Meet EPP Founder Susan Olesek

“We cannot change what we cannot see. We must be willing to take a look at what is actually going on. On the inside. On the inside of jails and prisons. On the inside of family systems. And inside of ourselves.”

About Susan

Born outside of Boston, Susan spent her formative years in Asia with occasional forays into places of extreme suffering like The Walled City of Hong Kong and the streets of Bombay. These experiences made deep impressions on her Enneagram Type 1, ideological heart. By the time she entered Occidental College to study sociology, Susan’s resolve to somehow make a contribution to the world was embedded in whom she was becoming.

This determination percolated while she raised three boys and began to study the Enneagram, a process that took her deeply into herself and a life changing trauma suffered in her own childhood when her mother took her own life.

In 2009, Susan emerged hopeful and certified, full of ideals, and with just enough self-belief to accept the challenging invitation to teach the Enneagram to 100 residents in a little prison outside of Houston, Texas. This decision changed the trajectory of her personal and professional life forever. With a burgeoning career that moved her from HR to teaching this fascinating system to “any and every one brave enough to admit to having a personality,”

Susan delights in the unknown, yet vast unfolding of the Enneagram Prison Project, a project with a mission that is now growing her, and the lives of anyone it seems to touch.

"In bearing witness to the courageous inner-work taking place in the unlikely place that prison is, I became downright convinced that the benefit of self-understanding through the lens of the Enneagram is a critical missing piece for real criminal reform."

- Susan Olesek, EPP Founder

Susan Olesek is a parent of three nearly grown boys who first learned the Enneagram as a new mother in a parenting class. She and her partner incorporated self-awareness the Enneagram afforded them into their marriage. Their children were also raised using the Enneagram as a parental reference for who, and how, they were becoming. As the children came of age, Susan brought the Enneagram to them more overtly, encouraging them to self identify with which pattern of personality they most resonated.

Today, with her children now emerging into adulthood, it is evident that these young adults have been equipped with a deep sense of self-knowledge that provides them with a confidence and a value of self that is vastly different than that which she experienced in herself as a young adult.

An unapologetic idealist, Susan Olesek is a Human Potentialist in passionate pursuit of what is possible for people. As a consultant, Susan has facilitated Fortune 500 clients in the work of self-development for over a decade, but it was an opportune visit to a Texas prison that changed the trajectory of her life forever.

In 2012 she founded the Enneagram Prison Project (EPP), a burgeoning California Bay Area nonprofit offering self-awareness education and self-regulation training to those incarcerated. With a vision to see her favorite transformational tool in every corner of society, EPP is now programming from San Quentin State prison, to Australia, the UK, Belgium and beyond. Ultimately Susan has a dream of changing our collective vision of Social Justice in the long term through teaching the incarcerated about the prison of our own personality.

Susan believes wholeheartedly in everyone and anyone willing to take an honest look at themselves to make deep and lasting changes from the inside out.

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR EPP AMBASSADORS

"Validating the inherent worth of a person as absolutely true is nothing short of a transformative conversation — no matter on which side of the prison wall you happen to stand."

​- Susan Olesek, EPP Founder