Escaping the Trap of Our Ego
Gregg Vanourek
Personal development & leadership excellence. Helping you craft your life & work. Co-author, LIFE Entrepreneurs & Triple Crown Leadership. Author, TEDx public speaker. New book in the works on the traps of living.
There’s a long list of people who have famously been captured by their ego, from celebrities and CEOs to politicians and professional athletes. It’s a well known problem, and one that keeps causing mayhem.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”?-Proverbs 16:18
But this is a problem for all of us, not just the rich and famous. There’s a long list of related problems that come with an unhealthy attachment to our ego: selfishness, arrogance, condescension, self-importance, superiority, hyper-sensitivity, hyper-competitiveness, and corruption.
With ego traps, we see?perfectionists, overachievers, and underachievers (our ego prefers us on the sidelines so we don’t run the risk of coming up short), as well as curmudgeons (who express disappointment or disgust every waking minute). It’s a parade of dysfunctions.
“Ego clouds and disrupts everything.”?-Jocko Willink in?Extreme Ownership
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How to Know When We’ve Been Captured by Ego
Our ego-driven thoughts are there to protect us and help us perform for others in a way that buttresses our chosen identity.
When we’ve been captured by our ego, we tend to bask in praise and let it go to our heads. We resist or ignore negative feedback or things we should consider improving. Our defense mechanisms kick in, placing us in a protective shell in which we’re not open to reality. We get caught up in defending an image of ourselves—an image of how we want to be seen to be.
When we’ve been captured by our ego, we tend to be or feel:
These feelings are all signs that our ego is doing a number on us.
“When everybody loves you, you can never be lonely…. when everybody loves me, I’m gonna be just about as happy as I can be.”?-The Counting Crows in their song, “Mr. Jones”
The Problem with Our Ego
Ego is one of the worst traps in our lives. It affects everything when it’s in charge of our thinking, from our happiness and quality of life to our relationships, work, and leadership. And it affects us all. It’s one of the great challenges of being human.
“There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.”?-Laurence J. Peter
At its worst, our ego does many things. It:
Our ego craves attention. It desperately looks for situations in which it can receive recognition and praise or in which it can create conflict so it can feel agitated or superior.
“Most people are in love with their particular life drama. Their story is their identity. The ego runs their life. They have their whole sense of self invested in it.”?-Eckhart Tolle,?The Power of Now
Our ego thrives on superficial comparisons in which we look good at the expense of others. It clings to an idealized image of reality and self so much so that, when change occurs, as it always does, the ego barrages us with negative thoughts and feelings, making us anxious and unhappy.
Our ego tells us lies about ourselves and others and, since these mischievous thoughts come from our own minds, we tend to take them as truth.
We may have a sense of this in the abstract, but there’s a real challenge at work in our daily experience: we’re often not aware when we’ve been hijacked by our ego. The master illusion is that our ego is ourself. We may get glimpses of the illusion when we invoke our deeper consciousness and observe the thought stream of our ego in action as a watcher of our own thoughts. (The question arises about who’s doing that watching? The answer, it follows, is our true self.)
This ongoing lack of awareness means that the ego has a firm grip on our psyche nearly all the time, and it explains why it’s so rare for us to escape that grip. Even as we consider whether our ego is a problem, our ego secretly kicks into denial mode and tells us that, while it may be a problem for others, for us it’s not a big deal.
Addressing our ego is also tricky because of the cognitive dissonance that comes from knowing that having?confidence?is good for us. We want to avoid being a wallflower and getting stepped on, but humility doesn’t mean insecurity, just as confidence doesn’t mean arrogance.
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How Ego Degrades Our Leadership
Ego is one of the great killers of effective leadership.
“The ego is seductive, the kiss of death to true leadership…. For too many leaders, their ego is their worst enemy.”?-Bob and Gregg Vanourek, “Your Ego Is Not Your Amigo”
Our ego takes us away from a focus on our team and our purpose, instead swapping in a focus on how we appear to others. It gets us so focused on managing our image that we’re not accomplishing nearly as much as we could if we just focused on getting the job done.
People can sense it when we’re in it only for ourselves and not a loyal member of the team committed to the?shared purpose.
They can also sense it when we’re full of ourselves and breathing our own vapors, assigning ourselves all the credit and neglecting all the contributions of others through the organization. They can see it when we’re unwilling to admit it when we’re wrong, causing us to lose our?credibility, one of the most valuable assets for any leader.
“Arrogant leadership is toxic to an organization. It looks like strength but is a debilitating weakness.”?-Ira Chaleff
When we’re hijacked by our ego, we unconsciously hire people who are like us to please our delicate ego, or people who are agreeable and will let our ego get away with its self-absorbed shenanigans. This leads to a weaker team without the diversity of thought, skills, and experience to make breakthroughs and without the will and wisdom to?speak truth to power.
Dr. George Watts and Laurie Blazek also?point out?that it leads to teams that are immature, hyper-competitive, dishonest, political, and dysfunctional. They note five ego traps of leaders, depending on a person’s foundational personality traits:
“Unchecked egos are the most destructive force in business.”?-Bo Peabody, entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Ego also threatens to ruin or degrade our experience with big challenges and transitions such as a job change, layoff, empty nest, or retirement, when we’re too attached to our role or position. (See my related article, “Is Your Identity Wrapped Up Too Much in Your Work?”)
“Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.”?-Colin Powell
How to Get Beyond Ego
Clearly, there are big downsides to having our thoughts captured by our ego. So how do we escape this trap? It turns out that there are many things we can do to get beyond our ego, from simple practices to mindset changes. We can:
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Conclusion
Our ego can be a mega-trap in our lives, secretly running a mental script that doesn’t serve us and that takes us away from a life we’d want to live. It causes pain, anxiety, and anguish, over and over again on a nefarious loop.
When we get beyond our ego, it can have profound effects on our experience of life. We can be and feel calm, accepting, forgiving, selfless, peaceful, trusting, serene, still, and complete.
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Reflection Questions
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Related Articles
Tools for You
?* Note that refraining from complaining can be very difficult to pull off. Consider starting small, e.g., by trying to not complain for a whole day, and then a week, or start a complaining fund in which you drop a dollar into a jar every time you complain.
** Featured image source: Adobe Stock.
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Gregg Vanourek?is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including?LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives?(a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and?Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations?(a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his?Best Articles?or get his?monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!
This article originally appeared on Gregg Vanourek's blog.
Senior Director of Product Management at Workiva
2 年Timely post with a great list to consider as we frame 2023 goals.
Former business executive, leadership author, and speaker.
2 年This is a really important article from Gregg. We consider ego to be one of, if not the, top challenges to being a good leader. Worth reading
Helping Business leaders and Educators build Championship Teams. | Keynote Speaker, Workshops and Coaching | Author
2 年Thanks for sharing. Ego can be so destructive to a leader being effective. Great reminders as well as excellent suggestions to overcome your ego.
I specialize in facilitating discussion by bringing like-minded people together to create real impact | Amazon New Release Best Seller | Walking the Path - A Leader's Journey | GoFundMe
2 年Good mentors help prevent bad egos. Surround yourself with strong people.