self-styled ‘acceptable ads’ program. (Though no one will say how much they’re paying to circumvent default ad blocks.)

So the creepy ad tech industry is not above paying other third parties for continued — and, at this point, doubly grubby (given the ad blocking context) — access to eyeballs. Does that sound even slightly like a functional market?

In recent years expressions of disgust and displeasure have also been coming from the ad spending side too — triggered by brand-denting scandals attached to the hateful stuff algorithms have been serving shiny marketing messages alongside. You don’t even have to be worried about what this stuff might be doing to democracy to be a concerned advertiser.

Fast moving consumer goods giants Unilever and Procter & Gamble are two big spenders which have expressed concerns. The former threatened to pull ad spend if social network giants didn’t clean up their act and prevent their platforms algorithmically accelerating hateful and divisive content.

While the latter has been actively reevaluating its marketing spending — taking a closer look at what digital actually does for it. And last March Adweek reported it had slashed $200M from its digital ad budget yet had seen a boost in its reach of 10 per cent, reinvesting the money into areas with “‘media reach’ including television, audio and ecommerce”.

The company’s CMO, Marc Pritchard, declined to name which companies it had pulled ads from but in a speech at an industry conference he said it had reduced spending “with several big players” by 20 per cent to 50 per cent, and still its ad business grew.

So chalk up another tale of reduced reliance on targeted ads yielding unexpected business uplift.

At the same time, academics are digging into the opaquely shrouded question of who really benefits from behavioral advertising. And perhaps getting closer to an answer.

Last fall, at an FTC hearing on the economics of big data and personal information, Carnegie Mellon University professor of IT and public policy, Alessandro Acquisti, teased a piece of yet to be published research — working with a large U.S. publisher that provided the researchers with millions of transactions to study.

Acquisti said the research showed that behaviourally targeted advertising had increased the publisher’s revenue but only marginally. At the same time they found that marketers were having to pay orders of magnitude more to buy these targeted ads, despite the minuscule additional revenue they generated for the publisher.

“What we found was that, yes, advertising with cookies — so targeted advertising — did increase revenues — but by a tiny amount. Four per cent. In absolute terms the increase in revenues was $0.000008 per advertisment,” Acquisti told the hearing. “Simultaneously we were running a study, as merchants, buying ads with a different degree of targeting. And we found that for the merchants sometimes buying targeted ads over untargeted ads can be 500% times as expensive.”

“How is it possible that for merchants the cost of targeting ads is so much higher whereas for publishers the return on increased revenues for targeted ads is just 4%,” he wondered, posing a question that publishers should really be asking themselves — given, in this example, they’re the ones doing the dirty work of snooping on (and selling out) their readers.

Acquisti also made the point that a lack of data protection creates economic winners and losers, arguing this is unavoidable — and thus qualifying the oft-parroted tech industry lobby line that privacy regulation is a bad idea because it would benefit an already dominant group of players. The rebuttal is that a lack of privacy rules also does that. And that’s exactly where we are now.

“There is a sort of magical thinking happening when it comes to targeted advertising [that claims] everyone benefits from this,” Acquisti continued. “Now at first glance this seems plausible. The problem is that upon further inspection you find there is very little empirical validation of these claims… What I’m saying is that we actually don’t know very well to which these claims are true and false. And this is a pretty big problem because so many of these claims are accepted uncritically.”

There’s clearly far more research that needs to be done to robustly interrogate the effectiveness of targeted ads against platform claims and vs more vanilla types of advertising (i.e. which don’t demand reams of personal data to function). But the fact that robust research hasn’t been done is itself interesting.

Acquisti noted the difficulty of researching “opaque blackbox” ad exchanges that aren’t at all incentivized to be transparent about what’s going on. Also pointing out that Facebook has sometimes admitted to having made mistakes that significantly inflated its ad engagement metrics.

His wider point is that much current research into the effectiveness of digital ads is problematically narrow and so is exactly missing a broader picture of how consumers might engage with alternative types of less privacy-hostile marketing.

In a nutshell, then, the problem is the lack of transparency from ad platforms; and that lack serving the self same opaque giants.

But there’s more. Critics of the current system point out it relies on mass scale exploitation of personal data to function, and many believe this simply won’t fly under Europe’s tough new GDPR framework.

They are applying legal pressure via a set of GDPR complaints, filed last fall, that challenge the legality of a fundamental piece of the (current) adtech industry’s architecture: Real-time bidding (RTB); arguing the system is fundamentally incompatible with Europe’s privacy rules.

We covered these complaints last November but the basic argument is that bid requests essentially constitute systematic data breaches because personal data is broadcast widely to solicit potential ad buys and thereby poses an unacceptable security risk — rather than, as GDPR demands, people’s data being handled in a way that “ensures appropriate security”.

To spell it out, the contention is the entire behavioral advertising business is illegal because it’s leaking personal data at such vast and systematic scale it cannot possibly comply with EU data protection law.

Regulators are considering the argument, and courts may follow. But it’s clear adtech systems that have operated in opaque darkness for years, without no worry of major compliance fines, no longer have the luxury of being able to take their architecture as a given.

Greater legal risk might be catalyst enough to encourage a market shift towards less intrusive targeting; ads that aren’t targeted based on profiles of people synthesized from heaps of personal data but, much like DuckDuckGo’s contextual ads, are only linked to a real-time interest and a generic location. No creepy personal dossiers necessary.

If Acquisti’s research is to be believed — and here’s the kicker for Facebook et al — there’s little reason to think such ads would be substantially less effective than the vampiric microtargeted variant that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg likes to describe as “relevant”.

The ‘relevant ads’ badge is of course a self-serving concept which Facebook uses to justify creeping on users while also pushing the notion that its people-tracking business inherently generates major extra value for advertisers. But does it really do that? Or are advertisers buying into another puffed up fake?

Facebook isn’t providing access to internal data that could be used to quantify whether its targeted ads are really worth all the extra conjoined cost and risk. While the company’s habit of buying masses of additional data on users, via brokers and other third party sources, makes for a rather strange qualification. Suggesting things aren’t quite what you might imagine behind Zuckerberg’s drawn curtain.

Behavioral ad giants are facing growing legal risk on another front. The adtech market has long been referred to as a duopoly, on account of the proportion of digital ad spending that gets sucked up by just two people-profiling giants: Google and Facebook (the pair accounted for 58% of the market in 2018, according to eMarketer data) — and in Europe a number of competition regulators have been probing the duopoly.

Earlier this month the German Federal Cartel Office was reported to be on the brink of partially banning Facebook from harvesting personal data from third party providers (including but not limited to some other social services it owns). Though an official decision has yet to be handed down.

While, in March 2018, the French Competition Authority published a meaty opinion raising multiple concerns about the online advertising sector — and calling for an overhaul and a rebalancing of transparency obligations to address publisher concerns that dominant platforms aren’t providing access to data about their own content.

The EC’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, is also taking a closer look at whether data hoarding constitutes a monopoly. And has expressed a view that, rather than breaking companies up in order to control platform monopolies, the better way to go about it in the modern ICT era might be by limiting access to data — suggesting another potentially looming legal headwind for personal data-sucking platforms.

At the same time, the political risks of social surveillance architectures have become all too clear.

Whether microtargeted political propaganda works as intended or not is still a question mark. But few would support letting attempts to fiddle elections just go ahead and happen anyway.

Yet Facebook has rushed to normalize what are abnormally hostile uses of its tools; aka the weaponizing of disinformation to further divisive political ends — presenting ‘election security’ as just another day-to-day cost of being in the people farming business. When the ‘cost’ for democracies and societies is anything but normal.

Whether or not voters can be manipulated en masse via the medium of targeted ads, the act of targeting itself certainly has an impact — by fragmenting the shared public sphere which civilized societies rely on to drive consensus and compromise. Ergo, unregulated social media is inevitably an agent of antisocial change.

The solution to technology threatening democracy is far more transparency; so regulating platforms to understand how, why and where data is flowing, and thus get a proper handle on impacts in order to shape desired outcomes.

Greater transparency also offers a route to begin to address commercial concerns about how the modern adtech market functions.

And if and when ad giants are forced to come clean — about how they profile people; where data and value flows; and what their ads actually deliver — you have to wonder what if anything will be left unblemished.

People who know they’re being watched alter their behavior. Similarly, platforms may find behavioral change enforced upon them, from above and below, when it becomes impossible for everyone else to ignore what they’re doing.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2W8RGjZ via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

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technicalsolutions88 · 6 years ago

Link

There are other signs behavioural advertising might be a gigantically self-serving con too.

So chalk up another tale of reduced reliance on targeted ads yielding unexpected business uplift.

At the same time, academics are digging into the opaquely shrouded question of who really benefits from behavioral advertising. And perhaps getting closer to an answer.

In a nutshell, then, the problem is the lack of transparency from ad platforms; and that lack serving the self same opaque giants.

At the same time, the political risks of social surveillance architectures have become all too clear.

Whether microtargeted political propaganda works as intended or not is still a question mark. But few would support letting attempts to fiddle elections just go ahead and happen anyway.

Greater transparency also offers a route to begin to address commercial concerns about how the modern adtech market functions.

from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2W8RGjZ Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

Text

The case against behavioral advertising is stacking up

There are other signs behavioural advertising might be a gigantically self-serving con too.

So chalk up another tale of reduced reliance on targeted ads yielding unexpected business uplift.

At the same time, academics are digging into the opaquely shrouded question of who really benefits from behavioral advertising. And perhaps getting closer to an answer.

In a nutshell, then, the problem is the lack of transparency from ad platforms; and that lack serving the self same opaque giants.

At the same time, the political risks of social surveillance architectures have become all too clear.

Whether microtargeted political propaganda works as intended or not is still a question mark. But few would support letting attempts to fiddle elections just go ahead and happen anyway.

Greater transparency also offers a route to begin to address commercial concerns about how the modern adtech market functions.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/

0 notes

fmservers · 6 years ago

Text

The case against behavioral advertising is stacking up

There are other signs behavioural advertising might be a gigantically self-serving con too.

So chalk up another tale of reduced reliance on targeted ads yielding unexpected business uplift.

At the same time, academics are digging into the opaquely shrouded question of who really benefits from behavioral advertising. And perhaps getting closer to an answer.

In a nutshell, then, the problem is the lack of transparency from ad platforms; and that lack serving the self same opaque giants.

At the same time, the political risks of social surveillance architectures have become all too clear.

Whether microtargeted political propaganda works as intended or not is still a question mark. But few would support letting attempts to fiddle elections just go ahead and happen anyway.

Greater transparency also offers a route to begin to address commercial concerns about how the modern adtech market functions.

Via Natasha Lomas https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

0 notes

lindyhunt · 6 years ago

Text

15 of the Best 'About Us' & 'About Me' Pages and How to Make Your Own

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

It's that compelling content that's crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business.

So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the "About Us" page.

The good news? It can be done. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable "About Us" pages, the elements of which you can emulate on your own website.

By the end of this post, you'll know what makes some of today's best "About Us" and "About Me" pages so great, and how to make your own about page that shares your company's greatness.

Best About Us Page Examples

Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Eight Hour Day

Joe Payton

Apptopia

Moz

Aja Frost

Cultivated Wit

Kero One

Nike

Refinery29

Sara Dietschy

Marie Catribs

Marc Ensign

Bulldog Skincare

Doomtree

1. Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells us a story.

2. Eight Hour Day

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's human.

3. Joe Payton

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's confident, creative, and easy to skim.

4. Apptopia

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It skips the business babble.

5. Moz

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's humble.

6. Aja Frost

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's data-driven.

7. Cultivated Wit

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It breaks the mold.

Below is the actual "About Us" page, which is a gem once you get there. But it's great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

8. Kero One

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's multilingual.

...

9. Nike

Why the About Us Page Rocks: It knows its audience.

The takeaway for marketers? Know your audience, and make it obvious to that audience the instant they read about you on your website.

10. Refinery29

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells you what's most important.

Here's another instance where any area of your website -- not just the "About Us" page -- is an opportunity to break the mold.

These aren't company traits you'd think to include when starting out, but they're what your customers often make gut decisions on when buying.

11. Sara Dietschy

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It has variety but still aligns with her personal brand.

This professional YouTube content creator has an eclectic collection of videos related to technology and culture, and expresses that diversity all over her "About Me" page.

12. Marie Catribs

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's unexpected.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It's amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone.

13. Marc Ensign

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's funny but professional.

Marc Ensign nails that balance between friendly and formal with a confident opening statement, followed by an amusing smiley photo of himself to set an inviting tone.

14. Bulldog Skincare

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's lovable and memorable.

15. Doomtree

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack.

How to Write an About Page

Establish a mission statement.

Outline our company story.

Reveal how you've evolved.

State your "aha!" moment.

Explain who you serve.

Explain what you're offering them.

Cite examples of who you've served.

Describe your values.

Here are five steps to writing an "About Us" page based on some of the things that impressed us about the examples above.

1. Establish a mission statement.

2. Outline your company story.

3. Reveal how you've evolved.

4. State your "aha!" moment.

5. Explain who you serve.

6. Explain what you're offering them.

However, by investing just a sentence or two into telling your potential customers exactly what they'll receive can keep them on your website for longer and interested in learning more.

7. Cite examples of who you've served.

Got some loyal customers in your portfolio? Use your about page to let the world know who already trusts and benefits from your work.

8. Describe your values.

Even better? You're becoming part of the exception -- and standing out from a sea of "About Us" pages. What makes you different? We're eager to learn more ... about you.

Want more inspiration? Check out 16 inspiring examples of beautiful blog design.

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