Is It Me or My Ego? - Issue 02
I’m Brian and each week I publish content on personal growth. Sometimes it will be things I’ve learned in my own growth experience, but most times I’ll be answering readers’ questions about personal growth. Send me your questions, and in turn, I’ll do some research & interviews and humbly offer the best advice I find.
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Q: How do I know when my ego is driving my decision? Is it my ego flaring up or am I just a lazy?
Last week, I published a newsletter on Ego Fracturing Experiences, and later that afternoon I facilitated a call on Managing Our Ego. Those two pieces sparked a lot of questions, comments, thoughts, and reading suggestions on the ego. The biggest question was around how we know it’s our ego driving our decisions versus bad habits or just plain laziness.
I think this is an important question because when your ego is driving your actions, you’re more likely to make decisions that negatively impact yourself and others or that just take you further away from your goals.
If you’re a driven person, you want to hit your goals. So if you can check your ego when it’s making bad decisions, you can step back into the driver’s seat and point your life back towards your vision.
What can make it challenging to tell whether it’s you or your ego driving the decision is that the action & result can look the same. I can choose to wake up at 7 AM because:
♥️ I’m so passionate about my goals that I can’t wait to get started on them (vision-driven)
🤫 If people knew I slept past 7 AM, they would think I was lazy (ego-driven)
Alternatively, I can choose to wake up at 8 AM because:
🏎 I operate and drive the best results when I get an extra hour of sleep (vision-driven)
🥊 I want to prove that you don’t have to wake up early to be successful (ego-driven)
To be honest, after the last post, I went out of my way to find examples of insanely successful people who don’t wake up shockingly early. I told myself I was doing it to support the late risers, but I might have also been trying to justify reasons why I personally struggle to wake up before 7 AM. This was the result of that:
Clearly, I’m still figuring out, so I’m going to pull in some thoughts from my mentor. She refers to this whole ego phenomenon as “who’s doing the doing.” Here’s something I’ve heard her say about this:
The actions might look the same, but it’s all about who’s doing the doing. I can donate a building because I want to increase access to education or I can donate to get my name on a building. I even donate the same amount. But one is very ego-driven and it’s about me. I’m not being a giver, I’m being a taker.
Egos are self-centered tend to do things for themselves or to justify themselves. Ego-based decisions tend to be greedy, combative, destructive, and harmful to ourselves and others. There’s a lot of that going on in the world and it is part of why global warming, poverty, and violence still exist in spite of all the economic and resource abundance on the planet.
But when you make decisions based on the best intention or that are vision/value-based, you can drive just as powerful results that are also net positives for humanity. We also tend to look up to people who can do well while doing good: Tesla, Patagonia, Southwest Airlines, The Honest Company, Trader Joes, etc.
Here are four things the ego does that can give you a hint as to whether it’s you and your vision running the show or if your ego is behind the wheel of your life. You might resonate with one or two of these more than the others. That’s normal. Our egos all operate a tad differently.
1. Our egos want to avoid stuff
Egos are really afraid of failure, embarrassment, pain, etc. We learn that as kids and, even when we have stellar parents who are actively forming our egos, our egos start to avoid stuff that hurts. We will also start to avoid emotionally painful stuff, like challenging relationship conversations. Has it ever taken you weeks or months to have a “we’re breaking up” conversation with someone?
In these situations, you really want what’s on the other side of the uncomfortable conversation or risk, but it’s not until that “want” outweighs the discomfort that you’ll do something about it. This is the “last straw” in a relationship for example. It might sound something like “if they lie to me one more time, it’s over.”
So hint number one that your ego is driving your actions… you’re avoiding something. Are you avoiding something? Here are a few clear examples of how ego avoidance shows up.
2. Our egos like to compare
Your ego might be in the driver seat if you’re consciously (or unconsciously) in a comparison game with someone else.
Our egos like to win and when it perceives someone else winning, it can lead to feelings of not being enough. Your ego might lead you into a self-beat-up cycle from that comparison, or it could drive you to even the playing field.
When your ego wants to compete, it can drive you to make all sorts of bad decisions that don’t support your goals, relationships, or health. Here’s a pretty egregious example from our friends in Canada:
For every $1,000 increase in the lottery prize in a Canadian province, there was a 2.4% increase in bankruptcy filings by the winner’s neighbors over the next few years.
Yep! You read that right. If your neighbor wins the lottery, you’re more likely to go bankrupt, because you’re going to start buying things you can’t afford in an effort to keep up.
All-in-all, if your decisions are being driven by comparison to someone else, it would be worth a pause to look at whether the decisions you’re making are supportive of your goals and values.
Here are some more examples of ego comparison decisions:
Pro Tip: If comparing yourself to someone online is making you feel like crap or driving you to do things that don’t align with your life goals, stop following them!
3. Our egos like to be really good at stuff
This is one that I feel personally more than some of the others (yes, I have quite the ego). I’m not exactly sure where we get this one from. For the sake of this post, I’m going to call it the “kickball effect” because no child wanted to be the last one picked on their kickball team. So to compensate, the ego tries to be better at things than we are.
Here are some more rough words from my mentor on this one:
You keep messing up because you’re trying to be better than you are, and you’re just not there yet. So it keeps coming off as arrogant and weird. Just… be who you are right now, which is good but it’s not great.
That’s ego fracturing feedback, but I have such a long list of crappy results I’ve driven in my life while trying to be better than I was in the moment, which was all ego-driven. I get this trait from my father, but you’re welcome to laugh at my pain if it somehow supports you. Here are some true-life examples:
These results aren’t that unique. Hopefully, you can relate at some level.
The point is, no one is asking us to be perfect, except for us. If we’re trying to be the best at everything, you’re likely to avoid stuff that could be fun, hurt yourself (or others), or surround yourself with people who aren’t good either so you can be the best.
Either way, we’d grow faster by admitting we suck at some things, which leaves much room for improvement. In fact, surrounding yourself by people who are much better than you will fast track your growth.
So, if you’re making a decision and it’s coming from you trying to be good at something… it would be worth a self-check-in.
4. Our egos like to be right, even when it’s bad for us
A friend of mine was kicked out of his company recently. When I asked him about whether he wanted them to succeed, he gave me a very pc answer like:
I own shares in the company, so I hope that they succeed.
I, of course, didn’t buy that crap so I asked him how he really felt, to which he responded:
I want them to die a really slow death. I want them to fail… but very slowly so they suffer longer and have more time to think about how they did me wrong. This is all while I start another company and crush it.
This is a perfect example of the ego wanting to be proven right, even when it’s against our best interest. It’s in the best interest of my friend for his past company to succeed because he will make a bunch of money and he would have founded a successful business. But his ego wants to prove that firing him was the wrong decision, and the company failing would be a massive ego boost.
Here’s one more fun example. I have a friend going through a divorce. She and her former partner founded a successful company together. I asked what she wanted from the divorce settlement and she said:
I want the business to be successful until he pays me for half of everything. Then I want it to collapse and burn in a slow death.
One thing I learned from these interviews is that the ego prefers when others die a “slow death.”
Our egos get attached to being right. It’s why saying “you were right” is so challenging in relationships. In really extreme cases, we’ll try to change facts to prove we were right even when there is overwhelming evidence that we were wrong (lots of this going on in Washington D.C).
If “being right” or “proving them wrong” is driving your decision-making process, check-in with yourself, because that’s probably not the person that you want to be.
What about the lazy part? Am I just being lazy?
Laziness is an excuse.
We all need rest, so I’m not referring to legitimate rest here. But when it comes to laziness, it’s either an excuse for something you’re avoiding or it’s a sign that you value something else more than the thing that you say you want.
We use laziness to describe behavior in ourselves or in others that we don’t like or don’t understand and choose to do nothing about.
I’m a very hard worker (it’s 11:30 PM as a write this), but I didn’t read many of my English or Asian American Studies books in college. It’s not that I’m lazy; I just valued working out or drinking a beer with my friends higher than reading those books.
If I’m not working out, I’m either avoiding it or I just value other things more than working out. I might be avoiding the physical discomfort, the time spent in traffic, or the shower I’ll have to take after. Or, maybe I just value a beer and a cheeseburger more than my long-term health.
People aren’t lazy. We do “lazy” things and label ourselves as “lazy” so we don’t have to look at what’s driving the decision. So the challenge here is… stop calling yourself lazy and ask yourself what you’re avoiding.
I’m curious what one of your “lazy” habits are and what’s really driving that decision when you take a closer look. Seriously… message me because I want to know.
An ego cheat sheet
Because we all like tools, here’s a quick image you can refer to if you want to check-in on these four ego features:
An ego reading list
After last week’s post & workshop, I received a few book suggestions, most of which I haven’t read just yet. But, some of them seemed really interesting. If you want to deep dive on ego management, these might be a good place to start:
🌍 A New Earth by Ekhart Tolle (I read it)
👬 The Alter Ego Effect by Todd Herman (I bought it)
💥 You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero (I bought it)
🔗 The Untethered Soul by Michael A Singer (I’m going to buy it)
👿 Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday (my ego is currently judging the title, so I’m not sure what I’ll do here just yet)
That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share.
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Cheers!
Brian ✊