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Defending Against Your Ego: Balancing Success & Opportunity While Staying Grounded

 


We all have an ego, that’s not the same as being egotistical.

When people are labelled with an ego, they are usually exhibiting egotistical behaviour.

This is the difference between the two:

EGO — a person’s sense of self-esteem or self-importance

EGOTISTICAL — excessively conceited or absorbed in oneself; self-centered

Ryan Holiday defines the problem of ego in “Ego is the Enemy” and how it impacts our lives by saying that it’s 

“an unhealthy belief in your own importance”.

I would add to this that not only is it an unhealthy belief in your own importance, but also an inability to challenge your beliefs.

You are not you without your ego. You are the sum of your experiences, an ever evolving story. We all use what happened yesterday to help us navigate tomorrow. The lenses you wear, that default node network you have built in your brain, that is you.

Not to say we all haven’t developed bad habits along the way, we have. Everyone has things they want to ‘fix’ within themselves, the fact that you feel this way is NORMAL.

On top of that, your experiences, your frames, how you see the world… that is what is uniquely you; and that is the biggest value you bring to anything that you do.

So if you can’t kill your ego, how do you stay balanced and grounded knowing that it’s a fine line between confidence and self-absorbed? You approach these 3 things differently, they are: learned cultural behaviour, personal success, and your habits.

Learned Behaviour

We are social animals. From the day that we are born until the day that we die, we belong to communities. The impact of that, is that we learn a tremendous amount from those around us. The beliefs, norms, expectations, goals, weights … all of these things begin to shape our understanding of our environment. We adopt them to meet our basic need of safety / security, the strength of the community and our role in it provides this.

Learned behaviours from when we are younger are extremely formative. It’s in part why you regularly hear people talking about lessons from childhood. Our brains are literally built to start taking in small amounts of knowledge and generalizing it broadly to support our understanding of the world (an example of this would be dogs. A child does not have to see every dog to know what dogs are. Based on a relatively small population sample, they begin to understand what a dog is and will correctly label other breeds as dogs even if they have never seen them before).

The challenge and opportunity here as it ties to ego, is to question yourself. You have to focus and put clear intention to think about what it is that you belief, and work to understand why you believe that. Being able to challenge yourself and push past your first or second level of reasoning is hard; typically people want the satisfaction of having an answer, they stop pushing after the first coupled of ideas, because those ideas check their box (these are the main reasons that usually support the belief in the first place). You have to be able to go deep, start treating your beliefs as a something to observe, examine and tear down. What are all of the parts, and how do they fit together.

The shift starts to occur when you realize that you wouldn’t put them back together the same way if it wasn’t for what you’ve been told by others.

Personal Success

Winning feels great. Losing sucks.

Humans are naturally risk averse, research has shown that we typically experience loss 2x as intense as a gain. It’s no surprise then that we focus our time and effort towards our wins.

Another key element is to winning is that it also speaks to our basic needs of safety and security. The more important we are, the more value we bring, the more we carve our our place in a community, the more needed we feel we are. The more needed you are, the less likely it is that you will be ousted; therefore, you’re safer.

Because this comforts us so well, we develop stronger and stronger ties to the things that helped us win. How you approached a problem, how you thought about a new trend, how you saved that account, how you fixed the machine, etc. Couple this with the fact that so much of our modern world is built on similar systems are frameworks, people use their past success to define their future, and as such, continue to stay locked into a narrow vision. 

There are not that many people who are comfortable abandoning or criticizing something they have created. We tie our work to our own expertise and identity.

A better approach is to always view your successes or solutions as effective for the given context. If you accept that there is always better ways to do things, if you embrace the best solution above all, you can let go of what you have been holding onto of your own.

Real success doesn’t come from you always having the right idea, even if you have had stellar ideas in the past, no one can solve every problem. Be the enabler for others, help stir the pot and create the environment for new ideas to smash together … that’s were great ideas come from.

Habits

When we are learning, we do the work. We have to. How else are you going to learn unless you roll up your sleeves and do what is needed to understand what’s in front of us.

As we gain experience and our mastery grows, we become complacent. We start filling in gaps with “what we know” and we make more and more assumptions in order to get to the answers we seek.

The easiest way to not let your ego get ahead of you, is to never stop doing the work. Treat your approach to a problem the same way a doctor diagnoses a patient, with a system.

You work from the top down, ask questions and drill down to the root cause of what you are seeing. If you make assumptions or suppositions, you need to test them, EVERY time.

The benefit you get from this is wild, because you start to see how small variations can open up much different possibilities, and by adopting an attitude that what you think and say needs to be fact checked as much as anyone else’s, you will stop yourself from falling into the trap of arrogance.

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